Mira Rosenthal is an American poet and translator of Polish-language writers such as Tomasz Różycki, Małgorzata Lebda, and Krystyna Dąbrowska. Her work has been nominated twice for the Griffin Poetry Prize as well as for the Derek Walcott Prize, the National Translation Award, and the Oxford–Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her translation of Różycki’s To the Letter won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the Found in Translation Award for the best book translation from Polish into English in 2024. She is the author of Territorial, a Pitt Poetry Series selection and finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year award, and The Local World, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Northern California Book Award, and residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and the Jan Michalski Foundation.
Poetry
Fall 2025
The Sava, the Danube
A letter from my translator all the way in Serbia: about death — the kindthat sends a fox ahead of it, sickness — but above all she goes onabout life, about the stubborn translation […]
May/June 2019
Translator’s Note: Voicing a Voice
Forty-nine questions about power, originality, performance, and what we mean when we talk about the translator’s voice in the translated text. What is the translator’s voice? What happens to voice […]
Fall 2015
The Languor and Airy Tenderness of Patrizia Cavalli’s My Poems Won’t Change the World
Most foreign poets can only dream of the line-up of translators Patrizia Cavalli enjoys for her selected poems in English, My Poems Won’t Change the World.
Fall 2013
Alice Oswald’s Memorial and the Reinvention of Translation
The idea that a translation inevitably interprets and rewrites its source poem is today a mundane assertion. The cultural dialog of the 1970s and 1980s, with its emphasis on translation as a process of negotiation and reactivation of cultural meaning, seems to have finally liberated poets from that old-fashioned notion of fidelity.
Spring 2013
The Voice Under the Voice of Every Casual Word: Tom Sleigh’s Army Cats
In his 2006 book of essays Interview with a Ghost, the poet Tom Sleigh gives us his ideal approach to writing: “to make a poem too messy to be thought of as an artifact, and too wrestled with and considered to be condescended to as process.”