Literary reader of faith: I urge you now, as I’ve urged friends, students, and anyone who would listen for over a decade, toward the poetry of Adélia Prado. She is without question one of our greatest living poets, her inimitable voice at once earthy and mystical, unassuming and ecstatic. In her introduction to The Alphabet…

It was back in the summer of 1995 during Image’s Glen Workshop that I had the opportunity to interview Dick Wilbur for Image. Wilbur was someone whose poetry—I am especially thinking here of poems like “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”—I’d read in my late teens and been drawn to, especially because…

Van Gessel has been Shūsaku Endō’s primary English translator since the 1970s. He has translated eight of his novels and worked as a consultant on Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Silence. I asked him about the previously untranslated Endō story in Image issue 92, and about what Endō’s work has to say to the West. Image:…

Jessica Goudeau’s translations of the work of Adélia Prado, Brazil’s foremost living poet, appear in issue 91.  The night I met Dona Adélia, she told me my husband was the perfect man. She came to the University of Texas for a poetry reading with her longtime translator and editor, Ellen Doré Watson. At almost eighty,…

When I read Austin Segrest’s “Plowboy’s Bible,” I began to realize that the entire poem was made up of nothing more than a series of phrases. The phrases veered wildly between images and concepts that were relatively intelligible to exotic, almost surreal metaphors. Slowly it dawned on me that I had read a poem like…

There’s a sub-genre of poetry in which the speaker’s persona is a long-ago figure or a fictional character. Here, in “Translation Back into Native Tongues,” the speaker is John of Patmos, purported author of the biblical Book of Revelation. His subject in this poem is language, languages: always a perfect subject for poetry, that prime…

Multiple members of my family live with chronic pain, which is why I’m always arrested by writers who don’t let God off the hook for painful experiences, who question suffering more closely. Can we know who is ultimately responsible for suffering? Does suffering have a purpose (and if it does, why does it so often…