Poet
Mirta Rosenberg
Mirta Rosenberg
(Argentina, 1951)
Biography
Mirta Rosenberg was born in Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina on 7 October 1951. For over ten years now she has been living in the capital, Buenos Aires. She translates poetry from English and French. As a poet, she had her debut in 1984 with the collection Pasajes (Passages). In 2006, her Collected Works 1984–2006 was published under the title El árbol de palabras (The tree of words) by Bajo la luna (Under the moon). This publishing house was managed by Rosenberg’s son and his girlfriend. In 1990, the poet herself took over, changing the name to Bajo la nueva luna (Under the new moon). To earn a living, Rosenberg also works as an ordinary translator, among other things for the Argentinian newspaper La Nación.Poetry by Rosenberg has been included in various anthologies and translated into English, French and German. Rosenberg has published translations of writers such as Katherine Mansfield, Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, James Laughlin, Seamus Heaney and Louise Glück.
Since 1986, Mirta Rosenberg has been on the editing staff of the poetry journal Diario de poesía, in which she has published scores of poems. Between 2001 and 2004, she organised, in the ‘Casa de la poesía’ in Buenos Aires a series on poetry translation under the title ‘Los traidores sobre poesía y traducción’ (The traitors on poetry and translation).
In 2003, Mirta Rosenberg was awarded the Guggenheim grant for poetry and in 2004 the Konex prize for her services as a literary translator.
Mirta Rosenberg’s poetry has its own independent voice in the highly varied panorama of present-day Argentinian poetry. She sings from the depths of language or from her own personal reading of it and the broadening that language in translation allows to appear. In Rosenberg’s (often enigmatic) poems, internal rhymes, rhythm, plays on words and repetitions often occur as components of her own wayward writing. With considerable stylistic distance she sounds the abyss of intimacy. In the introduction to Rosenberg’s Collected Poetry (1984–2006) the Spanish poet Olvido García Valdés writes that “her work can be described by an old word – namely, style. That is what makes Rosenberg’s work stand out from other poetry: her style is rhythm, her style is a kind of belief.”
[Mirta Roseberg took part in the Poetry International Festival Rotterdam 2008.
This text was written on that occasion.]
© Bart Vonck (Translated by John Irons)
Selected Bibliography Pasajes, Trocadero, Buenos Aires, 1984
Madam, Libros de Tierra Firma, Buenos Aires, 1988
Teoría sentimental, Libros de Tierra Firma, Buenos Aires, 1994
El Arte de Perder (The art of losing), Bajo la luna nueva, Buenos Aires, 1998
Poemas, Asociación de Escritores Extremeños, Badajoz, Spain, 2001
El árbol de palabras (The tree of words), Bajo la luna, Buenos Aires, 2006
Links
Mirta Rosenberg on Lyrikline
Poems
Poems of Mirta Rosenberg
Sponsors
Partners
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