BA, MAS, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. MFA, Brown University. PhD, Universidade de Lisboa. Ferrari is a polyglot poet, literary translator, and editor. As a translator and editor, he has published more than 20 books, including the complete works of Fernando Pessoa’s three heteronyms—Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis—co-translated with Margaret Jull Costa, and The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik, co-translated with Forrest Gander (all from New Directions). His other book-length translations include works from the Portuguese into English by António Osório (with Susan M. Brown), from the English into Spanish by Laynie Browne, Martin Corless-Smith, Frank Stanford, and W.S. Merwin (with Graciela S. Guglielmone), and from the Spanish into English by Juan Arabia. In 2026, Ferrari received the Fence Modern Poets Series prize for Mud Songs, the first volume of his Elsehere trilogy—an exploration of migration, identity, and vernacular soundscapes. He coined the term “poetic heterophony” to describe a poetics shaped by multiple linguistic systems, each revealing a distinct self or enacting a process of self-othering through an adopted language. Based in New York City, Ferrari teaches at Rutgers University–Newark and in the MFA Program at Sarah Lawrence College. He also hosts “World Poetry Salon,” a collaboration between Limelight Poetry (founded by Wang Yin) and the New York Public Library. SLC, 2022–
Previous Courses
Master of Fine Arts in Writing
Craft of LiteraryTranslation: Expanding Across Tongues
Craft—Fall
WRIT 7488
Literary translation spans several interdisciplinary fields, including comparative literature, linguistics, cultural studies, and creative writing. Therefore, this craft course will explore all of those academic disciplines at varying and overlapping intervals. Innovatively structured, this program will proceed conceptually and cumulatively––mixing history, theory, and practice. “Perhaps a time will come when a translation will be considered as something in itself,” said Jorge Luis Borges in English, during one of his Norton Lectures at Harvard in the fall of 1968. That time may have arrived. To discover whether it has, we will delve into a diverse array of literary works (poetry and fiction) alongside their respective English translation(s). The languages and authors we will study include, but are not limited to, Spanish (Borges, Pizarnik), Portuguese (Pessoa, Lispector), French (Follain, Pizarnik), Italian (Rosselli, Lahiri), German (Celan), and Chinese (Wang Yin). Reading as translators, we will engage with common translation challenges, such as style, Latinate/Germanic choices, cognates/false friends, and prosody. We will investigate the benefits of re-translation and collaborative translation, as well as generative aspects of self-translation and transcreation. Curiosity, rigor, collaboration, and creativity will guide us on this journey across voices and languages. While English is the target language of the course––with translators such as W. S. Merwin, Suzanne Jill Levine, Forrest Gander, and Margaret Jull Costa––each student will select, for the final semester project, a literary work to translate, written in any source language of their choice. The course aims to sharpen literary translation skills, ensuring participants also become more insightful readers and writers of literature. It is open to all graduate students––with experience in one or more foreign languages or even without any prior experience! Either way, come with a native language and leave with a world beneath the tongue.
Faculty
Literary Translation Craft: Matters for Writers: Exploring Romance and Other Languages Into English
Seminar—Fall
WRIT 7488
What does it mean to read as a translator? How does carrying a text across languages transform the way we write our own?
This craft course approaches literary translation not simply as the transfer of meaning, but as a practice of deep attention to diction, syntax, tone, voice, and form. Translation becomes a mode of close reading, research, and creative re-making: a way of hearing literature from inside language itself while discovering new possibilities for one’s own writing.
Moving across genres, we will read literary works alongside English translations, exploring how writers and translators negotiate sound, ambiguity, style, and cultural distance. Authors may include Fernando Pessoa, Alejandra Pizarnik, César Vallejo, Cristina Campo, Samuel Beckett, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yoko Tawada, Wang Wei, and others. Particular attention will be given to Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian), while also considering works from other linguistic traditions.
Throughout the semester, we will examine retranslation, collaborative translation, self-translation, transcreation, and the idea of “untranslatability.” We will also consider translation as a historically and ethically charged practice shaped by power, migration, colonial histories, and contemporary asymmetries produced by the global dominance of English. At a moment when artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping how texts navigate across languages, we will discuss what remains essentially human in the translator’s craft.
Students will regularly compare translations, produce their own versions, and workshop evolving drafts. The semester will culminate in a translation project accompanied by a translator’s note reflecting on formal choices, linguistic tensions, and the creative process.
The course is open to writers working in any genre and at any level of experience with foreign languages, no fluency is required. However, curiosity, rigor, and experimentation are essential.
Bring your language. Leave with a deeper sense of how literature moves between tongues—and how writing itself is transformed in the process.
Faculty
The Craft of Translation: Expanding Across Tongues
Craft—Fall
78151
Literary Translation encompasses numerous interdisciplinary fields, including comparative literature, linguistics, cultural studies, and creative writing. Therefore, this craft course will touch on all of these academic disciplines at varying and overlapping intervals. Dynamically designed, this program will proceed conceptually and cumulatively––mixing history, theory, and practice. “Perhaps a time will come when a translation will be considered as something in itself,” said Jorge Luis Borges in English during one of his Norton Lectures during the fall of 1968. That time may have arrived. To find out, we will delve into a wide selection of literary works (poetry and fiction) alongside their respective English translation. Some of the languages and authors include, but are not limited to: Spanish (Lorca, Borges, Pizarnik), Portuguese (Pessoa, Lispector, Amaral), French (Labé, Michaux, Beckett), Italian (Lahiri), German (Celan), Farsi (Rumi), and Chinese (Wang Yin). Reading as translators, we will reflect on common translation challenges such as style, Latinate/Germanic choices, cognates/false friends, and prosody. We will examine the benefits of retranslation and collaborative translation, as well as generative aspects of self-translation and transcreation. Curiosity, rigor, collaboration, and play will accompany us on this journey between voices, between languages. While English is the target language of the course––with translators such as W. S. Merwin, Richard Sieburth, and Margaret Jull Costa––for the final semester project, each student will select a literary work to translate, written in any source language of their choice. The course aims to hone literary translation skills so that participants will also become better readers and writers of literature. The course is open to all graduate students with experience in one or more foreign languages—or none, for that matter! Either way, come with a native language and leave with a world under the tongue.