Translation of the Route

Longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2025

Translation of the Route is the eleventh collection by the award-winning Argentine poet and translator Laura Wittner. In poems that are precise, frank and finely tuned, Wittner explores the specificities of parental and familial love, life after marriage, and the re-ignition of the self in middle age.

The ‘things’ of life – bus journeys, potted plants, thunder at night, coffee-stained books, fleeting conversations and the rest – are made full through Wittner’s ability to pinpoint in them the consequential, and even the metaphysical, manipulating language with a translator’s delicate skill. There are funny, moving pen-portraits of Wittner’s two children, suddenly grown, as well as bell-clear descriptions of the task of writing. For this is also a collection about language itself – as an interface, as a surface, and as vital communication.

The poems in this edition, Wittner’s first collection available in English translation, have been translated by the Mexican-Scottish bilingual poet and translator Juana Adcock, acclaimed author of Manca and Split.

'These poems are printed in the original Spanish on one side of a double page with translations into English on the other, and it is an interesting linguistic exercise, for a non-Spanish reader, to attempt to marry the two – excellent for students studying languages. [...] Funny and moving.' – Frank Startup, The School Librarian, on Translation of the Route

'Wittner's poems in Adcock's deft translation fold entire but only half-seen narratives into brief glimpses, like interior lives flashing past the window of a moving train. They are delivered with a misleading directness – a garrulous voice at your ear, its utterances appearing quotidian but imbued with the weird and cryptic. We sift for clues. How to decipher a particular coffee stain, the distant tinkle of broken glass, arcane road signs, a particular shade of fallen leaf, the shadows cast by dancing laundry? Wittner is alert to these strange messages, curious about them all, and willing to embrace the not-knowing. I could read these poems every day and still find the new in them.' – Martha Sprackland

‘Poems of the radiant everyday. In Juana Adcock's warm translation, Laura Wittner's chatty, witty voice comes through with gorgeous clarity. Reading this book is like listening to a wise, beloved friend over coffee.’ – Clare Pollard

'What I really love about these poems is their clarity. They give a luminescence to the most concrete of objects. They show us how individual moments in a normal day can be the occasion for celebration, or reflection on a whole lifetime. They make me look again at the cup in my hand or the view from my window that I thought I knew.' – Sarah Hesketh

Laura Wittner is an award-winning poet and translator from Argentina. Her books of poetry include El pasillo del tren (1996), Los cosacos (1998), Las últimas mudanzas (2001), La tomadora de café (2005), Lluvias (2009), Balbuceos en una misma dirección (2011), La altura (2016), Lugares donde una no está (2017) and Traducción de la ruta (2020). She has also published more than 20 books for children, most recently Cual para tal (2022), ¿Y comieron perdices? (2023) and Se pide un deseo (2023). Translation of the Route, Juana Adcock's translation of Traducción de la ruta (2020), was published by the Poetry Translation Centre with Bloodaxe Books in a dual language Spanish-English edition in 2024. It was longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2025. As a literary translator Wittner has translated books by Leonard Cohen, David Markson, M. John Harrison, Cynan Jones, Claire-Louise Bennett, Katherine Mansfield and James Schuyler, among many others. She lives in Buenos Aires.

Juana Adcock is a Mexican poet, translator and editor based in Scotland. She is the author of Manca (Tierra Adentro, 2014), Vestigial (Stewed Rhubarb, 2022) and Split (Blue Diode, 2019), which was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was included in the Guardian’s Best Poetry of 2019. She is co-editor of the anthology of poetry by Latin American women Temporary Archives (Arc Publications, 2022), and her translation of the Mè’phàà poet Hubert Matiúwàa’s The Dogs Dreamt (Flipped Eye, 2023) received a PEN Translates award. In 2024 her translation of Lola Ancira’s The Sadness of Shadows will be published by MTO Press and of Laura Wittner's Translation of the Route from Bloodaxe Books/Poetry Translation Centre.