Writer's Corner Writer's Corner: Adam Mahler: Interview on 97.3 WJFD-FM

Contraponto program series, originally broadcast on 7 May 2023

Adam Mahler is the translator of Clepsydra and Other Poems by Camilo Pessanha, published by Tagus Press in 2022 with an introduction by K. David Jackson (Yale University). He is a doctoral candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. The recipient of a Fulbright research grant, he has translated works by Santob de Carrión, Bernardim Ribeiro, Camilo Pessanha, and António Nobre. 

The only collection of poems by the Portuguese writer Camilo Pessanha (1867–1926) to have been published during his lifetime, Clepsydra is the crowning achievement of the Portuguese symbolist movement. Pessanha was a Portuguese writer who spent much of his adult life in Macau, a Portuguese colonial enclave at the time. The author of an enigmatic body of symbolist poetry, Pessanha has secured a unique legacy within the colonial Portuguese literary tradition. 

Meditating on the inexorable flow of time, Pessanha sets the music of his verses against the murmuring water clock that gives the book its title. This new annotated translation by Adam Mahler recreates in English the haunting melodies and evocative dreamscapes that were widely admired and emulated by Portuguese modernists such as Fernando Pessoa. In addition to the thirty poems of the original 1920 publication, the bilingual volume features eighteen compositions that appeared in subsequent editions, making it the most comprehensive scholarly edition of Clepsydra in English. 

Clepsydra and Other Poems is volume 15 of the Adamastor Series, edited by Viktor Mendes (UMass Dartmouth) and Ricardo Vasconcelos (UCSD). 

To purchase Clepsydra and Other Poems, please visit the University of Massachusetts Press website. 

Please join host Irene de Amaral and Adam Mahler for a discussion of Clepsydra on WJFD.