Patricio Ferrari

Argentine poet, editor, and translator

Patricio Ferrari

Patricio Ferrari is a polyglot poet, literary translator, and editor. Born in Merlo (Buenos Aires), Patricio left Argentina at the age of 16 to attend high school and play soccer in the United States as part of the Rotary Exchange Program. He received an MFA in poetry from Brown University, a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, and a PhD. in Linguistics at the Universidade de Lisboa with a dissertation on the prosody of Pessoa’s trilingual poetry. As literary translator and editor, Patricio has published 20 books, including The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik (with Forrest Gander; New Directions, 2018), Inside the Mask: The English Poetry of Fernando Pessoa (Gávea-Brown, 2018), The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos by Pessoa (with Margaret Jull Costa; New Directions, 2023) and Habla terreña by Frank Stanford (with Graciela S. Guglielmone; Pre-Textos, 2023). Patricio’s work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Southwest Review, Fence, Buenos Aires Poetry, Perfil, and Words Without Borders, among others. Currently residing in New York City, he teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, as well as at Rutgers University-Newark. Patricio has an ongoing collaboration with the Endangered Language Alliance, a non-profit organization in the city focused on linguistic diversity within urban areas worldwide.

cover image of the book The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro

The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro

Here, in Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari’s splendid new translations, are the complete poems of Alberto Caeiro, the imaginary master of the “heteronym” coterie created by the Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa conceived Caeiro around 1914 and may have named him loosely after his friend, the poet Mário de Sá-Carneiro. What followed was a collection of some of Fernando Pessoa’s greatest poems, grouped under the titles The Keeper of Sheep, The Shepherd in Love, and Uncollected Poems. This imaginary author was a shepherd who spent most of his life in the countryside, had almost no education, and was ignorant of most literature; yet he (Pessoa) wrote some of the most beautiful and profound poems in Portuguese literature. This edition of The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro is based on the magnificent Portuguese Tinta-da-china critical edition, published in Lisbon in 2016, and contains an illuminating introduction by the editors, Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari, some facsimiles of the original Portuguese texts, and prose excerpts about Caeiro and his work written by Fernando Pessoa as well as his heteronyms Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, and other fictitious authors such as Antonio Mora and I. I. Crosse.

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cover image of the book The Galloping Hour

The Galloping Hour

The Galloping Hour: French Poems—never before rendered in English and unpublished during her lifetime—gathers for the first time all the poems that Alejandra Pizarnik (revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolaño) wrote in French. Conceived during her Paris sojourn (1960–1964) and in Buenos Aires (1970–1971) near the end of her tragically short life, these poems explore many of Pizarnik’s deepest obsessions: the limitations of language, silence, the body, night, sex, and the nature of intimacy.

Drawing from personal life experiences and echoing readings of some of her beloved/accursed French authors—Charles Baudelaire, Germain Nouveau, Arthur Rimbaud, and Antonin Artaud—this collection includes prose poems that Pizarnik would later translate into Spanish. Pizarnik’s work led Raúl Zurita to note: “Her poetry—with a clarity that becomes piercing—illuminates the abysses of emotional sensitivity, desire, and absence. It presses against our lives and touches the most exposed, fragile, and numb parts of humanity."

Click here to see book notes by Patricio Ferrari, editor of The Galloping Hour

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cover image of the book The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos

The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos

Álvaro de Campos is one of the most influential heteronyms created by Portugal’s great modernist writer Fernando Pessoa. According to Pessoa, Campos was born in Tavira (Algarve) in 1890 and studied mechanical engineering in Glasgow, although he never managed to complete his degree. In his own day, Campos was celebrated—and slandered—for his vociferous poetry imbued with a Whitman-inspired free verse, his praise of the rise of technology, and his polemical views that appeared in manifestos, interviews, and essays. Here in Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari’s translations are the complete poems of Campos. This edition is based on the Portuguese Tinta-da-china edition and includes an illuminating introduction about Campos by the Portuguese editors Jerónimo Pizarro and Antonio Cardiello, facsimiles of original manuscripts, and a generous selection of Campos’s prose texts.

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cover image of the book The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro

The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro

Here, in Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari’s splendid new translations, are the complete poems of Alberto Caeiro, the imaginary master of the “heteronym” coterie created by the Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa conceived Caeiro around 1914 and may have named him loosely after his friend, the poet Mário de Sá-Carneiro. What followed was a collection of some of Fernando Pessoa’s greatest poems, grouped under the titles The Keeper of Sheep, The Shepherd in Love, and Uncollected Poems. This imaginary author was a shepherd who spent most of his life in the countryside, had almost no education, and was ignorant of most literature; yet he (Pessoa) wrote some of the most beautiful and profound poems in Portuguese literature. This edition of The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro is based on the magnificent Portuguese Tinta-da-china critical edition, published in Lisbon in 2016, and contains an illuminating introduction by the editors, Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari, some facsimiles of the original Portuguese texts, and prose excerpts about Caeiro and his work written by Fernando Pessoa as well as his heteronyms Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, and other fictitious authors such as Antonio Mora and I. I. Crosse.

More Information
cover image of the book The Galloping Hour

The Galloping Hour

The Galloping Hour: French Poems—never before rendered in English and unpublished during her lifetime—gathers for the first time all the poems that Alejandra Pizarnik (revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolaño) wrote in French. Conceived during her Paris sojourn (1960–1964) and in Buenos Aires (1970–1971) near the end of her tragically short life, these poems explore many of Pizarnik’s deepest obsessions: the limitations of language, silence, the body, night, sex, and the nature of intimacy.

Drawing from personal life experiences and echoing readings of some of her beloved/accursed French authors—Charles Baudelaire, Germain Nouveau, Arthur Rimbaud, and Antonin Artaud—this collection includes prose poems that Pizarnik would later translate into Spanish. Pizarnik’s work led Raúl Zurita to note: “Her poetry—with a clarity that becomes piercing—illuminates the abysses of emotional sensitivity, desire, and absence. It presses against our lives and touches the most exposed, fragile, and numb parts of humanity."

Click here to see book notes by Patricio Ferrari, editor of The Galloping Hour

More Information
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