Tom Boll

Tom studied for his PhD on Octavio Paz and T.S. Eliot in the departments of English and Spanish and Latin American Studies at University College London. As Assistant and then Managing Director of the Poetry Translation Centre, he was involved in bringing poets to the UK from numerous countries, including Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Mexico, Tajikistan and Cape Verde. Before taking up his post at UEA, Tom taught for six years in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at King’s College London.

Tom’s research interests include the theory and practice of translation; the Latin American, European and Anglo-American avant-garde; twentieth-century Spanish American fiction; contemporary poetry in Spanish and English; Mexican history and culture; archives.

Tom has published numerous articles on Spanish American literature and translation. His monograph Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot: Modern Poetry and the Translation of Influence (Legenda, 2012) examines encounters between Anglo-American modernism, French symbolisme, the Spanish American vanguardia and the political debates of post-revolutionary Mexico. His recent work focuses on the social interactions of the translation process, drawing on material in the archives of Penguin Books and Farrar, Straus and Giroux from the 1950s and 60s. He continues to work on the international transmission of modernism with articles on the Cuban poet, José Lezama Lima and the collaborations between Octavio Paz and Charles Tomlinson.


Translation

Tom’s translations of Spanish American poets have appeared in Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. His co-translations of Coral Bracho with the English poet, Katherine Pierpoint were published by Enitharmon in 2008 and included in the anthology My Voice: A Decade of Poems from the Poetry Translation Centre (Bloodaxe, 2014). His translation of volume 2 of Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari’s Conversations was published by Seagull Books in 2015.

Tom is a member of the Translation Research Group at UEA.

Academic Curator of the Literary Translation Archive, BACW