Gregary J. Racz
Professor and Chair, Department of English, Philosophy and Languages, LIU Brooklyn
E-mail: gracz@liu.edu

Biography:

Gregary J. Racz is a comparatist with a specialization in Translation Studies. He has served as review editor for Translation Review since 2010 and was president of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) from 2011-2013. A translator of poetry and drama from the Spanish, Racz has published sixteen volumes of translated and/or edited work in addition to some four hundred poems in journals and anthologies and critical pieces on literary translation. Since his hiring in 1998, Racz has taught over thirty courses at LIU (see below) and over fifty total in his previous positions at Princeton University, the United States Naval Academy, and Parsons School of Design.

A scholar-practitioner of literary translation, Racz has most recently published the articles:

  • “La vida es sueño en forma analógica: Teoría, metodología y recepción de la traducción a contrapelo.” In La traducción del teatro clásico español (siglos XIX-XXI). Eds. Claudia Demattè, Eugenio Maggi, and Marco Presotto, Biblioteca di Rassegna Iberistica 20. Edizioni Ca’Foscari, 2020: 385-402.
  • “Formal Poetics in Contemporary Spanish Drama.” In Escenarios de utopia, distopía, y miopía enel teatro contemporáneo de España del siglo XXI. Eds. Albert David Hitchcock and Candyce Crew Leonard. Editorial Puentes Dramaturgos, LLC, 2019: 295-303
  • “Theatre.” In Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation. Eds. Kelly Washbourne and Ben Van Wyke. Routledge 2019: 298-312.
  • “From Masks to Polyphony and Beyond: Ontic Slippage in the Poetry of Eduardo Chirinos.” Hispanic Journal 39.2 (2018): 159-76.
  • In addition to these critical writings on literary translation and a translation of Benito Pérez Galdós’s historical novel Gerona (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993), a biding interest in meter and rhyme has led him to publish mostly translations of poetic works and verse drama. Racz contributed poetry translations to The XUL Reader: An Anthology of Argentine Poetry 1980-1996 (ROOF BOOKS, 1997), José Lezama Lima: Selections (University of California Press, 2005), and The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (Oxford University Press, 2009), among other collections. Racz has also published nine volumes of translations of poetry by the Peruvian Eduardo Chirinos: Reasons for Writing Poetry (Salt Publishing, 2011); Written in Missoula (University of Montana Press, 2011); The Smoke of Distant Fires (Open Letter Books, 2012); While the Wolf Is Around (Diálogos Books, 2014); Thirty-Five Zoology Lessons (and Other Didactic Poems) (DíazGrey Editores, 2015), Medicine for the Ailments of Falcons (Literal Publishing, 2015); Still Life with Flies (Dos Madres Press, 2016); The Bayard Street Tightrope Walker (University of Montana Press, 2017), and A Brief History of Music & “Fourteen Forms of Melancholy” (Diálogos Books, 2020). He has additionally published the bilingual volume The Butchers’ Reincarnation (Dos Madres Press, 2020) by the Chilean poet Óscar Hahn.

Regarding works for the theater, Racz edited Three Comedies by Jaime Salom (University Press of Colorado, 2004), in which Rigmaroles, his translation of the mock-Renaissance farce El señor de las patrañas, appears. Life Is a Dream, his translation of the Spanish Golden Age dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño, and Fuenteovejuna, Félix Lope de Vega’s play of the same name, were commissioned for the Norton Anthology of Drama (2009). The two works were also published as stand-alone volumes, the former in the Penguin Classics series (2006) and the latter by Yale University Press (2010). Life Is a Dream has been staged by LIU Brooklyn, A Festival of Fools, Brigham Young University—Idaho, Duke University, Hampden-Sydney College, and Elmhurst College. Fuenteovejuna was performed by the M. F. A. program of Mary Baldwin College. Callas and Medea, Racz’s translation of Salom’s Las dos griegas, was commissioned and staged by the Thalia Spanish Theatre in New York City in 2013. Dark Stone, his translation of Alberto Conejero’s La piedra oscura, was published by the ESTRENO Contemporary Spanish Plays series in 2016, and given staged readings at the Instituto Cervantes in New York City (2018) and the University of Southern Indiana (2018). Racz’s translations of Miguel de Cervantes’s La Numancia (The Siege of Numantia), Lope de Vega’s El perro del hortelano (The Dog in the Manger), and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Los empeños de una casa (Trials of a Noble House), accompanying his revised translations Life Is a Dream and Fuenteovejuna, appeared in The Golden Age of Spanish Drama: A Norton Critical Edition (W. W. Norton & Co., 2018).

Racz won the Luz Bilingual Publishing Poetry Translation Contest (1998), International Quarterly’s Crossing Boundaries Award (2000), the American Translators Association’s Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry in Translation (2010), and was the co-winner of the 2012 Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. His translation The Smoke of Distant Fires was shortlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry Translation in 2013.

Educational Information:

Ph.D., (Comparative Literature) Princeton University, 1994
M.A., (Comparative Literature) Princeton University, 1989
B.A., (Spanish and English) Rutgers University, 1985

Courses Taught at LIU Brooklyn:

GRADUATE CLASSES

  • ENG705     Translation Studies
  • HDL654S    Counseling Process and Application I: Spanish Component
  • MA538       Latin American Cinema

UNDERGRADUATE CLASSES

Spanish Translation and General Translation

  • HHE159       Translating Literature, Translating the World
  • HSM110       Between Cultures: Translating Practices and Possibilities
  • SPA200       Spanish Translation and Interpretation I
  • SPA200       Spanish Translation I
  • SPA201       Spanish Translation II

Spanish and Latin American Literatures and Cultures

  • SPA 101     Readings in Spanish Literature
  • SPA 105     The Hispanic World
  • SPA 133     Readings in Spanish-American Literature
  • SPA 138     Contemporary Latin American Novel
  • HHE174       Hispanism in America
  • HHE 175     Al-Andalus (711-1492): Muslim Spain and its Legacies
  • HHE 185     Cuba at the Crossroads: Culture and Regime Change
  • HSM110     Culture Under Dictatorship: The Spanish Civil War
  • HHE136       Myth into History: The “Discovery” of Machu Picchu
  • HSM110     Mexico’s Evolving Encounters II
  • HSM109     Mexico’s Evolving Encounters I
  • SPA198       Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares
  • SPA198       Poetic Form and Genre
  • SPA198       The Fiction and Poetry of Jorge Luis Borges
  • SPA198       The Fables of Samaniego and Iriarte

Spanish Language

  • SPA11         Introductory Spanish I
  • SPA12         Introductory Spanish II
  • HLS21          Honors Spanish I
  • HLS22          Honors Spanish II
  • SPA31          Intermediate Spanish I
  • SPA32          Intermediate Spanish II
  • SPA100       Spanish Conversation
  • SPA103       Advanced Conversation and Composition
  • SPA150/197 Spanish Grammar
  • SPA 170197 Spanish for Education
  • SPA197       Spanish for the Health-Care Professions

English-Language and World Literatures

  • HHE129     The Play of Meaning
  • HHE148     You Must Be Joking: Parody and Satire in Arts, Politics, and Life