[Allen Tice]

Does anyone here have any information on what permissions (if any) and/or financial arrangements (if any) would have to be made to make translations from Constantine P. Cavafy?

If not, how could I efficiently find those answers? If it's too much trouble or I have to have someone else approve what I do, I might not attempt any translations. Otherwise, I think I might like to try my hand.

[W.F. Lantry]

Quick answer? Not you or me!

Slightly longer answer: check this page. Odd that so many publishing houses have brought things out overt the last few years. Oxford, Norton, Penguin, Knopf. Almost makes one think open season has been declared.

But wait. He died in '33. It should all be in copyright. Of course, one needs to mention here Fitzgerald.

Thanks,

Bill

[Andrew Frisardi]

I found: "Copyright by The Cavafy Archive and Manuel Savidis" at: http://www.cavafy.com/copyright/index.html.

I'd write to them to ask. The fact that Cavafy died in 1933 doesn't mean his work's in the public domain. Copyright laws were changed a few years back, so that even work published in the 1920s outside the U.S. is still under copyrights.

[Marcia Karp]

No one owns translation rights, only publication.

[Rose Kelleher]

oh, never mind

[Roger Slater]

You should check the date of publication of the particular poem you are interested in translating. It's in the public domain if it was published before 1923.

PS-- I just checked, and much of his major work was written before 1923. "Ithica" came out in 1911, so it is in the public domain.

[Andrew Frisardi]

In my experience it's not that simple, Roger. Dante's stuff was published way before 1923 but because the official edition of his book that I translated was published in 1932 I had to get permission to publish the translations. Same with Ungaretti, who was contemporary with Cavafy; even his early poems from the First World War were under the umbrella of his collected works, which has a copyright from the 1950s or so.

Marcia is right of course no permissions are needed for translating only for publishing (who's going to check anyway?). But oddly enough, I've had publishers tell me I had to get permission to translate -- Ungaretti's publisher was a stickler on that. But really, it's for publishing that permissions matter.

[Philip Morre]

In Europe copyright is 70 years from death of writer. You cannot renew or extend copyright by publlishing 'New' 'Collected' or 'Official' editions, or rather a new copyright would apply at best only to the new text if it differed in some important way from the original. The sad manoeuvres of the Joyce estate and their spurious recent editions of Ulysses are relevant here. Joyce, who died in 1941, is out of copyright. Ungaretti, who died in 1970, is not. Cavafy died in 1933 and according to my (1951) Mavrogordato translation, there was a "complete edition published in Alexandria in 1935". You do not need anyone's permission to publish either your translations or Cavafy's originals. I am mystified by Andrew Frisardi's remarks about Dante: the publication of an 'official' edition - presumably of the Vita Nova - in 1932 or today would have no relevance to publishing either Dante or Frisardi's Dante, so long as some marginally older text was used (assuming that the editor of the 1932 edition was still about in 1942 and claiming some kind of uniqueness to his efforts). Is there not some American professor hogging Emily Dickinson's copyrights on the grounds of his superior scholarly text? But even there, you can publish (and translate from) her earlier editions to your heart's content.
Creeping copyright should be resisted.
Yrs
Philip

[Roger Slater]

I'm with Philip.

Emily Dickinson might present a different copyright issue, since Johnson created an "original" work by deciding how to meld various drafts and where to insert those famous dashes. So if you were to republish her poems exactly as he edited them, you would be pilfering his editing decisions. But if you republished editions that appeared before 1923, and possibly made your own editorial alterations to those texts, you'd obviously be in the clear.

Andrew, I think perhaps your publisher made you jump through unnecessary hoops, maybe in an excess of caution or an expectancy of reciprocity on other projects. I can only speculate why. But if you translate from pre-1923 texts, I'm pretty sure it is that simple. You're good to go.

[Janice D. Soderling]

It's in the public domain if it was published before 1923.

This is not always the case. You will sometimes see in books that the copyright is held by an author's estate or publisher and was renewed such-and-such a date.

C.25. What are "non-renewed" books?
Works published before 1964 needed to have their copyrights renewed in their 28th year, or they'd enter into the public domain. Some books originally published outside of the US by non-Americans are exempt from this requirement, under GATT. Some works from before 1964 were automatically renewed. http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenb...ght_ lapse.3F


Here is a link to a recent discussion on translations complete with some useful links. There are other such Eratosphere discussion threads.
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showth...ation+andre w

Marcia et al are correct to distinguish between translation and publication of a translation.