Hélène Cardona

Dappled with transparent imagery, like the Mediterranean sunlight she grew up with, Hélène Cardona’s poems offer a vivid self-portrait as scholar, seer and muse.

--John Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

A poet, literary translator and actor, Hélène is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Hemingway Grant and the USA Best Book Award. Her books include two translations: Beyond Elsewhere (White Pine Press, 2016) and Ce que nous portons (Éditions du Cygne, 2014); and three bilingual poetry collections, most recently Life in Suspension (Salmon Poetry, 2016) and Dreaming My Animal Selves (Salmon Poetry, 2013). A Romanian translation of Dreaming My Animal Selves has been published by Junimea Editions in 2016.
www.helenecardona.com

NEW from Hélène Cardona - Life in Suspension (Salmon Poetry 2016)

Life in Suspension:
La Vie Suspendue
(Salmon Poetry, 2016)Foreword by Richard WilburA bilingual collection in English and French
“In this bilingual edition of her poems Hélène Cardona is our contemporary ecstatic, time-traveler, and shape-shifter. Behind the dreamlike atmosphere of her poems lies a fierce will to discover beauty, to resurrect ancient enchantments, and to defend enigmas of the spirit. ‘I like transforming into an animal, / devouring who I was,’ she writes. Her luminous poems celebrate the imagination’s power to dignify and exalt our highest yearnings.”
-- Lee Upton, winner of a Pushcart Prize, the National Poetry Series Award, and two awards from the Poetry Society of America

Hélène Cardona keenly understands poetry’s insistence that we slow down, downshifting into a more measured and conscious pace. Her powerful poems are written line by certain line, which is how her readers gratefully experience them.
—Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate

Un recueil émouvant, original, sensible. Travail d’orfèvre auquel on ajouterait sans hésiter le mot beau ! J’ai particulièrement apprécié “Ouranoupolis Pantoum.”
—Costa-Gavras
(Oscar winning writer and director, Missing, Z, Music Box)

Her Story

A citizen of the United States, France and Spain, Hélène Cardona is fluent in English, French, Spanish, German, Greek and Italian. Born in Paris of a Greek mother and Spanish father and raised all over Europe, she studied English Philology and Literature in Cambridge, England; Spanish at the International Universities of Santander and Baeza, Spain; and German at the Goethe Institute in Bremen, Germany. She attended Hamilton College, New York, where she also taught French and Spanish, and the Sorbonne, Paris, where she wrote her thesis on Henry James for her Master’s in American Literature. She worked as a translator/interpreter for the Canadian Embassy in Paris.

A poet, literary translator and actor, Hélène is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Hemingway Grant and the USA Best Book Award. Her books include two translations: Beyond Elsewhere (White Pine Press, 2016) and Ce que nous portons (Éditions du Cygne, 2014); and three bilingual poetry collections, most recently Life in Suspension (Salmon Poetry, 2016) and Dreaming My Animal Selves (Salmon Poetry, 2013). A Romanian translation of Dreaming My Animal Selves has been published by Junimea Editions in 2016.
She co-edits Fulcrum: An Anthology of Poetry and Aesthetics, is Co-International Editor of Plume, Essay contributor to The London Magazine, and co-producer of the documentary Pablo Neruda: The Poet’s Calling. She has translated Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings for the Iowa International Writing Program’s WhitmanWeb. She also has translated the poetry of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Aloysius Bertrand, Maram Al-Masri, René Depestre, Ernest Pépin, Jean-Claude Renard, and her father José Manuel Cardona into English, as well as the Lawrence Bridges film Muse of Fire for the NEA.
Further publications include Washington Square, World Literature Today, Poetry International, The Irish Literary Times, The Warwick Review, TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, and elsewhere. She also writes children stories and co-wrote with John FitzGerald the screenplay Primate, based on his novel.
Acting credits include Chocolat, Jurassic World, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Hundred-Foot Journey, Muppets Most Wanted, X-Men Days of Future Past, Happy Feet 2, Mumford, & many more. For Serendipity she co-wrote with director Peter Chelsom and composer Alan Silvestri the song Lucienne, which she sang.