Dr. Mario Murgia

Mario Murgia is a poet, literary translator, and full professor of English, Translation, and Comparative Literature. His interests are thematically varied and have often revolved around the relationship between literature and other artistic expressions, such as music and the performing arts. His main area of academic research is Anglophone and Hispanophone drama and poetry from the twentieth century and the Early Modern period, with a particular emphasis on English and (Colonial) Spanish poetry produced in the 16th and 17th centuries.

As Mexico’s only miltonist, Murgia has published annotated Spanish editions of John Milton’s Maske (Comus, Axial, 2013), Areopagitica (Areopagítica, UNAM, 2009) and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (El título de reyes y magistrados, UNAM, 2012). He has also participated in the first-ever Mexican edition of James Joyce’s Dubliners (2015), which adds to his various Spanish translations of the poetry, drama, and prose of authors such as Barry Callaghan, Robert Graves, Edgar Allan Poe, Adrienne Rich, and Dylan Thomas, among many others. Murgia co-ordinates UNAM’s El proyecto Shakespeare (The Shakespeare Project), which aims to translate the entirety of the Bard’s plays for Spanish-speaking audiences in Latin America. He also recently translated Antología de cuentos escoceses contemporáneos (Anthology of Contemporary Scottish Short Stories, UNAM, 2015) and is currently working on the translations of Milton’s sonnets as well as Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Double Falsehood, and Henry VIII.

Murgia’s book Versos escritos en agua: la influencia de El Paraíso Perdido en Byron, Keats y Shelley (Lines Writ in Water: The Influence of Paradise Lost on Byron, Keats, and Shelley, UNAM, winter 2015) attempts to explain how the figure of Milton’s Satan was adapted and sublimated in the poetry of the so-called younger Romantics. His volume Singularly Remote: Essays on Poetry (MadHat Books, 2018) covers a wide range of topics, from the problem of canon formation, to the poetry of the Mexican Modernistas and the rhetoric of Geoffrey Hill. His literary essays have been published in Iberoamérica Global (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2008); Anuario de Letras Modernas (UNAM, 2016); The Hopkins Quarterly (2011); The Milton Quarterly (2016); as well as in books from Oxford University Press and Wiley-Blackwell, to name but a few examples.

Murgia’s most recent book of poetry is entitled El mundo perdone (May the World Forgive) (Mexico 2018), and his poetical works have appeared in publications such as Caminos Inciertos (Spain, 2010), Emanations: Second Sight (USA, 2012), and The Battersea Review (USA, 2015).