DUAL Poetry Podcast

This week's poem is by Saado Cabdi Amarre from Somaliland.  The poem is read first in English translation by Sarah Maguire and then in Somali by Saado herself. If you enjoy this poem and would like to find out more about Saado Cabdi Amarre and all the other poets we’ve translated, please visit our website www.poetrytranslation.org.

This week’s poem is by Kajal Ahmad from Kurdistan. The poem is read first in English translation by Mimi Khalvati and then in Kurdish by Kajal. If you enjoy this poem and would like to find out more about Kajal Ahmad on our website.

This week’s poem is by Reza Mohammadi from Afghanistan. The poem is read first in English translation by Nick Laird and then in Dari by Reza. If you enjoy this recording and would like to find out more about Reza Mohammadi and all the other poets we’ve translated, please visit our website. www.poetrytranslation.org.

This week’s poem is by Abdellatif Laabi from Morocco. The poem is read first in English translation by Andre Naffis-Sahely and then in French by Abdellatif. If you enjoy this poem and would like to find out more about Abdellatif Laabi and all the other poets we’ve translated, please visit our website www.poetrytranslation.org.

This week's poem is by Kajal Ahmad from Kurdistan.  The poem is read first in English translation by Mimi Khalvati and then in Kurdish by the poet Choman Hardi. If you enjoy this recording and would like to find out more about Kajal Ahmad and all the other poets we’ve translated, please visit our website www.poetrytranslation.org.

This week's poem is by Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi from Sudan.  The poem is read first in English translation by Sarah Maguire and then in Arabic by Saddiq himself.

'He Tells Tales of Meroe' is from a new book of poems by Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi inspired by the Petrie Museum’s collection of material from Meroe in Sudan.

You can buy 'He Tells Tales of Meroe' here.

Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi will be giving a free reading at The Mosaic Rooms on the 22nd of March 2017. Book your place here.

If you enjoy this recording and would like to find out more about Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi and all the other poets we’ve translated, please visit our website.

www.poetrytranslation.org.

This week's poem is by Mohan Rana from India.  The poem is read first in English translation by Bernard O'Donoghue and then in Hindi by Mohan himself. If you enjoy this poem and would like to find out more about Mohan Rana and all the other poets we’ve translated, please visit our websitewww.poetrytranslation.org.

Some of Azita’s poetry is also quite challenging to understand for a Persian speaking audience – although the inherent mood and rhythm of poetry can allow you to forgive and gloss over the fact that sometimes expressions or images doesn’t make complete logical sense. For the translations, however, all three of us felt it was important to give some additional pointers to the English speaking audience, so that they can understand at least one of the layered meanings – whether cultural or personal – and so that misunderstandings were not thought to be a product of the translation. Azita, who is currently also translating all her work into Swedish with a Swedish translator, told me that she was aware of the difficulty her work poses for translators, as every single word can have a hidden meaning.

At this stage, Maura and I decided to change some of the initial choices made, and swap one of the newer and longer poems for two shorter poems that referenced the theme of exile, which up till now hadn’t been valorised through the choice of poems – 'When Winter Comes' and 'The Boat That Brought Me'. Azita wasn’t very pleased with this decision at first, as they have already been translated elsewhere, but in the end, she thinks that 'When Winter Comes' is one of the strongest translations of all, so she’s happy with the choice.

Azita was very helpful to work with, and as the poems got closer and closer to their final translations, she made time to read, and speak to me about them all. She was happy for certain elements to be changed to make more sense for an English speaking audience (e.g. the poppy in with a red flower, which could have been translated as simply ‘flower’ or ‘rose’ but we chose to make closer to the meaningful red flowers in English) and was very happy to feel that a real sense of musicality had been carried across in Maura’s writing.

From Elhum Shakerifar on Translating Azita Ghahreman

Víctor Terán inhabits a different cultural tradition to the other Mexican poets translated by the PTC. He writes in a dialect of Zapotec spoken by a mere 100,000 people living on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca province. In spite of its limited extent, this region has produced a succession of notable writers. According to Carlos Montemayor, whose Los escritores indígenas actuales (Indigenous Writers Today) (1992) marks a key moment in the promotion of Mexico's native languages, Isthmus Zapotec can claim to be the most vibrant modern example of the country's indigenous literature.

The aspect of indigenous culture that has most commonly appealed to the literary mainstream in Latin America is its cosmogony, or vision of the universe. Readers looking for these forms of collective myth in Víctor Terán, however, will be surprised. In ‘The North Wind Whips' the speaker muses,

Someone unthinkingly
smoked cigarettes in heaven,
left it overcast, listless.

The image is witty, urbane, a projection of the poet's inner frustration onto the world outside rather than a communally sanctioned vision.

Carlos Montemayor has described Terán as the most ‘personal' poet writing in Isthmus Zapotec. That is a significant claim for somebody writing in a tradition for which the concept of the individual author is a relatively recent invention. Terán's poems frequently trace the to-and-fro of the speaker's feelings. As his translator David Shook points out, he ‘toys with sentimentality without ever crossing into its territory'. In ‘Six Variations on Love':

Love
is wild honey that seeps from a tree,
sap of tender maize-cob generous at dawn,
sap that runs
through the intimate garden of a woman.

The abstraction of ‘love' is grounded  in precise physical observation ( maize-cob ‘at dawn' rather than at any other time) which guides the sequence towards a particularly sexual desire. This association of sexual desire and physical environment can take startling forms. In ‘Whirlwind', ‘My heart stretched across the bed, waiting for you' while ‘the pigs make known / that they attack the boy squatting to do his business.' Not only is this an unsentimental view of erotic relations, it is also a blunt portrait of rural culture.

From Three Mexican Poets by Tom Boll

Read more about Víctor Terán.

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This week's poem is by Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi from Sudan. The poem is read first in English translation by Sarah Maguire and then in Arabic by Saddiq himself. If you enjoy this poem and would like to find out more about Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi and all the other poets we’ve translated, please visit our website www.poetrytranslation.org.