Join the PTC's Partisipation Producer Bern Roche Farrelly and one of our Queer Digital Residency translators Jon Herring for a wide ranging conversation about getting started in translation, the interplay between linguistics and transition and , of course, a discussion of queer readings of DC superhero. Who else remembers Chris O'Donnell's robin? But wait... what was the Queer Digital Residency? The Poetry Translation Centre (UK) and the Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina) partnered together t...
Sep 26, 2023•36 min
Right now in April 2022 the PTC has just released our latest World Poets Series Book ‘To Love a Woman’ by Argentinian poet Diana Bellessi, translated by Leo Boix. So this week we are taking a little thematic inspiration and playing you four poems about desire written by female poets. You will hear 'Make Me Drunk with Your Kisses' by Maria Clara Sharupi Jua from Equador, translated from Shuar by Nataly Kelly and The Poetry Translation Workshop, 'Cat Lying in Wait' written in Dari by Shakila Azizz...
Apr 01, 2022•21 min
Today’s podcast is dedicated to the poetry of Georgian Poet Diana Anphimiadi. Thanks to our working relationship with the translator Natalia Bukia-Peters the PTC has been translating Georgian poetry since 2013 when two of Diana’s poems 'May Honey’ and ‘Tranquillity’ were translated at one of our collaborative workshops, then in 2018 Diana was part of our Georgian Poets tour alongside Salome Benidze. Now the PTC with Bloodaxe Books has published Diana’s first full-length English Language collecti...
Mar 05, 2022•15 min
Welcome to the Dual Poetry Podcast’s department of births deaths and marriages. Reflecting our remit, the department of births deaths and marriages will be playing you three poems reflecting these three themes: The Caesarean of Three Continents by Corsino Fortes from Cape Verde Death of a princess by Gaarriye from Somalia & the married woman by Adelaide Ivánova from Brazil The start of the new year suggested a podcast about fresh beginnings, renewal and rebirth. But this, of course, is impos...
Jan 20, 2022•22 min
The 30th parallel north links several countries represented in the PTC archive, Mexico, Morocco, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan Pakistan, India and China even glancing off the far south of the Japanese archipelago, sweeping between Tanega-shima and Sumanose-Jima, while totally avoiding Europe. Just like the PTC. So to close up 2021 this podcast is a poetry collection of the 30th parallel north, featuring poems from the PTC audio archive, including: Entropy in Wiesbaden by David Huerta From Mexi...
Dec 24, 2021•25 min
This week the Dual Poetry Podcast is focusing on nature poems. In the shadow of the climate emergency poems about the natural world take on a new significance, so during the second week of the 2021 COP 26 conference in Glasgow we consider now contemporary poets are taking on and reshaping the traditional subject of nature. Setting aside red roses, summer flowers, floral metaphors about love or odes to the glories of the countryside, rather we are looking to nature as a site of political encounte...
Nov 12, 2021•14 min
Dual Poetry Podcast is taking a look at Afghan poetry, with five poems from the PTC archive. We made this recording in September 2021, weeks after the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan following the withdrawal of Western forces. There is worldwide concern for poets, scholars and intellectuals still in the country, many of whom have publicly supported universal human rights and been openly critical of the Taliban The world recognises the importance of classical poets who hailed from this pa...
Sep 16, 2021•16 min
Born in the remote Khojand province of Tajikistan in 1964, Farzaneh Khojandi is widely regarded as the most exciting woman poet writing in Persian today and has a huge following in Iran and Afghanistan as well as in Tajikistan, where she is simply regarded as the country's foremost living writer. Her frequently playful and witty poetry draws on the rich tradition of Persian literature in an often subversive and humorous way. Khojandi was translated by Narguess Farzad, Senior Lecturer, Persian St...
Aug 13, 2021•15 min
On today’s episode, we are travelling again to Mexico to spend some time with the work of Coral Bracho, winner of the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize in 1981 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. The PTC first published Bracho’s work in 2008 when she was part of our Mexican Poets Tour along with Victor Teran and David Hurta. Her work was translated by Tom Boll with the poet Katherine Pierpoint. Bracho’s early poems marry verbal luxuriance with a keen intelligence and awareness of the artisti...
Jul 02, 2021•14 min
This week we are looking at the work of Abdellatif Laâbi, who is widely acknowledged to be Morocco's greatest living poet. This week the PTC publishes My Mother’s Language featuring a selection of Laâbi’s poems originally written in French with translations into English by the noted Poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely, who has just become the editor of Poetry London Magazine. In his introduction to My Mother’s Language Naffis-Sahely details Abdellatif Laâbi’s biography, living through the en...
Jun 17, 2021•16 min
Shakila Azizzada was born in Kabul in Afghanistan in 1964. She now lives in the Netherlands and writes in both Dari and Dutch. Her poems are unusual in their frankness and delicacy, particularly in the way she approaches intimacy and female desire, subjects which are rarely addressed by women poets writing in Dari. After working on the transitions with the cultural anthropologist Zuzanna Olszewska, the poet Mimi Khalvati said of Azizzada: She is a very musical poet, tender and intimate, but also...
Jun 03, 2021•11 min
With his work translated and anthologized around the world, Víctor Terán is the preeminent living poet of the Isthmus Zapotec. He was born in 1958. His work has been published extensively in magazines and anthologies throughout Mexico. Since 2000, he has also appeared in anthologies in Italy and the United States and he is a three-time recipient of the national fellowship for writers of indigenous languages, The PTC translated Victor Teran first in 2010 when he was part of our Mexican Poets tour...
May 20, 2021•14 min
This week we are bringing you two poems in from a series by the Georgian poet Salome Benidze, The Story of Flying and The Story of the poor. Salome was one of two Georgian poets who toured the UK with the PTC in 2018 alongside Diana Amphidiadi. Benidze’s poems were translated by Natalia Bukia-Peters with the UK poet Helen Mort and we published a chapbook of her poems called I wanted to ask you .
May 06, 2021•16 min
In this episode of the podcast, we are looking at Hindi poetry. Late last year the PTC published two chapbooks in our World Poet Series featuring Hindi poets: The Cartographer by Mohan Rana and This Water by Gagan Gill. The poems you hear on today’s podcast are by Mohan Rana who lives in Bath, England and writes deceptively simple poems circling metaphysical themes. Today’s two poems are In Your Own Words and After Midnight by Mohan Rana translated by Lucy Rosenstein with the poet Bernard O'Dono...
Feb 24, 2021•10 min
In this podcast, we bring you poems that take the form of messages from afar, the poets are addressing loved ones but communicating to the reader as well, the implied distance between the writer and the addressee standing in for personal and emotional distance. Kajal Ahmad was born in Kirkuk in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1967, Kajal Ahmad began publishing her remarkable poetry at the age of 21 and has gained a considerable reputation for her brave, poignant and challenging work throughout the Kurdish-sp...
Jan 29, 2021•7 min
We start 2021 with two poets whose poems have narrative strands, one is a fairy tale complete with daemons and the other is a sketch of the life of an economic migrant who fears the host of his wife. Shakila Azizzada was born in Kabul in Afghanistan in 1964. During her middle school and university years in Kabul, she started writing stories and poems, many of which were published in magazines. Her poems are unusual in their frankness and delicacy, particularly in the way she approaches intimacy ...
Jan 15, 2021•12 min
Translated by Atef Alshaer with Paul Batchelor. This October the PTC published 'Embrace' a dual-language Arabic and English collection of poems by Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, who has been called one of the foremost Arabic-language poets of his generation. This collection includes many new poems and was translated by Atef Alshaer with UK poet Paul Batchelor. Listen to three poems from the collection in this podcast. To get a copy of the book head to the PTC online shop: https://www.poetrytra...
Oct 23, 2020•10 min
Listen to two poems from the Poetry Translation Centre Archive: 'Taste' by Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf translated by Said Jama Hussein with poet Clare Pollard and 'He Tells Tales of Meroe' by Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, translated by Atef Alshaer and Rashid El Sheikh with poet Sarah Maguire, selected for Black History Month. DEALS Our Black History Month bundle features So At One With You, an anthology of modern poetry in Somali and He Tells Tales of Meroe: Poems for the Petrie Museum by Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi f...
Oct 09, 2020•13 min
This week as part of the PTC’s Resistance Poets series we bring you two poems by Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, a Sudanese poet who writes in Arabic. 'Poem of the Nile' was published in The London Review of Books one of the rare occasions the LRB has published poetry translated from Arabic and the first time they featured the work of an African poet. 'They Think I Am a King: Yes, I Am the King' is from a book of poems by Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi inspired by the Petrie Museum’s collection of material from Meroe i...
Sep 10, 2020•30 min
Currently, the PTC is looking at Resistance Poets whose work is unafraid to tackle political issues. This week we are bringing you two pomes by Afghan poet Reza Mohammadi who writes in Dari. These were translated for the PTC in 2012 by Hamid Kabir and the Northern Irish poet, novelist and screenwriter Nick Laird. You can purchase the PTCs Reza Mohammadi’s dual-language Chapbook, containing 10 of his poems in the original Dari alongside the English translations as part of our Resistance Poets boo...
Aug 20, 2020•10 min
Translator André Naffis-Sahely worked with Ribka Sibhatu for 10 years leading up to the publication of their PTC World Poet series book Aulò! Aulò! Aulò! While Ribka translates her own poems from Tigrinya and Amharic into Italian, Andre translates her poems from Italian into English and works tirelessly promoting her work in the anglophone world. In addition to her work as a lyric poet and human rights activist, Sibhatu has devoted a considerable amount of her creative energies to assembling and...
Aug 08, 2020•21 min
The PTC has just published Aulò! Aulò! Aulò! a collection of poems and fables by Ribka Sibhatu with translations by André Naffis-Sahely as part of our World Poet Series. Ribka writes in Tigrinya and Amharic, two languages native to Eritrea as well as Italian and French. The poet calls her five languages her stepdaughters. She translates her own work into Italian and Andre, in turn, translates the Italian and English. The collaboration has been going for a decade since André began translating her...
Jul 17, 2020•20 min
This week the podcast features two poems by Cuban poet Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, both from her 2013 collection Sucking The Stone. The first of these, The Law of Dynamics, sees the poet explaining to Galileo why he can't to the Macarena. (Why? Because it is 'a dance for Satyrs and other sex-mad creatures.') while the second poem, one of two in the collection to share the volumes name, Sucking The Stone , references Lapis Lazuli the semi-precious stone that has been prized since antiquity for its ...
Jun 25, 2020•10 min
This week we have two poems by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias 'Farmer's Treasure' and 'An accumulation of dry matter that is slow after flowering but intensifies during the lactic phase' both from her collection Gimmer Spray. The exceptional skill and formal dexterity that marks Rodríguez Iglesias’s work in Spanish has been expertly brought to life in English by Abigail Parry, an award-winning poet whose debut collection Jinx was published by Bloodaxe in 2018, working in collaboration with bridge-tran...
Jun 21, 2020•8 min
Contemporary Cuban poetry is as diverse and indefinable as contemporary poetry in any other country, but Legna does belong to a particular generation of poets. Generación O, formed mainly of poets born after 1975, is founded on the shared experience of growing up after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Cuba was launched into extreme deprivation. This week's two poems highlight Legna's use of humour. The DUAL POETRY PODCAST is focusing on her work for the next few weeks as we release a free onli...
Jun 11, 2020•12 min
The Cuban poet Legna Rodríguez Iglesias was born in Camagüey in central Cuba in 1984 and currently lives in Miami, Florida. As well as poetry she has written theatre, short stories, children’s books and a novel. Her poetry has been translated into Portuguese, German, Italian and English. The DUAL POETRY PODCAST is focusing on her work for the next few weeks as we release a free online audio archive of poems from her PTC collection 'A little body are many parts'. This week we are bringing you two...
Jun 04, 2020•9 min
The DUAL POETRY PODCAST continues with its focus on the Cuban writer Legna Rodríguez Iglesias who burst onto the Cuban literary scene with all the ferocity of a stampeding elephant aged 19. This week we are bringing you two poems, Pure Jazz and Maggot People, that originated in her 2017 title Miami Century Fox, a collection of 51 Petrarchan sonnets. Last year in partnership with Bloodaxe Books the PTC co-published 'A little body are many parts' an overview of poems from Legna Rodríguez Iglesias ...
May 28, 2020•9 min
This week's podcast brings you 'I must ask you' & 'Mad Dog Pack' both translated by Abigail Parry and Serafina Vick for Legna Rodríguez Iglesias' PTC publication 'A little body are many parts' which brings together poems from seven different collections of Legna's poetry. The collection has been shortlisted for the first annual Derek Walcott Prize for a full-length book of poems published in 2019 by a living poet who is not a US citizen. You can find out more about the translation process on...
May 21, 2020•6 min
This week the Dual Poetry Podcast is breaking its form to bring you two poems rather than one. 'Thirty heads a day' & 'Graduate' were both translated by Abigail Parry and Serafina Vick for the PTC publication 'A little body are many parts' which brings together poems from seven different collections of Legna's poetry. The collection has been shortlisted for the first annual Derek Walcott Prize for a full-length book of poems published in 2019 by a living poet who is not a US citizen. You can...
May 14, 2020•7 min
This week's poem is by Shakila Azizzada from Afghanistan. The poem is read first in English translation by Mimi Khalvati and then in Dari by Shakila herself. Shakila has spent many years in the Netherlands and her poetry reflects both her Afghan heritage and her European influences. She also writes in Dutch and translates her own poetry both ways. She is a very musical poet, tender and intimate, but also uncompromising in her political poems, and sometimes surreal – a poet of range and courage. ...
May 07, 2020•4 min
