'the elephant' by Adelaide Ivánova, looks at how the human body processes trauma, drawing parallels between a mother reacting to the death of her young child and a woman experiencing sexual assault. In this recording, you will hear Ivánova talk about the origins of this poem in her friendship with an elderly German woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease before she reads her poem in the original Portuguese. Afterwards, you will hear the poet Rachel Long reading the English translation that she ...
Sep 26, 2019•6 min
Bejan Matur is the most illustrious poet among a bold new women’s poetry emerging from the Middle East. Her poetry engages directly and concretely with the struggles of her people, and yet there is also a mysticism in her writing, a closeness to nature, an embracing of mythology – a dialogue with God. This poem and many others that appear in her PTC chapbook 'If This is a Lamnet' were translated by TS Elliot Award-winning poet Jen Hadfield and bridge translator Canan Marasligil . This is part of...
Sep 19, 2019•6 min
Despite the pleasurable excitement and excess of youth that Yoyo shows us, these poems are also laced with the insecurity and fear of growing up on a planet which may not outlast you; and the societal fissures that flow from that. In Yu’s poetic world, nature is necessary and liberating, but it is not the beautiful, timeless vision we see in classical Chinese poetry. Nature offers potential freedom, at the same time that it is full of latent, utterly modern threat and suffering." -Rebecca Tamás,...
Sep 12, 2019•3 min
This week's poem is by Corsino Fortes from Cape Verde. The poem is read first in English translation by Sean O'Brien and then in Portuguese by Corsino Fortes. Corsino Fortes's first book Pão & Fonema [Bread & Phoneme] which appeared in 1974 made an immediate impact. 1974 was a momentous year for Portugal and its African colonies as it was the year in which Portugal's dictator Salazar was overthrown, an act which began the process that led to the decolonisation of the Cape Verde Islands i...
Sep 05, 2019•6 min•Season 1Ep. 30
Translated by Rachel Long and Francisco Vilhena. Before we hear the poem in both in the original Brazilian Portuguese and English translation, the poet Adelaide Ivánova talks about the importance of research in her work and how she discovered the work of a British anthropologist called Dame Mary Douglas. You can buy a copy of the hammer and other poems from the PTC website: www.poetrytranslation.org/shop/the-ham…-other-poems This is part of our new rebranded weekly release: the Dual Poetry Podca...
Aug 29, 2019•3 min
Abdellatif Laâbi is a leading Moroccan poet who writes in French. In 1966 he helped found the important artistic journal 'Souffles', in 1972 the journal was banned and in 1974 Laâbi was imprisoned for 8 years for "crimes of opinion" for his political beliefs and his writings. After his release in 1985, he moved to France where he still lives in exile. His work was translated for the PTC by André Naffis-Sahely, who recently edited 'The Heart of a Stranger' an anthology of exile literature for Pus...
Aug 22, 2019•3 min
'Stay' starts with the wonderfully direct and odd line 'Your beard is expendable', a great example of Yu Yoyo's lithe, arresting language, deftly translated by UK poet AK Blakemore and the translator Dave Haysom. This is a poem in seven sections that sees the poet imaging a lover's journey to Viet Nam, a country she had never visited when she wrote the poem. You can find this poem in My Tenatless Body, an introduction to Yoyo's work published by the PTC as part of our World Poets Series. You can...
Aug 15, 2019•9 min
This is one of two poems titled 'the hammer' in Adelaide Ivánova's World Poets Series collection the hammer and other poems . This poem shows the great breadth of Adelaide's references, from the mating rituals of hammerhead sharks to reports that when a Pope die a senior member of the Vatican staff strikes him on the forehead with a silver hammer to make sure he isn't just sleeping. Also, in this recording, you can hear the contrast between how Adelaide Ivánova reads the original text, with a qu...
Aug 08, 2019•4 min
'July' is by Diana Anphimiadi, a Georgian poet who is also a linguist, and whose often complex poetry foregrounds language. Scrambled thoughts become crow-songs perched on a wire. Famous women from Greek myth speak frankly - upside-down, headless, from beyond the grave. The five senses tussle on the page, among cats and fish and chandeliers. Eating and bathing offer a glimpse of the eternal. In Beginning to Speak , Anphimiadi repeatedly makes the world unfamiliar with the flick of a pen, demonst...
Jul 25, 2019•4 min
at three o’clock in the morning you put your arms around a tree because there’s no-one to put their arms around you Sleepwalking by Yu Yoyo is a set of 9 connected poems. In translating this poem the translators, Dave Haysom and AK Blakemore, were forced by the form of the English language to specify who the poem is addressing in a way that the Chinese original left totally open. You can buy an introduction to Yu Yoyo's poetry My Tenantless Body translated by Dave Haysom and AK Blakemore from th...
Jul 18, 2019•13 min
"dad sentence me to death so you can live inside my tenantless body" Born in 1990, Sichuanese poet Yu Yoyo had already begun to earn critical attention before she turned sixteen, publishing dozens of poems in Poetry , Poetry Monthly and other prestigious publications in China. She is seen as a representative voice among the post-90’s generation, especially known for her mature voice and subtle treatment of modern femininity. You can buy an introduction to Yu Yoyo's poetry My Tenantless Body tran...
Jul 11, 2019•2 min
Translated by Jo Shapcott and Narguess Farzad. This week's poem is 'Behind The Mass Of Green' by Farzaneh Khojandi from Tajikistan. The poem is read first in English translation by Jo Shapcott and then in Tajik by Farzaneh. Farzaneh Khojandi is a poet with a huge following in Afghanistan and Iran as well as her native Tajikstan. She is widely regarded as the most exciting woman poet writing in Persian today and is revered as Tajikistan’s foremost living writer. Thank you for listening to the Dua...
Jul 04, 2019•5 min
(Explicit content) This week's poem 'the good animal' by Adelaide Ivánova. First, you will hear the poet, journalist and activist Adelaide Ivánova discussing the poem and reading her original Portuguese text, then her poet-translator, the UK poet Rachel Long will read the English version. You can buy an introduction to Adelaide Ivánova's poetry 'the hammer and other poems' translated by Rachel Long & Francisco Vilhena from the PTC online store . This is part of our new rebranded weekly relea...
Jun 27, 2019•4 min
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. The poet and critic, Nandkishore Acharya, has written that, 'Amongst the new generation of Hindi poets, the poetry of Mohan Rana stands alone; it defies any categorisation. However, its refusal to fit any ideology doesn't mean that Mohan Rana's poetry shies away from thinking - but that it knows the difference between thinking in verse and thinking...
Jun 20, 2019•3 min
Beloved by Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf is a passionate love poem! It is a jiifto, one of the many Metric forms of Somali poetry made up of short lines. First, you will hear the stunning translation by UK poet Clare Pollard who captures the alliterating Bs of the original Somali and the sense of yearning with lines like 'be my new moon / unbreakable metal'. Afterwards, you can hear Asha reading the poem in the original Somali. This month sees the publication of her first English Language collection pu...
Jun 13, 2019•6 min
Translated by Jamie McKendrick This week's poem is 'Heaven's Kitchen' by David Huerta from Mexico. The poem is read first in English by the translator, the poet by Jamie McKendrick and then in Spanish by David Huerta. David Huerta was born in Mexico City in 1949. He is one the leading poets of the generation that first came to prominence during the 1970s in Mexico. He published his first book of poems, El Jardín de la luz [The Garden of Light] (1972), while still a student in the Faculty of Phil...
Jun 06, 2019•3 min
This week's poem podcast contains three short poems by Kurdish-Turkish Poet Bejen Matur, translated by Canan Marasligil and UK poet Jen Hadfield. The poems are 'Dead Sun', 'There is no Sun' and 'Truth'. Bejan Matur’s enthralling visceral poems are among the most imaginatively potent being written anywhere in the world. She is one of the leading voices of a bold new women’s poetry emerging from the Middle East. Her award-winning poems describe a delicate space between concrete realism and mystica...
May 30, 2019•3 min
'guerilla bitchcraft' was the first poem by Adelaide Ivánova that the Poetry Translation Centre translated at a workshop with Francisco Vilhena and Clare Pollard in 2017. The PTC workshop was dazzled by Ivánova’s breadth of reference, lurching between the personal and political. One moment she jokes about weed and star-signs, the next she’s addressing rape, colonialism and Zika. It’s not often in a poetry workshop you have to read a whole Nirvana lyric (turns out ‘Polly’ is not really about a pa...
May 23, 2019•6 min
This week's poem is 'the dog' by Adelaide Ivánova, taken from her collection the hammer and other poems, translated by Francisco Vilhena and Rachel Long. The poem is read first in Brazilian Portuguese by the poet herself and then in English by her poet-translator Rachel Long. This poem looks closely at the experience of a raped woman, worried about whether she will be able to enjoy sex after her experience. In her introduction, Adelaide also discusses Humboldt, an ambiguous male figure that appe...
May 19, 2019•3 min
This week's poem 'the mule' by Adelaide Ivánova begins with an epigram by the Romanian-German poet Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger. Celan wrote predominantly about The Holocaust and the challenge of finding the words to express the unsayable. This poem references other instances of rape in literature including 'The Rape of Lucrece' by William Shakespeare. First, you will hear the poet, journalist and activist Adelaide Ivánova discussing the poem and reading her original Portuguese te...
May 16, 2019•6 min
Coral Bracho was born in Mexico City in 1951. She has published six books of poems. Her poems were translated for the PTC's 2005 World Poets' Tour by Tom Boll and the poet Katherine Pierpoint. Bracho's early poems marry verbal luxuriance with a keen intelligence and awareness of artistic process. Yet that artistic consciousness doesn't lose sight of world. This is part of our new rebranded weekly release: the Dual Poetry Podcast, one poem in two languages from the Poetry Translation Centre. As e...
May 02, 2019•4 min
What is most difficult to translate, in my experience, is poetry that toys with sentimentality without ever crossing into its territory, poetry that counterbalances abstraction with precision. And that’s Víctor Terán’s poetry. It is difficult to approach the edge of sentimentality without crossing it, and it is equally difficult to get as close to that edge as Terán has managed in Isthmus Zapotec. This funambulism is even more significant an achievement for Terán considering the state of the lan...
Apr 25, 2019•3 min
The ironically entitled 'Title' (like another poem by Abdulla Pashew, 'Unfinished Poem', that we translated in the same workshop) is concerned with the exigencies of writing poetry. In this case, the poet is tired; his life-long poem is turning into an epic and he becomes aware that in his mind, 'words slip out of place'. The prominent Kurdish poet and writer, Abdulla Pashew, is widely regarded as the most popular living Kurdish poet. This is part of our new rebranded weekly release: the Dual Po...
Apr 18, 2019•3 min
Anphimiadi is one of Georgia’s leading contemporary poets. With subtle lyricism, her poetry describes the most intense experiences of many women’s lives: childbirth; love, with its many complications and death. Anphimiadi’s own paternal roots lie in Pontus, a historically Greek region on the southern coast of the Black Sea which at one time stretched from central Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey, to the borders of the Colchis in modern western Georgia. Home to the legendary Golden Fleece, West Pon...
Apr 11, 2019•4 min
This week's poem is by Coral Bracho from Mexico. The poem is read first in English translation by Katherine Pierpoint and then in Spanish by Coral herself. Coral Bracho's poems were translated for the PTC's 2005 World Poets' Tour by Tom Boll and the poet Katherine Pierpoint. Bracho's early poems marry verbal luxuriance with a keen intelligence and awareness of artistic process. Yet that artistic consciousness doesn't lose sight of the world. When she visited London in 2005 she described the way ...
Apr 04, 2019•2 min
'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. Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi's poems have also been published in Poetry Review and The Times Literary Supplement. This is a real indication of Saddiq's growing status as an important international poet. This is part of our new rebranded weekly release: the Dual Poetry Podcast, one poem in two languages fro...
Mar 28, 2019•22 min
This week, to celebrate Nowrus, the Dual Poetry Podcast poem is Haft Seen by Shakila Azizzada from Afghanistan. The poem is read first in English translation by Mimi Khalvati and then in Dari by Shakila Azizzada. 'Haft Seen' is a traditional custom for the Persian new year celebration known as Nowruz. A table is set with 7 different items which its essential items letters start with (Sin-Seen "س"). These are Sib - Apple, Sabze - Grass, Senjed - Sea-buckthorn, Serkeh - Vinegar, Samanu -a sweet pa...
Mar 21, 2019•2 min
This week’s poem is by David Huerta from Mexico. The poem is read first in English translation by Jamie McKendrick and then in Spanish by David Huerta. This is part of our new rebranded weekly release: the Dual Poetry Podcast, one poem in two languages from the Poetry Translation Centre. As ever we will be releasing a translated poem each week. Please take a moment to rate and review this podcast on iTunes or wherever you download.
Mar 14, 2019•3 min
Much of Azita Ghahreman's work is deeply personal yet infused with political undertones. Her poems often reflect on her childhood growing up in a land-owning family in the South-Eastern Khorasan province of Iran – referenced in evocative images of the natural world amongst which she grew up – and on the changing face of modern Iran. This is part of our new rebranded weekly release: the Dual Poetry Podcast, one poem in two languages from the Poetry Translation Centre. As ever we will be releasing...
Mar 07, 2019•5 min
Abboud al Jabiri fixes on a deceptively simple image and, when elaborating on it, manages to convey complex and delicates feelings about loss and acceptance. An Iraqi poet and translator, Abboud al Jabiri, was born in Najaf in 1963. A member of the Iraqi Writers' Union and the Arab Writers' Union, he was one of the founders of the Iraqi Youth Literature forum. His two poetry collections are Index of Faults (2007) and Lean on his Blindness (2009). Since 1993, he has lived and worked in Amman, in ...
Feb 28, 2019•4 min
