Modern Poetry In Translation

Introduction to Jacques Tornay by Annie Freud, published in MPT 'Profound Pyromania'. I met Jacques Tornay in 2016 at HeadRead, the International Literary Festival of Estonia. Sitting in the audience, listening to poems in many languages which are foreign to me, I was suddenly transported by the familiar sounds of the French language. Having been brought up on the poems of Ronsard, Du Bellay, Lamartine and de Regnier, I had the sensation of inhabiting that part of myself that breathes, hears and dreams in French. While the poet spoke, the hubbub of chairs and glasses quietened and I was overtaken by an irresistible smile. For those who don’t know him, Tornay is a French-speaking Swiss writer, journalist and translator. His work includes poetry, short stories, aphorisms and biography. He is the author of numerous books and has been the recipient of prestigious prizes. It was no surprise to learn of his love for Rilke, the poet I am most reminded of when reading his work. Set in the stark landscapes of his n

From the introduction to Hisham Bustani's poems in MPT 'A Blossom Shroud' by translator Thoraya El-Rayyes: Few poems better capture the cynicism of the infamously irate Hisham Bustani than these two odes to frustration. A poet, short-story writer, political commentator and veteran rabble rouser, Bustani’s eventful public life has been punctuated by various brushes with the police state – from harassment by the censors and security services, to arrests for his writing and involvement in political protest. Bustani’s poem ‘On the Brink Of’ revolves around vivid imagery from the urban landscape of the Jordanian capital Amman, where he lives. Through this imagery, the poem constructs a noisy microcosm of Middle Eastern post-colonial modernity in all its dysfunction – from urban sheep-herding to petrodollar-fuelled sex tourism. The other poem presented here, ‘The Struggle’, is a forceful portrait depicting the futility of individual human endeavour in the face of larger forces that shape our world. It conveys an

Russian poet Maria Stepanova wrote her epic poem ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ in 2015, when the war in the Donbas Region of Ukraine was at its height. Every line in this densely-populated and highly allusive poem emerges from a consciousness of conflict and the martial culture and mythology that allows state-sponsored violence to happen. Stepanova traces the mythmaking culture of war from ballads and films of the Russian Civil War through the Second World War and into the twenty-first century, and Russia’s illegal and covert involvement in a war against Ukraine. ‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ is impossible to translate in a superficially ‘faithful’ way: the language is so much a captive of the surrounding culture: folk refrains jostle for space against psalms, Silver Age Russian poetry, an Old Russian epic poem ‘The Tale of Igor’s campaign’, pop ballads, phrases from popular culture, Paul Celan, T. S. Eliot – the list is endless. Many of these allusions are simply not accessible to a non-Russian

ABOUT THE POET: MONA KAREEM Mona Kareem is a poet-writer-translator based in New York. She is the author of three poetry collections. Her translations include Ashraf Fayadh's Instructions Within and an Arabic selection of Alejandra Pizarnik’s poems. ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR: ROBIN MOGER: Robin Moger is a freelance translator of Arabic with a particular interest in twentieth-century and contemporary prose and poetry

DUNYA MIKHAIL was born in Iraq and left for the United States in 1996. Her books include The Iraqi Nights, Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea, and The War Works Hard. She also edited a pamphlet of Iraqi poetry titled 15 Iraqi Poets. She was awarded the Kresge Fellowship, Arab American Book Award, and UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing.

Two poet-translators rattle their sabres for a duel of words and French poetry! Listen to MPT's translation duel which took place at Ledbury Poetry Festival, Sunday 9 July 2017. Olivia McCannon and Susan Wicks went head-to-head with their translations of a poem by Ariane Dreyfus. *No poets were harmed in the production of this event*. About the translators: Olivia McCannon is a translator of Balzac and winner of the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Susan Wicks’ translations of Valérie Rouzeau have won prizes and her own seventh collection, The Months was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

In Gavura’s work the poetic persona has a strong empathy with nature, seeing it as an example of both a non-human otherness and as part of God’s creation. As a theologian Gavura regards nature and humanity as part of a post-lapsarian existence. Gavura’s natural world and the animals which inhabit it are true to themselves and the savagery they express is an aspect of the innocence they retain. His poems draw on everyday feelings of doubt, fear, disillusionment, anger, weakness or even evil thoughts and he tries to bring together these aspects of the contingent world and gain insight. Given his religious sensibility Gavura’s poems frequently incorporate a mythical dimension. This spiritual bedrock in Gavura’s poetry paradoxically opens his poetry to all readers with its acute positioning of human beings, nature and divine aspiration. - James Sutherland Smith JÁN GAVURA is the author of three collections, Burning Bees (Pálenie včiel, 2001), which was awarded the Ivan Krasko Prize for the best debut book in th

ABOUT SIDDHARTHA BOSE I was born in Calcutta and spent the first five years of my life there. This city, which was once the second city of the British Empire, was where English literature was fi rst introduced as a discipline of study, to civilise the natives. I spent the next eight years in Bombay, and returned to the city of my birth for another five before moving to the USA on my own when I was eighteen. After seven years in America, I moved to London in 2005 on a British government scholarship. I have lived in London ever since. My writing grows out of this fractured upbringing across three continents. The linguistic eff ects of this fracturing are peculiar. I grew up with three languages (English, Bengali, and Hindi) and started learning another (French) when I was fourteen. Strangely, given the formative years of my schooling took place in Bombay, I cannot read what is – ostensibly – my mother tongue (Bengali), though I still speak it. I am illiterate in the language of my ancestors. ‘Elegy, Father’

This podcast includes readings of two poems by award-winning Korean author Han Kang, 'Pitch-Black house of Light' and 'Winter Through a Mirror'. SOPHIE BOWMAN is a literary translator and student of Korean literature. She won the 2015 Korea Times Translation Award for her translation of poems by Jin Eun-young and her prose translations can be found in Koreana magazine. HAN KANG is a novelist, poet, and a professor of creative writing at Seoul Institute of the Arts. She received the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian (2015, Portobello Books, translated by Deborah Smith). Her other publications available in English include Human Acts (2016) and The White Book (forthcoming in 2017). The readings in this podcast were recorded and edited by James Bull.

In this podcast: 00:00 - Introduction to Denise Riley 02:50 - Denise Riley reading begins 33.05 - Sasha Dugdale introduces Don Mee Choi 42.12 - Don Mee Choi reads translations of Kim Hyesoon 54:00 - Don Mee Choi reads translations of Kim Yideum 1:05:48 - Don Mee Choi reads from her book ‘The Morning News is Exciting’ This podcast features Denise Riley and Don Mee Choi. It was recorded at The Print Room, London, for the launch of Modern Poetry in Translation's winter issue 'The Blue Vein', which features Korean poetry including work by Kim Hyesoon, Kim Yidium, Han Kang and more. See the full contents on www.mptmagazine.com About Don Mee Choi: Don Mee Choi was born in Korea, but settled in the USA. She is a poet, critic and essayist and in experimental and important work she challenges notions of history and identity. She is one of Korean poetry’s foremost translators and her translations of Kim Hyesoon are published by Bloodaxe. Her last collection of poetry, Hardly War was published to acclaim in 2016. Th

With a career spanning over two decades and six books to his credit, Geet Chaturvedi is one of the most widely read contemporary Hindi authors. His poetry delights the reader with its inner lyrical beauty and playfulness, as well as its sensitivity and sensibility of ideas and imagination. This recording is read by the author, and translator Anita Gopalan.

Three distinguished poets with international perspectives read their work at Winchester Poetry Festival 2016. Hear new poems by Jan Wagner in Iain Galbraith’s prizewinning translations and a new long poem by Jane Draycott which was written in response to the Dutch modernist poem ‘Awater’. Tara Bergin’s reading includes the response poem she wrote for MPT’s new first issue website, ‘Bachmann’s Warbler’.

ALEMU TEBEJE is an Ethiopian journalist, poet and web-campaigner based in London. His poems have been published in the anthologies Forever Spoken and No Serenity Here, featuring 26 poets from 12 African countries. His website is: www.debteraw.com * CHRIS BECKETT grew up in Ethiopia and his translations of contemporary Amharic poets such as Bewketu Seyoum and Zewdu Milikit have appeared in MPT, Poetry Review and Wasafiri. His collection of praise shouts and laments, Ethiopia Boy, was published by Carcanet/Oxford Poets in spring 2013. More information on www.chrisbeckettpoems.com

MAJID NAFICY Majid Naficy was born in Isfahan, Iran, in 1952 and currently lives in West Los Angeles, California. Raised in a large and well- educated family, his first poems were published in a literary journal in Isfahan when he was just 13. After studying at the University of California at Los Angeles, Naficy returned to Tehran University, abandoned writing poetry, and joined political groups working to overthrow the Shah. After the 1979 Revolution, when Khomeini began to crack down on dissidents, Naficy and his wife, Ezzat Tabaiyan, were forced to go underground, but continued to work against the new regime. In 1981 both Ezzat and Naficy’s brother, Said, were imprisoned and executed and thereafter, in 1983, Naficy fled the country. With the help of Kurdish guerillas, Naficy escaped to Turkey on horseback, carrying the nine poems he had written after Ezzat’s death, some money, an Afghani passport, and torn photos of his brother and wife. Eighteen months later he was granted asylum in the U. S. and moved t

George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, and came to England with his family after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. He was educated in England, training as a painter, and has always written in English. In recent years he has worked as a translator of Hungarian literature, producing editions of such writers as Ottó Orbán, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Ágnes Nemes Nagy. He co-edited Bloodaxe’s Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth. His Bloodaxe poetry books are The Budapest File (2000); An English Apocalypse (2001); Reel (2004), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; New & Collected Poems (2008) and The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. Bloodaxe has also published John Sears’ critical study Reading George Szirtes (2008).

This poem is published in MPT ‘The Great Flight’ focusses on refugee poetry – poetry by refugees and about the plight of refugees and migrants. Read more: http://bit.ly/1r8dsmK This issue introduces us to a range of new work by renowned poets, including Eritrean Ribka Sibhatu and Ethiopian Hama Tuma. South Korean poet and translator Don Mee Choi writes about her experiences of migration and we’ve commissioned a new translation of important work by Syrian poet Golan Haji. Carmen Bugan writes movingly about her father’s failed escape from Communist Romania and Shash Trevett muses on the murder of language. We also feature new versions of two radical women poets: eighth-century Sufi mystic Rābiʿah al-Baṣrī, in Clare Pollard’s translation, and sonnets of female sexuality and desire by renaissance poet Louise Labé in translations by Olivia McCannon – all in this new issue of the groundbreaking magazine dedicated to poetry in translation.

This recording was made on 5th May 2016 at Kings College London, at an event celebrating the launch of MPT's anniversary anthology, Centres of Cataclysm, published by Bloodaxe Books.

ALEXANDER HUTCHISON'S most recent collection, Bones & Breath (Salt, 2013) won the inaugural Saltire Award for Poetry Book of the Year.

PEDRO SERRANO has published five collections of poems. He co-edited and co-translated the groundbreaking anthology The Lamb Generation which brought together translations of 30 contemporary British poets in 2000. He has also translated Shakespeare’s King John into Spanish. His collection Peatlands was published by Arc Publishing in 2014 in Anna Crowe’s translation. * ANNA CROWE is a poet, translator and co-founder and former Artistic Director of StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival. Her Mariscat collection, Figure in a Landscape, won the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award and was a PBS Choice. Her latest book of translations is Peatlands (Arc 2014) by Pedro Serrano.

Choman Hardi, interview at The Queens College Oxford. CHOMAN HARDI was born in Iraqi Kurdistan. She came to England as a refugee in 1993. She has published collections of poetry in Kurdish and English. In 2010 four poems from her English collection, Life For Us (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), were selected for the English GCSE curriculum. Her forthcoming collection, Considering the Women, is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015.