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Editorial: May 2009

April 29, 2009
We’re six weeks away from the Poetry International Festival, and the Rotterdam office is buzzing with preparations. One important task is to gather together a selection of poems, along with Dutch and English translations, of all the poets who are to appear at the festival.
It’s a unique experience to be able to hear a poet read in his or her own language, and when it is a language one has  no understanding of at all, to forget even about meaning-making and listen simply to the rhythm, the unfamiliar combination of sounds, stresses, melodies. At the moment, you can do exactly this by listening to the archive audio files we have uploaded onto our Sound of the Poet page.

However, most of the time we also want to know what a text is conveying in terms of imagery and ideas, not simply sound, hence the need for translations, no matter if they are, as Arundhathi Subramaniam notes in her introduction to the India PIW issue this month, only ever echoes of the originals. The May India issue is “a small tribute to translation”, emphasising the role of the translator as both facilitator and creator by featuring  original work and translations by two seasoned writers who are active as poets and translators, E.V. Ramakrishnan and Sudeep Sen. Each has chosen a poet – P.P. Ramachandran and Mitha Sen respectively – to translate and introduce.

The theme of translation is developed on the India domain with the launch of its audio archive. Listening to an original poem while reading a translation is both satisfying, in that you can appreciate meaning and melody simultaneously, and deeply frustrating in that the gulf between original and translation is emphasised all the more. Listen, for instance, to P.P. Ramachandran’s performance of ‘Semantics’, while reading the translation by E.V. Ramakrishnan. This is a wonderful poem to consider in light of themes of translation, as it reminds us that words are not static meaning-blocks but vessels for changeable semantic and cultural resonances: “An expansive continent / Lies in the word ‘ocean’. // The ‘cow’ conceals / A prowling leopard.” The linguistic associations of ‘ocean’ and ‘cow’ are certainly different to the resonances of the Malayam equivalent, and these associations of course cannot be fully translated; nonetheless E.V. Ramakrishnan’s translation is a bridge to the original poem, encouraging us to ponder the fluidity of language in general.

On the Belgium domain, there is a wonderful spread of translations of poems by the 19th-century Guido Gezelle. Gezelle himself was an avid translator, and, like Robert Burns, embraced regional vernacular as a medium for poetry. When reading Edwin Morgan and Francis Jones’ translations of Gezelle into, respectively, Glaswegian and North Yorkshire vernacular, another level of translation takes place for the reader unfamiliar with these British regional variants – witness the fact that a glossary is needed to clarify Morgan’s version. Apart from their vibrant interpretation of Gezelle’s rhythms and play with sound, these translations also approximate the experience a Dutch speaker would have reading Gezelle’s work, and echo his view of the possibilities of writing in the vernacular.

For another perspective on translation in the Belgium issue, this time inter-disciplinary, I encourage you to watch the animated film by Kristof Luyckx based on Mark van Tongele’s ‘Breathtaking’ (accessible via a link at the bottom of van Tongele’s page). Yves T’Sjoen notes that van Tongele “dynamises language by continually creating its own highly individual linguistic reality”. Van Tongele’s poem ‘Ideas about Dying’, a series of questions pondering what happens after death – “Do I get my hands on the key to time? will / I become a ray of light bent by gravity . . . will I drift like a black dot on the face of change?” – attempts to ‘translate’ into language the unknown ‘nothingness’ of death. Portugal’s Rui Lage does something similar in his ‘What the Wind Has to Say’, beautifully translated by Richard Zenith: like the wind, death has no words, is “a voice that says nothing” but paradoxically “speaks of all things in all places” – ultimately untranslatable, but universally understood.

Our fourth domain this month, the UK, continues its Poetry Society centenary series with poems by Jo Shapcott, president of the Poetry Society and a judge of the National Poetry Competition – I  love her ‘I Go Inside the Tree’ – and by Christopher James, winner of the last National Poetry Competition, whose observatory powers and sensitivity to the world around him are combined with both striking metaphor and economy of language in ‘After the Storm’ and ‘Farewell to the Earth’, a moving, sensory recollection of the burial of a father.

The quality of poetry and translations this month is particularly high across all domains. Enjoy the issue, and do keep checking our festival page for updates and new material. Next month, we’ll be dedicating the PIW magazine to the festival and its poets.
© Sarah Ream
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