Readings from Fresh and Salt: Focus on Water

Audio recordings of poems featured in MPT Bearing the Burden of Sameness: Focus on Care. Read these poems and more at: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/bearing-the-burden-of-sameness-focus-on-care/

Bearing the Burden of Sameness: Focus on Care

Selected readings of poems published in https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/salam-to-gaza-focus-on-dissent-and-resistance/

Salam to Gaza: Focus on Dissent and Resistance

2021 Writers în Residence at MPT Sam Riviere & Cătălina Stanislav speak to Elena Vlădăreanu and Gabi Eftimie. For a transcript please visit: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/romanian-poetry-sam-riviere-catalina-stanislav-speak-to-elena-vladareanu-and-gabi-eftimie/

Romanian Poetry: Sam Riviere & Cătălina Stanislav speak to Elena Vlădăreanu and Gabi Eftimie

Jhumpa Lahiri speaks to MPT Editor Khairani Barokka, discussing self-translation and writing poetry. The poems featured in this podcast were published in MPT 'Wrap it in Banana Leaves; the Food Focus' in 2022. You can find out more about this issue and subscribe on the MPT Magazine website: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/subscribe/

A full transcript of this podcast is available at https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/jhumpa-lahiri-speaks-to-khairani-barokka-on-self-translation-and-turning-to-poetry/

Jhumpa Lahiri speaks to Khairani Barokka: On self-translation and turning to poetry

These recordings are of poems featured in April 2023 issue of Modern Poetry in Translation Magazine – Measureless Melodies: Focus on Vietnam. To read these poems and explore the issue see www.modernpoetryintranslation.com

’Here In Vĩ Dạ Hamlet’, Hàn Mặc Tử, Tr. By N.T. Anh

Recorded at the Brighton festival, Angélica and Hilary read two poems in English and Portuguese, and answer questions from two GCSE students.

ANGELICA FREITAS
Angélica Freitas’s recent poetry collection, Um útero é do tamanho de um punho (Cosac Naify, 2012), was nominated for the Portugal Telecom Prize. Her first book, Rilke Shake (Cosac Naify, 2007), has been translated into English and German. She co-edits the poetry journal Modo de Usar & Co. from her home in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

HILARY KAPLAN
Hilary Kaplan is the translator of Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas (Phoneme Media). Her work was featured on BBC Radio 4 and has received fellowships from the PEN Translation Fund and Itaú Cultural. She is translating a collection of short stories by Paloma Vidal.


Feminism, the internet and Brazilian poetry: Angélica Freitas and Hilary Kaplan

Audio from MPT 'Call the Sea a Poet: Focus on Malta'. To read these poems in full visit www.modernpoetryintranslation.com

Mosaddegh by Mohammad-Ali Sepanlou, translated by Siavash Saadlou

'All Roads Lead To Rome' by Immanuel Mifsud, translated by Ruth Ward and Immanuel Mifsud

Collection', by Priscilla Cassar, translated by Maria Grech Gannado

'The Wave', by Maria Grech Gannado, translated by the poet

Dzifa Benson speaks to MPT Editor Khairani Barokka: On names, poetry, and the Ewe language. The poetry in this podcast is featured in MPT Measureless Melodies, available at www.mptmagazine.com 

For a full transcript, see https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/dzifa-benson-speaks-to-khairani-barokka-on-names-poetry-and-the-ewe-language/

Dzifa Benson speaks to Khairani Barokka: On names, poetry, and the Ewe language

Nadia López García, ‘The Way of the Deer’ - Tr. Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez & Whitney Devos from Spanish

Sodïq Oyèkànmí, ‘river’ - Translated by the poet from Yorùbá

Concha Méndez, 'This Must Be My Last Loss' - Translated by Harriet Truscott from Spanish

Jaku Mata, ‘Before the City Goes Under Water’ - Translated by Eric Abalajon from Filipino

Kim Seon-Hyang, ‘Water Snake’ - Translated by Darcy Paquet and Sun Kyoung Yoon from Korean

The Somali-English Poetry Collective

The Somali-English Poetry Collective is a group of five women: Abyan Cusmaan, Jawaahir Daahir, Karin Koller, Idil Osman and Marilyn Ricci, based in Leicester. 

They share a passion for poetry and have also produced a Somali-English book: Somalia To Europe: Stories from the Somali Diaspora available through: www.Leicesterquakerpress.org.uk or www.jdsaqal.com.

THE SOMALI-ENGLISH POETRY COLLECTIVE: "I am Somali"

This recording is by Abdullah O. Jimoh.

Audio recording is of the poem featured in MPT Bearing the Burden of Sameness: Focus on Care. 

Read this poem and more: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/bearing-the-burden-of-sameness-focus-on-care/

The Garden Must Tend Me, Abdullah O. Jimoh, Tr By The Poet

Care Advice, Ester Naomi Perquin, translated by David Colmer. This recording made by David Calmer and Ester Naomi Perquin.

This poem is featured in MPT Bearing the Burden of Sameness: Focus on Care. 
Read this poem and more: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/bearing-the-burden-of-sameness-focus-on-care/

Care Advice, Ester Naomi Perquin, Tr David Colmer

This recording made by Adrija Ghosh.

Audio recording of the poem featured in MPT Bearing the Burden of Sameness: Focus on Care. 

Read this poem and more: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/bearing-the-burden-of-sameness-focus-on-care/

A Song, Rabindranath Tagore, Tr Adrija Ghosh

Miss River Snail by Xinyang Wu, translated by Tuoya Wulan.

This recording was made by Tuoya Wulan. Featured in MPT Bearing the Burden of Sameness: Focus on Care. 

Read this poem and more: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/bearing-the-burden-of-sameness-focus-on-care/

Miss River Snail, Xinyang Wu, tr Tuoya Wulan

When Spring Comes, by Najwan Darwish, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid.

This recording made by Kareem James Abu-Zeid. Featured in MPT Bearing the Burden of Sameness: Focus on Care.

Read this poem and more: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/bearing-the-burden-of-sameness-focus-on-care/

When Spring Comes, Najwan Darwish Tr. Kareem James Abu-Zeid

The Seamstresses, Missak Manouchian translated by Jennifer Manoukian from Western Armenian

Two poems by Amelia Rosselli, translated by Roberta Antognini and Deborah Woodard from Italian

Destruction of Texts: Yi Sang, translated by Translated by Jack Jung from Korean

Salam to Gaza: Hussein Barghouthi, translated by Suneela Mubayi. 

We are grateful to Suneela Mubayi for providing these recordings, featuring a live reading from the event "Nakba Then and Now: Refuse Silence" published on YouTube by The Radical Book Collective and the Polis Project:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfuqn34gY_I&t=5839, followed by an original recording of the poet Hussein Barghouthi reading the poem.

Salam to Gaza: Hussein Barghouthi, translated by Suneela Mubayi

Published in MPT Salam to Gaza: Focus on Dissent and Resistance: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/salam-to-gaza-focus-on-dissent-and-resistance/

Politics’ Corpse Covered with the Morning Paper: Afrizal Malta translated by Daniel Owen

Two poems: Henri-Michel Yéré, translated by Todd Fredson

sound of a jaw harp in the labelling factory: Jike Ayou, translated by Yě Yě

Two poems by Batool Abu Akleen - translated by Batool Abu Akleen and Cristina Viti

Cindy Juyong Ok speaks to Sarah Hesketh, on translating Kim Hyesoon - and more.

Cindy Juyong Ok's translations feature in MPT Fresh and Salt: Focus on Water. Find out more about this issue on our website: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/fresh-and-salt-focus-on-water/

Cindy Juyong Ok speaks to Sarah Hesketh - on translating Kim Hyesoon, and more

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.

'In Lampedusa' by Ribka Sibhatu: read by Niyat Remedy Asfaha, translated by André Naffis-Sahely

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. The New York Times said of Hardly War:

‘Deliberately and excitingly difficult in both its style and its subject matter, Don Mee Choi’s second collection, Hardly War, sees its author operating as an archaeologist as much as a poet. Choi’s use of hybrid forms — poetry, memoir, opera libretto, images and artifacts from her father’s career as a photojournalist in the Korean and Vietnam Wars — lets her explore themes of injustice and empire, history and identity, sifting through the detritus of family, translation, propaganda and dislocation.’

http://www.donmeechoi.com

About Denise Riley:

Denise Riley is a critically acclaimed writer of both philosophy and poetry. Her books include War in the Nursery [1983]; ‘Am I that Name?’ [1988]; The Words of Selves [2000]; Denise Riley: Selected Poems [2000]; The Force of Language, with Jean-Jacques Lecercle [2004]; Impersonal Passion [2005], Time Lived, Without Its Flow [2012] and Say Something Back [2016]. She is currently Professor of the History of Ideas and and of Poetry at the University of East Anglia, and has taught and researched widely at many institutions in Europe and America.. Her visiting positions have included A.D. White Professor at Cornell University in the US, Writer in Residence at the Tate Gallery in London, and Visiting Fellow at Birkbeck College in the University of London. She has taught philosophy, art history, poetics, and creative writing. Denise Riley lives in London.

Denise Riley and Don Mee Choi read at the launch of MPT The Blue Vein

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.

Two poems by Han Kang: read by Han Kang and translator Sophie Bowman

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’s City’ emerges from this illiteracy. I spent my
adolescent years fl âneur-ing through the streets of Calcutta. Yet, I
am forever severed from it as I read the great literature of the city,
in translation. This long poem is my a empt at translating the city back to myself, in English, the language that still colonises the modern Indian state, and mind. This translation, the poem, is filled with fragments, a sense of the incomplete, li le alleyways of thought and image, half-spoken u erances. It is also a poem of mourning, and in that sense, it is haunted by ghosts, like Calcu a itself, and fed by the ghosts of words I can’t read, but only see as strange hieroglyphs, borne across, translated, from a broken, voiceless past.

Siddhartha Bose: ‘Elegy, Father’s City’

Liz Berry reads ‘Iron Oss’ – in Black Country Dialect

From MPT 'Our Small Universe: Focus on Languages of the United Kingdom', Spring 2019

See more at wwwmodernpoetryintranslation.com

Liz Berry reads ‘Iron Oss’ – Black Country Dialect

Christine De Luca reads ‘Dis life is nivver enyoch’ – in Shetlandic

For a full transcript please visit the project page http://modernpoetryintranslation.com/lakoat-kujawas-a-digital-pamphlet-curated-by-poet-in-residence-khairani-barokka/

Khairani Barokka introduces 'My Body Is Stone, My House Is the Moon’

When Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort founded MPT in 1965 they had two principal ambitions: to get poetry out from behind the Iron Curtain into a wider circulation in English and to benefit writers and the reading public in Britain and America by confronting them with good work from abroad. They published poetry that dealt truthfully with the real contemporary world. For more than 50 years MPT has continued and widened that founding intent.

Modern Poetry in Translation Magazine

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