Clare Pollard on a golden period for translations
Translated poetry, once a niche within a niche, seems to be growing in popularity for a new generation of writers and readers. Translated poems within the major magazines have become commonplace – this year The Poetry Review, under Emily Berry, has been publishing poets such as Stella N’Djoku translated by Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe and Hagiwara Sakutarō translated by Jae Kim, whilst André Naffis-Sahely’s inaugural issue as poetry editor of Poetry London contained translations from Amharic, Arabic, French, Persian and Portuguese. Naffis-Sahely is, of course, a wonderful translator himself, whose translations of the Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi came out with the Poetry Translation Centre this summer.
It is great to see poets from other languages taking their rightful place in anthologies too – Hazel Press’ deeply enjoyable O, a collection of poems on female pleasure edited by Anna Selby, features translations of Kim Hyesoon, Forugh Farrokzhad and Kutti Revathi, along with Zoe Brigley’s memorable version of Gwerful Mechain’s medieval ‘Ode to my Cunt’.
My own co-translation of Anna T. Szabo’s Trust came out with Arc this spring, the results of our friendship over 17 years – all that time ago, when I first visited Hungary with the British Council, I recall being surprised by how nearly every poet I met there also translated as part of their practise. Now poet-translators in the UK seem to abound – from Khairani Barokka to Shash Trevett to Juana Adcock, many of the most exciting poets are enriched by their multilingualism.
Another important shift has been in who gets to be translated. There was a time when white, male, so-called ‘major’ poets dominated (with the fact that certain European countries gave out generous grants making them far more likely to be published as well). Recently, organisations such as PEN and the PTC, with their Sarah Maguire Prize, have been trying to create a much-needed shift towards majority world poets. Presses have also shifted from heavy, exhaustive collections towards fresher, more fleet-footed translation pamphlets. Highlights this year have included Simone Atangana Bekono’s How the First Sparks Became Visible translated by David Colmer (The Emma Press), Anar’s Leaving, translated by Hari Rajaledchumy and Fran Lock (PTC), and the superb Translating Feminisms pamphlets on Indonesian and Filipino poets (Tilted Axis).
All of these, notably, recentre women’s voices. The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation has also done important work in shifting the gender imbalance, with Sasha Dugdale’s translation of Maria Stepanova, The War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe), on the shortlist this year and surely likely to appear on many books of 2021 lists. I can only compare my experience of reading the title poem to that of reading ‘The Waste Land’ for the first time – it is so astonishing, and the effort that has gone into translating it immense.
Elsewhere, the trend for female or nonbinary translations of major texts has continued with Maria Dahvana Headley’s hugely successful Beowulf (that begins with the proclamation ‘Bro!’), and Hollie McNish and Kae Tempest taking on Sophocles’ Antigone and Philoctetes respectively. We all wait patiently for Emily Wilson’s Iliad, but in the meantime it feels like a golden period for translations that are making us rethink the canon.
Clare Pollard has published five collections of poetry and is the editor of Modern Poetry in Translation.
