Modern Poetry In Translation

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.

Modern Poetry in Translation Magazine (MPT) celebrates fifty years between July 2015 and July 2016 with a programme of special events and publications. To mark the occasion, MPT is working with Bloodaxe Books to publish an anthology of the most exciting and important work published in MPT over the last 50 years. Speaking at International Translation Day in October 2015, Sasha Dugdale was joined by former editors David and Helen Constantine to discuss the anthology and look back over the magazine's extraordinary history. Find out more about MPT's 50th anniversary: bit.ly/MPT50

This podcast was recorded at the launch of MPT ‘I WISH...' and features Michael Rosen and Marina Boroditskaya in conversaiton with MPT Editor, Sasha Dugdale. Read an interview with Michael and Marina on the MPT Magazine website here: http://bit.ly/1Yge46E Read poems from MPT 'I WISH...' here: http://bit.ly/1KsAmw0

This podcast was recorded in July 2015 at a special celebration to mark the opening of MPT's 50th year and 12 months of events, publications and special projects. Find out more about MPT's 50th anniversary celebrations: http://www.mptmagazine.com/page/fifty-years-mpt/ About David Constantine David Constantine was born in Salford in 1944. For thirty years he taught German at the Universities of Durham and Oxford. He holds honorary professorships in English at the Universities of Liverpool and Aberystwyth, and was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation until 2013. He is a translator and editor of Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist and Brecht. His translation of Goethe’s Faust, Parts I and II, came out in Penguin in 2005 and 2009. He has published several volumes of poetry, most recently Nine Fathom Deep (Bloodaxe, 2009); also a novel and three volumes of short stories, the most recent of these being The Shieling (Comma Press, 2009). He was the 2010 winner of the BBC National Short Story Award for 'Tea at the

MPT’s Spring Issue 'Scorched Glass' focussed on Iranian poetry. In July 2015 we held a series of events celebrating Iranian Poetry at Poetry International, produced in partnership with Southbank Centre and the British Council. In this podcast you'll hear readings by Hubert Moore, Nasrin Parvaz, Stephen Watts, Ziba Karbassi, Paul Batchelor, Karen McCarthy Woolf and Pascale Petit.

TEDI LÓPEZ MILLS Tedi López Mills was born in Mexico City in 1959. She studied philosophy at the Mexican National University and literature at the Sorbonne. She has published ten books of poetry including Muerte en la Rúa Augusta, published in David Shook’s translation as Death on Rua Augusta by Eyewear Publishing in 2014.

AMARJIT CHANDAN Amarjit Chandan was born in Nairobi in 1946 and studied in India at Panjab University, coming to Britain in 1980 to live in London. He has published five collections of poetry and three books of essays in Punjabi notably Jarhān (poems) and Phailsufiān and Nishāni (essays). He has edited and translated about 30 anthologies of Indian and world poetry and fiction by, among others, Brecht, Neruda, Ritsos, Hikmet, Cardenal, Martin Carter and John Berger in Punjabi.

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.

NIKOLA MADZIROV Nikola Madzirov is a Macedonian poet, essayist, translator and editor. His poetry has been translated into over 30 languages. He won the European Hubert Burda Prize for young East European poets for his collection Relocated Stone (2007). A selection of his poetry, Remnants of Another Age, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2013. PEGGY REID Graham and Peggy Reid have translated and co-translated many and various texts, including history, novels, plays, film scripts and poetry. In 1973 they won the Struga Poetry Festival Translation Prize, and later participated in the few but very productive Struga International Translation Workshops. Both have honorary titles from Ss. Cyril and Methodius University and both have been awarded an MBE for services to literature and language in Macedonia. Their translations of Nikola Madzirov appear in his collection Remnants of Another Age (Bloodaxe, 2013).

SUJATA BHATT Sujata Bhatt’s Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2013) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her new collection, Poppies in Translation, will be published in March 2015, also by Carcanet.

KAREN LEEDER Karen Leeder is Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in German at New College, Oxford. She has published widely on modern German literature, especially poetry and has been active in translation in the UK and beyond: including a stint on the English PEN Work in Translation Committee, the Steering Committee of the British Centre for Translation and on the Board of MPT. DURS GRÜNBEIN Durs Grünbein was born in Dresden in the former East Germany in 1962. He has lived in Berlin since 1985, working as poet, essayist and translator from English, Latin and Greek, and now as Professor at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He won Germany’s major literary prize, the Georg-Büchner-Preis, at the age of 33. Ashes for Breakfast (Faber), his ninth book of poems and his first in English translation, was launched at the 2006 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.