Victoria Field attended the One World Poetry Evening and wrote this blog.
I attended the One World Week Poetry Evening on Monday 24th Feb – it was wonderful – moving, funny, enriching and genuinely dissolving boundaries whilst honouring the rich diversity of language and poetry.
It opened with Helen James reading a poem by Chinese poet Ya Mo, translated by Ming Di. You can read it here.
‘Homeland’ begins describing by describing our ‘Blue globe/ a celestial body that slowly rotates // Human beings, the world, you, ourselves’ and then invokes ‘Walls, barbed wires, borders... border lines’ before listing ‘the long silent snow-capped land, the permafrost zone/ the desert that still has life/ algaes, mosses, lichens... poppies’.
What followed was a feast of poems from staff, students and alumni in many different languages, sometimes with formal translations and sometimes allowed simply to be. I’ve put the languages in alphabetical order and hope I haven’t missed any.
Arabic, Bengali, Berber (also known as Tamazight), Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, Hindhi, Irish, Malay, Nepalese, Slovakian and Urdu.
I’m currently learning Dutch and the poem I read is the oldest poem in the Dutch language, written by a monk at an abbey in Rochester. As it’s spring and the poem is from the 11th century and so out of copyright, I’ll paste it here.
Hebban olla vogala
nestas hagunnan
hinas hic enda thu
wat unbidan we nu?
In modern Dutch:
Hebben alle vogels
nesten begonnen
behalve ik en jij
wat verbeiden we nu?
In English – my fairly free translation:
All the birds have begun
to build their nests
apart from us -
what is it we’re waiting for?
And we had English from the US by way of ancestral stories of Hungary, and a poem in English by Welsh poet R.S.Thomas, Children’s Song which you can read here.
Language is a sustainability issue, a diversity issue and central to questions of power, colonialism and control.
The Endangered Languages Project website states that over 40% of the world’s 7000 languages are in danger of extinction. Another way of putting it is that a language dies out every two weeks. That’s shocking. You may be interested in this Guardian podcast about poetry in translation, especially from minority languages.
Poetry, language at its most distilled and beautiful, is for me as precious as birdsong. Thank you to Zulfi and Ellie for allowing so many songs to be heard.
Victoria Field
PhD student and Sessional Academic
thepoetrypractice.co.uk
