I am having a lot of  pain at the moment so I may be absent for a while.I have to do what is vital.Then I shall come back

https://www.londoncalling.com/features/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-poetry-translator

Extract

LC: Every single word holds its own importance in poetry. How do you translate the meaning of an individual word if there isn’t a translatable word in English? 

CP: Finding a solution is part of the fun. English is a very extensive, nuanced language, so there’s usually some way to do it if you think long enough.

LC: What challenges do you face when translating a poet who has a very different heritage and culture from your own? 

CP: The fun is that the challenges are always different. Translating the Somali poet Caasha Lul Mohamad Yusuf brings technical challenges because her poetry is structured around alliteration. She often references the Quran so there are allusions I can miss that would be obvious to a Somali audience. You worry about misunderstanding, and that you might not be able to carry a poet’s particular formal skill or music into English.

LC: In Somalia, poetry is regarded as the highest art form. What themes do you find reoccurring in Somali poems, and why do you think this art form is so important to their culture? 

CP: There’s lots of romance. Love, men and women, the romance of the land itself. The green after the rain; the honey. It can be very delicate and lyrical. There’s also politics. Lots of politics. There’s a real sense that poetry matters, that people are listening to what poets say. Somali culture was traditionally nomadic, so it’s no surprise poetry is important. Unlike other art forms, a poem is so light you can carry it in your head.

LC: What is your involvement with the Poetry Translation Centre? 

CP: I’ve been translating Somali poems for them for five years now, and Somali week has become a very important date in my diary! I’ve particularly loved working with Caasha Lul Mohamad Yusuf, and am excited that the PTC are going to publish a major book of her work next year with Bloodaxe called The Sea- Migrations. She writes so powerfully about being a black Muslim woman and immigrant. Her poems feel very necessary right now. I’m also involved in the PTC’s translation workshops. Every week we look at a poem from a different language, hear about the context and culture from a literal translator and attempt a group translation. Last term was a crash course on everything from Chinese poetical ambiguities to Swahili syllabics. It’s amazing what good translations the collaborative process can create.

LC: For someone who has never read translated poetry before, where is a good place to start? 

CP: The Poetry Translation Centre anthology My Voice is a wonderful way in. It has the originals facing the translations which is really important. The magazine Modern Poetry in Translation is also fantastic.

LC: What do you think the medium of poetry does that no other art form can do? 

CP: I’m drawn to the intensity. In a novel it can take several hours of emotional investment to get to the place where you cry, a good poem can do it in thirty seconds.

The empty tomb is here inside my house
Not entire and not destroying all
This space  where used to dwell  my  loving spouse

The consolation is   bitter excuse
The loss of  love, my future state appals.
The empty tomb is here inside my house

As I live, to whom am I of use?
Where is the voice that to my heart will call?
A space  where used to speak  my  loving spouse

There is no resurrection for  our race;
But from the nuclear threat we each recoil.
The empty tomb is here inside my house

How is the world now ruled by the debased?
Are we redeemed  ever from our  Fall?
I miss  exchanges with my artist  spouse

Must we build  more iron  prison walls?
How bitter, Jesus,  is the human  bile.
The empty tomb is here inside my house.
This space  where we  mused, as spouse to spouse

 

So dust to dust and ash to ash,oh lord
Let us mourn without more wrath,discord

In the war the artist made small maps
For  agents  dropped   in  occupied terrain
Then she bore her child with love  that gripped
And took her  like  kind armies might a town

Shaken by the wildness of  the good
She  let new life begin within her womb
Yet  those who’re occupied by what is bad
Will create not life but  their own tomb

The feminine, the artist soul,  the cup
Containers  made to hold  and so create
Can they  judge when passion takes a grip
The nature  fierce that  longs  and wills to mate?

As occupation by an egoistic force
Can make us sinful humans truly cursed

A book of patterns. beautiful as lace
But lacking life and warmth and  zest and fun
We need more than mere geometry of space

We need the flesh ,we  need the long  embrace
Where what was two shall turn into just one.
Passion,action, jewelled  with love’s grace

What is most human is the human face
To join our eyes and smile, so  life begins
We need more than a geometry of space

To show a blank face  is to show distaste
Schizoid,alien,anguished, with no twin
Passions mindful, orchestrated ,save.

How can we experience and not waste
The precious life we get when we are born?
We need a life  connected  like the waves.

Timeless, all is woven into one
The right, the wrong, the to the fro, the calm
A book of patterns. beautiful as lace
With living flesh we make a  holy space

The nearer  peace,more savage are the acts
Abhorrent to the atheist in us all.
History, undigested ,splits and cracks

As we whites  did evil to the black
With little difference, hate in glory calls.
The nearer  peace, the more savage the acts

All of us can  disremember facts
Israeli hands  have gripped and then appalled.
History, undigested ,splits and cracks

As ,with Bomber Harris, Dresden packed
Burned  like grass the refugees to ghouls
The nearer  peace, the more savage the acts

We deny the  healing  we have lacked
For  Jews we helped destroy, psychotic fools
History, undigested ,splits and cracks

Palestine’s own Arabs are  ill ruled
And in return,  explode  like stubborn mules
The nearer love, the more  the  hatred whacks
History., unconceivable,   directs

sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty, how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)