Translation
Saturday 8 October 2005 22:00-22:45 (Radio 3)
Ian McMillan presents a translation special, featuring Somaliland's leading poet, Gaarriye.
Programme Details
The pleasures and perils of translation are the subject of this week’s edition of The Verb. How DO you go about translating poetry? Is it easier translating prose? Was Robert Frost right when he defined poetry as that special something that always gets lost in translation? To explore these questions Ian McMillan has enlisted a distinguished cast: this year’s winner of the Forward Prize for Poetry, David Harsent, will be talking about his versions of Somaliland’s leading poet, Gaariye; another poet, Sarah Maguire, will be explaining why she believes translation is vital for the health of any country’s poetic tradition; and the director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, Amanda Hopkinson, will be reminding us that some of the great historical translations are now so familiar that we think of them as part of the English canon. Also in the programme, the academic John Mullan will be offering a new reading of one of the most famous lines in world literature, and Radio 3’s writer in residence for the Africa Season, Rommi Smith, will be reflecting on how the African experience is translated into English.
That’s all in The Verb with Ian McMillan, at 9.30pm on BBC Radio 3.
Additional Information:
Gaarriye, David Harsent and Sarah Maguire are taking part in The Poetry Translation Centre's Poets Tour: six international poets and their translators will be performing across the UK throughout October 2005. Also reading their work are the poets Coral Bracho (Mexico), Gagan Gill (India), Toeti Heraty (Indonesia), Partaw Naderi (Afghanistan), and Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi (Sudan). All will be joining be their translators, who include the poets Jane Duran, Mark Ford, Katherine Pierpoint and Carole Satyamurti. For further details go to: http://www.poetrytranslation.soas.ac.uk/tour/
Producer: Aasiya Lodhi
