3 poets come together at VPL to discuss the art of literary translation

The Vancouver Public Library will host a discussion exploring the art of poetry translation with three authors on Oct. 30 at the Central Branch.

Curated by writer and Kwantlen Polytechnic University creative writing instructor Jen Currin, the Poetry in Translation event will feature poets Rhea Tregebov, Rahat Kurd, and Deborah Woodard. University of British Columbia (UBC) associate professor Bronwen Tate will moderate the discussion. 

Tregebov, who is an associate professor emerita at UBC’s School of Creative Writing, says unlike the cliché that poetry gets lost in translation, in her view, poetry can “get found in translation.”

“The challenges involved in moving from one language to another — and one culture to another — are just exciting and fascinating to me,” Tregebov says.

“You create a slightly different work in the target language, but it hopefully will succeed in many of the ways the original did.”

Tregebov is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including her most recent collection, Talking to Strangers.

She edited and co-translated the anthology, Arguing With the Storm: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers, and is the recipient of awards including the Pat Lowther Award, The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize, and the Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry from Prairie Schooner, among others.

While translating fluently from French and Spanish, Tregebov also took part in “tandem translation,” where she was invited to translate from languages she doesn’t know, including Japanese, Finish, and Catalan languages.

“While [bilingual translators] could deal with all of the elements of the source language, they wanted a poet who was a native speaker of English to help finalize those translations,” Tregebov says.

She adds that one of the challenges when translating poetry can be to retain its traditional form, especially with end rhymes and meter in contemporary English.

“English doesn’t have as many rhymes as the Romance languages. [With] the Romance languages, verbs will end in the same way, so it’s easier to rhyme in French, Italian, or Spanish than it is in English. It’s a lot harder to get those end rhymes [in English],” Tregebov says.

Tregebov hopes attendees will become more curious about the process of translation and learn some of the possibilities, joys, challenges, and difficulties of poetry translation.

Kurd, a poet, writer, and editor, started translating a couple years ago.

Urdu was one of the languages she was immersed in while growing up in Canada. Since it is also one of the primary languages of poetry, Kurd began learning it to read the script.

Later, she started reading more modern Urdu poetry and came across more women’s voices in the language. Many of these writers expressed feminist ideas while using classical Urdu, Kurd says.

“I felt very excited by that style of more contemporary poetry,” Kurd says. “That’s why I’ve been more interested in translating poetry from feminist voices, as well as voices that are … politically engaged and are trying to challenge power and injustice.”

Kurd, who comes from a Kashmiri and North Indian family, says she hopes to talk about the value of being multilingual, coming to English with multiple languages, and the value of different dialects of English at the event.

Kurd’s mother is Kashmiri and spoke the language with her own sisters and mother. Her parents spoke with each other in Punjabi, and Kurd’s mother spoke to her in Urdu. 

Being multilingual while growing up in Ontario, English was the dominant language, and the focus at her school was English and Canadian literature. Kurd didn’t have a chance to speak about her inherited languages.

“I had access to learning European languages, but it’s been a more personal project to think about the languages that I inherited within my family, and I’ve had to cultivate that independently,” Kurd says. “For several years, I’ve been in the process of reclaiming and learning how to read literary Urdu.”

When reflecting on multilingual societies, particularly North India and the Kashmir region, where there are long histories of diversity and multilingualism, Kurd says growing up in such contexts prepares people to accept diversity. She adds that they allow people to engage with multiple cultural, literary, and artistic influences in ways that can bring people closer together.

“When you have access to a bilingual edition of poetry, it can be a very nice way to get closer to both the original thinking of the original poet, as well as the thinking of the translator who brings it into English,” Kurd says.

Her book of poetry, The Book of Z, will be released in October. It is a persona poem written in the voice of Zulaykha, an imagined mytho-poetic figure who often appears in Persian poetry and other poetic traditions, Kurd says. The book is in English and uses vocabulary from Persian, Arabic, and Urdu.

“One of the things that I’m really committed to as a poet is showing what my lineage is and writing into some of the inherited, traditional approaches, but also replying back to it from a contemporary, feminist, and woman’s perspective.”

Kurd’s other works include The City That Is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters, co-authored with Kashmiri poet Sumayya Syed, and the Cosmophilia poetry collection.

Woodward is a poet and translator who wrote the books Borrowed Tales and No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911. She co-translated the poetry of Amelia Rosselli in Hospital Series, Obtuse Diary, The Dragonfly, and Notes Scattered and Lost. 

For more information about the event, visit www.bit.ly/poetryintranslation.