Special Issue of Refugee Poetry, MPT Launches ‘The Great Flight’

On Wednesday, April 13 at London’s Southbank Centre will host the launch of “The Great Flight,” Modern Poetry in Translation’s refugee-focussed issue, ed. Sasha Dugdale:

The free event, which is set to begin at 8pm, will feature performances by Syrian poet Golan Haji, civil rights activist and writer Nasrin Parvaz, and translator-poet Stephen Watts. You can hear “readings of Golan’s poetry in Arabic and in superb new English translations by Stephen Watts, followed by a discussion on issues of identity, dislocation and discrimination with Nasrin.”

The issue also includes work by five Assyrian Iraqi poets, the great Algerian poet-translator-scholar Habib Tengour, and Algerian poet and novelist Mohammed Dib.

Poems by Golan Haji:

Four  poems, trans. Lauren Pyott

Autumn Here is Magical and Vast, trans Stephen Watts

Poems by Habib Tengour:

Crossing, trans. Marilyn Hacker

Seven poems, trans. Pierre Joris

Poems by Mohammed Dib:

Fifteen poems, translator uncredited

Also: Madeleine Campbell on Translating Mohammed Dib Through ‘Sound, Gesture, Movement and Sculpture’

More meditations on exile:

Sargon Boulus: “A Refugee Tells” (trans. Youssef Rakha and Kees Nijland)

Dara Abdallah: 14 Poems (trans. Mona Kareem)

Ashraf Fayadh: ‘The Last of the Line of Refugee Descendants’ (trans. Jonathan Wright)

Hassan Blasim: “A Refugee in the Paradise That is Europe” (trans. Jonathan Wright)

Osama Esber: “Exile is Born at This Moment” (trans. Esber)