Journeys in Translation: Refugee Poems

In the spring of the academic year 2016/17, I taught an MA course in English Literature and Translation, with a special focus on translating postcolonial texts. The course had already started when I came across a collection of poems on refugees by various authors, Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for Those Seeking Refuge (Five Leaves Publications). The book had been conceived as a collective response to the so-called refugee crisis which struck the British public opinion in the summer of 2015 (for furher information on this collection, see Bradshaw's article in the final bibliography). In the light of my current studies on new forms of slavery in today's Britain, I found the collection of great interest. And I was even more pleased to discover the existence of an international translation project attached to the book, Journeys in Translation, an open call to translate 13 poems (or some of them) selected from the collection into any language. Ambrose Musiyiwa (one of the poets and inspirers of Over Land) launched this initiative to encourage people to reflect, through working between languages, on our attitude towards those seeking refuge (with a final event to be held in Leicester on 30th September 2017, International Translation Day). I found this a unique opportunity to help my students engage in practical work on this urgent postcolonial issue. Musiyiwa declared that the collection aimed at showing that those "who are seeking refuge are people and not numbers, insects or environmental phenomena" (Bradshaw). This is where the role of art indeed comes into play. Gabriele Del Grande, the Italian film director and social activist who was recently jailed by Turkish authorities for his work with Syrian refugees, once noticed that all the media over-exposure on refugees, in the end, "does not move the debate one bit. On the contrary, it risks distorting the story. [...] Instead, we increasingly need more lengthy stories and more time to process the encounter with the human side of the story [...] we need to dare to imagine a common future. And only art can help us in so visionary a task" (Korzhenevich 109). In a world scarred by barriers and fences, translation cannot but be seen as part and parcel of this artistic endeavour. I thought my students would have an opportunity to contribute to this effort in giving voice, in going beyond the "short-lived, strategic sentimentalism" fostered by mainstream media on contemporary refugees (Bromley). I believed that working on the raw material of the poetic line would allow them a deeper encounter with the issues at stake. Even though the seminar was not compulsory for students attending the course, 23 of them attended it, plus two students working on their MA thesis in literary translation (all their names are listed below). Before starting the seminar, I optimistically imagined that in 4 classes (8 hours altogether) we would translate all 13 poems. Thanks to the quality of the students' participation, and the long discussions in which we often engaged, we barely managed to translate 6 of them.