In spring 2017 I tutored a translation seminar group of postgraduate students at the University of Torino, involving them in Ambrose Musiyiwa’s international project Journeys in Translation. They worked together on six poems from the collection Over Land, Over Sea (Five Leaves Publications 2015)—a volume where various poets dealt with the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. This represented the initial step of a wider project that was to culminate in my translation of the whole collection Per terra e per mare: Poesie per chi è in cerca di rifugio (Civic Leicester 2020). In the interim, I translated and commented on the same six poems in an article I authored for FES no. 3 (2018): at the time, I was proud to contribute to From the European South, a ‘young’ journal which had already won my interest and appreciation for the manifold perspectives that it offered on the many souths and forms of oppression in contemporary Europe. I was still prouder to participate in the FES project with a cross-disciplinary approach fusing refugee and translation studies. How, then, to celebrate the journal’s first ten years? I thought of developing the article further, relying again on the stimulating initiatives coming from Ambrose Musiyiwa. In 2020 he edited Black Lives Matter: Poems for a New World (Civic Leicester), a collection of 107 poems by various authors who reflect—and respond to—the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing forms of protest against the oppression of racialized communities worldwide, “disproportionately killing people from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds,” as Musiyiwa writes in his Introduction. “The UK Is not Innocent,” states the title of Arun Jetoo’s poem, while Lily Silverman’s lines narrate the case of another racialized victim “struggling to breathe. / A member of the public entitled to sit on him. / The policeman with his fingers in Rashan’s mouth.” Burning issues of our times, on which I wished my students had a chance to ponder through both textual analysis and translation. Four poems sharing a focus on Britain were therefore selected. In the translations which follow here, Panja Banyoko’s “Streets Paved with Gold” presents a common story of migration where the reality beneath ‘dream-England’ (to use Salman Rushdie’s words) is marked by stifling humiliations and suffering; unrhymed lines in free verse, where attention had to be paid to phonetic patterns. Julian Colton’s “Statue Outrage” connects the anti-racist movements sparked by Floyd’s murder with the toppling of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston (1636-1721) in Bristol; this is a concrete poem in the shape of a human body (Floyd’s corpse? A policeman in the act of shooting? Colston’s statue?), and demanded special attention to the length and position of the lines in our collective translation. Colton’s poem hints at the degrees of outrage that a destroyed statue on one hand, and the racist killing of people on the other, should trigger. Joel Scarfe’s “Bad Sail” concentrates on the same statue-toppling to remark how traces of slavery are still present in our current complicit silence; translation-wise, the poem opens on a pun on “cast” which challenged the students’ creativity. Finally, Paul Francis’s “The Ballad of Paulette Wilson” is a narrative poem recounting the emblematic story of one of the victims of the infamous 2018 ‘Windrush Scandal’, when some post-WWII migrants to the UK were declared ‘illegal’, detained, and in some cases deported. The long lines of this poem became even longer in translation, since Italian has far fewer monosyllabic words than English. Consequently, my proposal was to break every line in two, turning rhyming couplets into the ABCB rhyme typical of ballads—an attempt to depart from the letter of the original in order to safeguard the spirit of the source text. This is my gift to FES, and my hope for many more birthdays to come. But this is not from me only. It comes too from Ambrose Musiyiwa, Panya Banjoko, Julian Colton, Joel Scarfe and Paul Francis, who generously permitted the re-publication and translation of their works. And it comes from the forty-one students in literary translation who, during a seminar in spring 2025, engaged in lively discussions on how best to translate every single line: Francesca Alborghetti, Aurora Amoroso, Alex Ancarani, Antonio Assisa, Erika Bondesan, Alessia Brafa Misicaro, Elena Canu, Arianna Cavallaro, Alessia Anna Colla, Martina Colomba, Alessandro De Bonis, Elena Dominici, Emily Falcioni, Clarissa Maria Farruggio, Elena Fiorelli, Laura Gaiano Cappelli, Alice Garello, Alice Goria, Sara Grassini, Eligio Langella, Carlo Lopresti, Chiara Lorenzato, Monica Macaluso, Sara Merlino, Martina Molsitti, Silvia Monterosso, Davide Morazzoni, Chiara Novo, Luca Orlando, Milena Peretto, Egle Pertile, Matilde Saccani, Agnese Sampaolo, Maria Sapone, Sara Sheikhi, Elena Silvestri, Simone Spano, Matilda Spanu, Federica Tarantini, Carlotta Tiddia, Chiara Wasowski, Raffaella Zunino.
Translating Black Lives Matter (and celebrating FES)
Deandrea Pietro
2026-01-01
Abstract
In spring 2017 I tutored a translation seminar group of postgraduate students at the University of Torino, involving them in Ambrose Musiyiwa’s international project Journeys in Translation. They worked together on six poems from the collection Over Land, Over Sea (Five Leaves Publications 2015)—a volume where various poets dealt with the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. This represented the initial step of a wider project that was to culminate in my translation of the whole collection Per terra e per mare: Poesie per chi è in cerca di rifugio (Civic Leicester 2020). In the interim, I translated and commented on the same six poems in an article I authored for FES no. 3 (2018): at the time, I was proud to contribute to From the European South, a ‘young’ journal which had already won my interest and appreciation for the manifold perspectives that it offered on the many souths and forms of oppression in contemporary Europe. I was still prouder to participate in the FES project with a cross-disciplinary approach fusing refugee and translation studies. How, then, to celebrate the journal’s first ten years? I thought of developing the article further, relying again on the stimulating initiatives coming from Ambrose Musiyiwa. In 2020 he edited Black Lives Matter: Poems for a New World (Civic Leicester), a collection of 107 poems by various authors who reflect—and respond to—the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing forms of protest against the oppression of racialized communities worldwide, “disproportionately killing people from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds,” as Musiyiwa writes in his Introduction. “The UK Is not Innocent,” states the title of Arun Jetoo’s poem, while Lily Silverman’s lines narrate the case of another racialized victim “struggling to breathe. / A member of the public entitled to sit on him. / The policeman with his fingers in Rashan’s mouth.” Burning issues of our times, on which I wished my students had a chance to ponder through both textual analysis and translation. Four poems sharing a focus on Britain were therefore selected. In the translations which follow here, Panja Banyoko’s “Streets Paved with Gold” presents a common story of migration where the reality beneath ‘dream-England’ (to use Salman Rushdie’s words) is marked by stifling humiliations and suffering; unrhymed lines in free verse, where attention had to be paid to phonetic patterns. Julian Colton’s “Statue Outrage” connects the anti-racist movements sparked by Floyd’s murder with the toppling of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston (1636-1721) in Bristol; this is a concrete poem in the shape of a human body (Floyd’s corpse? A policeman in the act of shooting? Colston’s statue?), and demanded special attention to the length and position of the lines in our collective translation. Colton’s poem hints at the degrees of outrage that a destroyed statue on one hand, and the racist killing of people on the other, should trigger. Joel Scarfe’s “Bad Sail” concentrates on the same statue-toppling to remark how traces of slavery are still present in our current complicit silence; translation-wise, the poem opens on a pun on “cast” which challenged the students’ creativity. Finally, Paul Francis’s “The Ballad of Paulette Wilson” is a narrative poem recounting the emblematic story of one of the victims of the infamous 2018 ‘Windrush Scandal’, when some post-WWII migrants to the UK were declared ‘illegal’, detained, and in some cases deported. The long lines of this poem became even longer in translation, since Italian has far fewer monosyllabic words than English. Consequently, my proposal was to break every line in two, turning rhyming couplets into the ABCB rhyme typical of ballads—an attempt to depart from the letter of the original in order to safeguard the spirit of the source text. This is my gift to FES, and my hope for many more birthdays to come. But this is not from me only. It comes too from Ambrose Musiyiwa, Panya Banjoko, Julian Colton, Joel Scarfe and Paul Francis, who generously permitted the re-publication and translation of their works. And it comes from the forty-one students in literary translation who, during a seminar in spring 2025, engaged in lively discussions on how best to translate every single line: Francesca Alborghetti, Aurora Amoroso, Alex Ancarani, Antonio Assisa, Erika Bondesan, Alessia Brafa Misicaro, Elena Canu, Arianna Cavallaro, Alessia Anna Colla, Martina Colomba, Alessandro De Bonis, Elena Dominici, Emily Falcioni, Clarissa Maria Farruggio, Elena Fiorelli, Laura Gaiano Cappelli, Alice Garello, Alice Goria, Sara Grassini, Eligio Langella, Carlo Lopresti, Chiara Lorenzato, Monica Macaluso, Sara Merlino, Martina Molsitti, Silvia Monterosso, Davide Morazzoni, Chiara Novo, Luca Orlando, Milena Peretto, Egle Pertile, Matilde Saccani, Agnese Sampaolo, Maria Sapone, Sara Sheikhi, Elena Silvestri, Simone Spano, Matilda Spanu, Federica Tarantini, Carlotta Tiddia, Chiara Wasowski, Raffaella Zunino.
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