MPT’s new issue ‘Songs of the Shattered Throat’ focuses on poetry in the languages of India, with a selection of new translations of Tulsidas, Monika Kumar, Kutti Revathi, Joy Goswami, Vinod Kumar Shukla and Anitha Thampi, whose poem is published in partnership with Indian Quarterly. The issue also features new work by Ed Doegar, Daljit Nagra and Siddhartha Bose. The translations are accompanied by an essay by prominent Hindi novelist and poet Geet Chaturvedi about the status of Hindi as a literary language and English language’s corrosive effect on Hindi literary culture. ‘Songs of the Shattered Throat’ also includes selections of poems by Swedish modernist Ann Jäderlund, Lea Goldberg’s exquisite sequence ‘Songs of Spain’, published in English translation for the first time, Bernard O’Donoghue’s new translation of Piers Plowman and a collaborative translation between UK poet Karen McCarthy Woolf and Turkish poet Nurduran Duman. All in this new issue of the groundbreaking magazine dedicated to poetry in translation: for the best in world poetry read MPT.
Inside the Issue:
Contents
William Langland’s Piers Plowman, an excerpt
Translated by Bernard O’Donoghue
Guy Vaes, The Blacktip Ragwort
Translated by Philip Mosley
Kinga Fabó, two poems
Translated by George Szirtes
Lev Ozerov, ‘Father’
Translated by Irina Mashinski, Maria Bloshteyn and Boris Dralyuk
Francisco Fernández Torres, ‘The Desolate Goldfinch’
Translated by Róisín Tierney
Lea Goldberg, ‘Songs of Spain’
Translated by Rachel Tzvia Back
Marina Tsvetaeva, six poems
Translated by Moniza Alvi and Veronika Krasnova
Ján Gavura, five poems
Translated by James Sutherland-Smith and the poet
Nurduran Duman, ‘The River’
Translated by Karen McCarthy Woolf
Ann Jäderlund, seven poems
Translated by Johannes Göransson
Editorial
- Hindi poet and novelist Geet Chaturvedi wrote me a letter last year in response to my questions about the position of Hindi literature, and I was so struck by the passion of his le er that I asked if we could publish it in MPT....Read full editorial
Focus
Tulsidas, two stanzas from ‘Childhood’
Translated by Rohini Chowdhury
Kutti Revathi, four poems
Translated by Vivek Narayanan, Padma Narayanan and the author
K.G. Sankara Pillai, ‘The River Discards its Name at the Sea’
Translated by Aditya Shankar
Ed Doegar, Poems from the Ainkuṟunūṟu
Kunwar Narain, two poemsTranslated by Apurva Narain
Geet Chaturvedi, Hindi Medium Type: an essay
Vinod Kumar Shukla, ‘Had we all lived together…’
Translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Joy Goswami, three poems
Translated by Sampurna Chattarji
Afzal Ahmed Syed, two poems
Translated by Taimoor Shahid
Vimmi Sadarangani, two poems
Translated by Gopika Jadeja
Daljit Nagra, Backlashing Baglash & Jaglash
Monika Kumar, three poemsTranslated by Sampurna Chattarji
Leeladhar Jagoori, two poems
Translated by Sarabjeet Garcha
Anitha Thampi, ‘Alappuzha Vellam’
Translated by J. Devika
Siddhartha Bose, ‘Elegy, Father’s City’
Reviews
Fiona Sze-Lorrain, An Indivisible Mind
Catching up with one of Japan’s great poets
Will Stone, A Good European
A progressive for dark times
Eric Torgersen, In the Middle of the Fire
A Swedish Poet inspired by James Dean, Kenneth Koch and Coca Cola