Translating your grandmother
A Lahore poet and Yara compare notes on translating family speech into poems, moving between Urdu, Arabic and English, and what is lost when a grandmother's sentence becomes a line.
A poem is a room with one window
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Show notes
A poem is a room with one window
Yara's first guest is a poet from Dublin who works night shifts as a hospital porter and writes in the hour after he gets home. He reads three poems and they take one of them apart, line by line, to see where the breaks fall and what they do.
- Three readings, including a poem that is nine lines long
- Why the line break is the poem's only private instrument
- Restraint: what was cut from the hospital poem and why
- Writing about patients without using them
- The hour after a night shift as a writing routine
The three poems are on the show page with the poet's permission. Read them before or after, as you prefer.
Transcript
Marhaba, I am Yara Khoury and this is Line Break Season, a show where poets read and then, unusually, explain themselves. I called it that because the line break is the one thing poetry has that nothing else does, and almost nobody talks about it. My first guest is a poet from Dublin who works night shifts as a hospital porter and writes in the hour after he gets home, before he sleeps. He is going to read three poems, one of them nine lines long, and then we are going to take one of them apart and look at every break, every cut, every word he argued with himself about. We also talk about writing about patients without using them, which he does with more care than anyone I know. Listen slowly. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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