A poem is a room with one window
A Dublin poet who works night shifts in a hospital reads three poems and talks with Yara about the line break, restraint, and writing about patients without using them.
Translating your grandmother
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Show notes
Translating your grandmother
Yara and a poet from Lahore who writes in Urdu and English talk about the poems they have each written in a grandmother's voice, and the problem of carrying a sentence from a kitchen into another language without flattening it.
- Two readings, one in Urdu with Yara's English, one in Arabic with the guest's
- The words that will not cross: endearments, curses, food
- Rhythm of speech versus rhythm of the line
- Writing a person who cannot read what you wrote about her
- The ghazal and the qasida, and what each lets you keep
Both poems appear on the show page in the original and in translation.
Transcript
Welcome back to Line Break Season, I am Yara Khoury. This week's conversation started by accident, when a poet from Lahore and I discovered over dinner that we had each written a poem in our grandmother's voice, and that neither of us was sure we had the right to. So we are going to read them to each other, hers in Urdu and mine in Arabic, with rough translations, and then talk about what happens when a sentence spoken in a kitchen becomes a line on a page in a language the speaker never used. We talk about the words that refuse to cross, endearments and curses and the names of food, about the rhythm of speech against the rhythm of the line, and about the ghazal and the qasida and what each form lets you keep. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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