Monday 31 March 2014

My NaPoTraMo Challenge

It's a shiny new blog! With poetry! Well, there isn't any poetry yet, but there will be. Some of you may have heard of National Poetry Writing Month, or NaPoWriMo, in which participants aim to write a poem every day in April. Being translationally-inclined, I have decided to attempt a twist on this: National Poetry Translation Month! (A rather grand title, admittedly, since there's only me...)

I translate principally from French, so that will be the language of most of the poems I attempt. However, if anyone would like to send me a poem in another language with a gloss (a word-for-word translation underneath the original so the translator can see what each word is doing), I'd be delighted to include it! For reasons of copyright, I won't always be able to post my full translation here, but I will post extracts, my thoughts on the experience of translating that particular poem or poetry in general, and a few complete poems here and there.

Please feel free to comment! Hearing from the outside world will motivate me to complete my NaPoTraMo challenge! Wish me luck...