Karin Karakaslı, Fran Lock, Canan Marasligil, and Sarah Howe at the launch of Real, June 2024. Photo by Hayley Madden.
It’s Women in Translation Month! We list 10 must read poetry books in translation by women poets from around the world.
Real by Karin Karakaslı (trs. Canan Marasligil, Sarah Howe)
An acclaimed writer in multiple genres as well as a journalist and academic, Karin Karakașlı has repeatedly turned to poetry to chart complex emotional geographies – both her own and those of her country, Turkey. Her highly cinematic poems are powered by music, metaphor and a fascination for the mechanics of language itself. Running through her work is a deeply held belief in the emancipatory potential of words.
“This wonderful selection from Karin Karakaşlı’s work over the last fifteen years establishes her as an important contemporary poet of witness. Coruscating and sardonic by turn, her verse yet seems to deprecate its own hard-won wisdom. In the face of history, Karakaşlı tells us, we need not heroics but the courage to just keep going, ‘one cigarette, then another, and another’.” – Fiona Sampson
I Will Not Fold These Maps by Mona Kareem (trs. Sara Elkamel)
Mona Kareem is a stateless poet, born in Kuwait, whose work has been internationally acclaimed for its power and immediacy ever since she published her first collection at the age of 14. Her writing comes out of the experience of growing up with ‘Bidoon’ status (from ‘bidoon jinsiya’ or ‘without nationality’); an Arab minority denied Kuwaiti citizenship rights, who were categorised as ‘illegal residents’ and stripped of their access to employment, education, social welfare and official documentation a year before her birth.
Her poems are surreal, relying heavily on vivid metaphors, often to bridge the gap between the self and what lies outside the self. They enact a boundless porosity between the body, nature, and the material world. Kareem plays with language to explore the infinite depths of human experience and identity. These poems, with dates, times and places obscured, present us with new maps of precarious, unstable, and permeable geopolitics. Kareem delineates ‘rupture’ as a facet of the migrant’s experience.
This Water by Gagan Gill (trs. Lucy Rosenstein, Jane Duran)
Gagan Gill is one of the most respected poets writing in Hindi today. Her poems give voice to the unheard – whether of a foetus or a bride, the abused earth or the animals upon it. This selection, featuring work from each of her five collections, demonstrates the musical and visual originality of her verse, which is constantly finding new expressive possibilities in simple everyday language. Includes an afterword by Helen Charman.
The Poetry Translation Centre’s World Poet Series showcases the most exciting living poets from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.
“[Gagan Gill] combines stark images with rare expressiveness: expressiveness composed of silences, gaps, absences, disruptions, of pulsational pressure which goes beyond language.“
-Lucy Rosenstein
My Tenantless Body by Yu Yoyo (trs. Dave Haysom, A K Blakemore)
My Tenantless Body is the celebrated Sichuanese poet Yu Yoyo’s first publication in English. It presents a sensitive yet forceful new voice that leads us through the haunted nightscapes of China with dark wit. The book’s young protagonist veers in and out of focus: her thoughts always intensely clear, her feeling never simply clarified. In these poems the oblique and the plain-spoken seem to cross paths, picking one another’s pockets along the way. Includes an afterword by Rebecca Tamás.
“One reads in Yu’s pointed lines a disappearance of the poet herself; not only in her predominant idiom (a searching, imperative voice), but in her stark depiction of contemporary China’s bleached cities and sullen interiors, with hardly any room left for the expressive first-person“.
– Theophilus Kwek, The Poetry Review
Leaving by Anar (trs. Hari Rajaledchumy, Fran Lock)
From the harrowing aftermath of the civil war to the subtle terrors of societal expectation, the poet Anar chronicles female experiences in Sri Lanka today. Her poems avoid neat classifications such as narrative, allegory or lyric, instead, she combines genre and traditions as she sees fit to say whatever needs saying. Her poems draw on a diverse field of reference from classical Tamil mythic landscapes to contemporary feminist thought, from Koranic imagery to personal history.
“Anar’s poetry is sensual, subversive, explosive. The images she conjures are dream-like and haunting. Even when Anar writes about trauma, she takes shelter in beauty. These translations, by Hari Rajaledchumy working with the English-language poet Fran Lock, are elegant and brilliant.”
– Meena Kandasamy
Aulò! Aulò! Aulò! by Ribka Sibhatu (trs. André Naffis-Sahely)
Ribka Sibhatu is one of the foremost poets of the Eritrean diaspora and a prominent activist for refugee rights. The present selection captures the scale and range of her achievements to date, from recent poems of direct political intervention, through her decade-long effort to record the oral folklore and myths of Tigrinya tradition, back to her earliest taboo-breaking lyric poems. Sibhatu has devoted a considerable amount of her creative energies to the assemblage and recording of Eritrea’s folkloric canon, a body of oral literature which has been handed down through the ages in the form of ‘aulòs’, which literally means ‘Please give me permission! I have something to say publicly in rhyme!’. Naffis-Sahely has worked closely with Sibhatu for over 10 years, making translations of her poems and fables to bringing them to the attention of English speaking audiences. His dedication to making her voice heard has resulted in this new publication, which includes an afterword by Sasha Dugdale.
“Naffis-Sahely’s translation captures the poet’s intricate weaving of multiple worlds – fable and grounded reality, elegiac and absurd, spiritualised emotion and reportage. Through [Sibhatu’s] poetry she allows us to step into her unique gaze as an artist and activist in self-exile…”
– Devina Shah, Modern Poetry in Translation
the hammer and other poems by Adelaide Ivánova (trs. Rachel Long, Francisco Vilhena)
This remarkable collection is a selection from Adelaide Ivánova’s award-winning book the hammer (o martelo). This unsettling work considers both sexualised violence and consensual sex through a single narrative voice. It explores post-rape experience in a morally bankrupt justice system and offers potent expression of female sexuality – within and beyond the bounds of marriage – in poems that are challenging, profound, and darkly comic. Ivánova’s work is a form of impassioned resistance that delivers a necessary shock to the system. Includes an afterword by Emily Critchley.
“Ivánova sings of bodily fragmentations and argues that these ruptures are the only way of representing the whole body in an unjust system. The hammer, in poems that frame the pamphlet, is both judgment and weapon, is language and physics, is inevitable and not: a tool of interrogation and resistance.”
– Annie Fan, Modern Poetry in Translation
The Water People by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (trs. Marilyn Hacker)
Vénus Khoury-Ghata is an outstanding figure in contemporary literature, with a prolific output in both poetry and prose. She is celebrated for her immersive landscapes and folkloric narratives, drawn from her upbringing in Lebanon but expressed in the language of France, where she has lived since 1972. In Khoury-Ghata’s poetry, Arabic and French literary traditions merge like water from the river and the waterfall. Her mesmeric sequences plunge us into a semi-surreal world where humans and trees, plants, animals and the elements themselves are intertwined and yet forever fluid – a world where we are urged to leave our ‘voices behind’, to ‘listen better’. This book presents an extended extract from her 2018 collection Gens de l’eau, and includes an afterword by Karen McCarthy Woolf.
“River-fresh and supple in Marilyn Hacker’s English translation, Khoury-Ghata’s voice has the authority and cadence of the practised story-teller. While morally alert, she avoids message-preaching, dodges abstraction. Symbols are never merely symbolic but tangible objects, weighed in the hands, felt under the feet. Readers will find themselves spellbound into a circle of enchanted childhood as they follow the narrative rhythms and shifting moods – sometimes joyous, sometimes elegiac, and sometimes expressing a fine defiance.”
– Carol Rumens
To Love a Woman by Diana Bellessi (trs. Leo Boix)
Diana Bellessi’s trail-blazing poetry has been a source of inspiration for successive generations of Argentine poets. For fifty years, her work has confronted social, ecological and colonial exploitation with poetry of ethical and lyrical integrity. This is the first single-author selection of her work to appear in English, drawing on six of her most vital collections. At the heart of the book is a sequence of sensual love poems that helped to establish a new directness in Latin American queer poetics. Includes an afterword by Mary Jean Chan.
“The apparent simplicity of Bellessi’s verse often belies a keen attention to imagery and musicality that Leo Boix brings vividly to life in the English translation.”
– Mary Jean Chan
Akin to Stone by Bejan Matur (trs. Jen Hadfield, Canan Marasligil)
Bejan Matur’s enthralling visceral poems are among the most imaginatively potent being written anywhere in the world. She is one of the leading voices of a bold new women’s poetry emerging from the Middle East. Her award-winning poems describe a delicate space between concrete realism and mystical reflection, engaging with the struggles of the Kurdish people of Turkey. This new volume of her work presents poems from all stages of her career, with of some of her most acclaimed poems alongside works translated into English for the first time, and includes an afterword by poet Malika Booker.
