Translated by Natalia Bukia-Peters and the UK poet Jean Sprackland
Today’s podcast is dedicated to the poetry of Georgian Poet Diana Anphimiadi. Thanks to our working relationship with the translator Natalia Bukia-Peters the PTC has been translating Georgian poetry since 2013 when two of Diana’s poems May Honey and Tranquillity were translated at one of our collaborative workshops, then in 2018 Diana was part of our Georgian Poets tour alongside Salome Benidze.
Now the PTC with Bloodaxe Books has published Diana’s first full-length English Language collection entitled Why I No Longer Write Poems, with translations by Natalia Bukia-Peters and the UK poet Jean Sprackland. The book has received Creative Europe funding and a PEN translates award. Plus, Diana’s work was described as ‘gorgeous, fabulising verse’ by Fiona Sampson in The Guardian
In her introduction, translator Natalia says: Diana Anphimiadi’s paternal roots lie in Pontus, a historically Greek region on the southern coast of the Black Sea that once stretched form central Anatolia to the borders oft he Colchis in modern-day Turkey. Her mother is Georgian,
from the area known as Megrelia-Colchis, where the famous legends of the Golden Fleece, the Argonauts, Jason and Medea also originate. In this small area of the Caucasus, Georgian literature – and Georgian poetry, in particular, has always been of central importance and its legacy, the urgency of expression and narrative allusions, can be felt in Anphimaidi’s work
You will hear prayer before taking nourishment, one of several prayer-poems Diana has penned, Dance 3 / 4 time, not just a dance Diana tell us but an Erotic poem and Medusa on of serval poems where Anphidiadi gives voice to the women of Greek mythology.
