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Accepted Paper:
Response-ability to poetry’s publics: translating Mohammed Ghassani in the United States
Meg Arenberg
(Rutgers University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will consider methodologies for response-able translation through the case of my own experience translating into English for a US-based publisher the Swahili language poetry collection N’na Kwetu (I Have a Home) by Pemba-born Tanzanian poet Mohammed Ghassani.
Paper long abstract:
Response-ability to Poetry’s Publics: Translating Swahili Poetry in the United States
This paper will consider methodologies for response-able translation through the case of my own experience translating into English for a US-based publisher the Swahili language poetry collection N’na Kwetu (I Have a Home) by Pemba-born Tanzanian poet Mohammed Ghassani. Drawing on specific examples and counter-examples from the poems themselves and in conversation with American poet and translator John Keene, among others, I will consider the risks and possibilities inherent in assimilating the politically weighty formal and linguistic choices of the poet within the context of Swahili literary convention and Zanzibari political history to the aesthetic norms of Anglo-American poetics and the generic expectations attached to the appellation “African Literature” within the specific racisms of US publishing.