The Thursday Post: Station to Station

It feels good to have my feet back on Scottish soil as I’ve been dashing about recently, with trips to Malta, Russia and Norway.  The trip to Malta was to visit the Inizjamed: Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival 2016.  This festival is one of the 16 partners in the Literary Europe Live (LEuL) platform which we are part of, and it was wonderful to visit to see how they run their week of intensive translation workshops with poets writing in many different languages. The workshops culminate in a splendid outdoor festival that features each of these poets reading their original poetry and the other poets reading the translations they have created. 

Taking place in a fort by the sea, the first night was nearly washed away by one of the most sudden and violent storms I have ever experienced and which resulted in books from book stalls being tossed by chains of people to safety and soaked poets and audience members running for cover wherever they could find it.  The Inizjamed team had great emergency measures in place in the form of other rooms within the fort set up with seats and stages, so the readings went ahead and luckily the rest of the festival was dry and able to take place under the stars.

My trip to Russia was thanks to a project we are working on with the British Council and the Edwin Morgan Trust to celebrate the UK-Russia Year of Language and Literature 2016 and the global Shakespeare Lives programme commemorating the 400th anniversary of his death.  I had the privilege of facilitating translation workshops with Scottish poets Christine De Luca, Jen Hadfield and Stewart Sanderson and our three Russian poet partners; Marina Boroditskaya, Grigorii Kruzhkov and Lev Oborin.  We worked for three concentrated days at the Dostoevsky Library in Moscow, and were beautifully looked after by our wonderful colleagues from the British Council.  We were also joined by translators Rose France and Anne Stokes.  Rose assisted us by supplying the literal translations of the poems into each language for the poets to work from, and Anne was observing and advising as she is currently researching this process of workshop translation. 

We read the poems and translations at events in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and I was impressed by the enthusiasm and engagement of the Russian audiences.  Each event was packed  – standing room only, and running at 1.5 to 2 hours each, I wasn’t sure if the audience members would stay the course but their attention never wavered, and their responses were joyful.  It really felt as if we had built bridges between the poets and the literatures of the two countries, and we are delighted that the Russian poets will be coming to visit us in Scotland next year for the second half of the exchange.

Then it was off to Oslo in Norway for a wee holiday, though with the marathon on (we had no idea!) it turned out that it was more like an obstacle course navigating the city than a relaxing stroll, however we especially enjoyed trips to Bygdøy to see the Viking ships and to the extraordinary Vigeland Park to wonder at the statues there.

After all that travel, I’m happy to say that I plan to keep my feet firmly planted on the ground in Scotland for the foreseeable future and as we have so many international poets in the Autumn Programme at the Scottish Poetry Library this year, I’ll be celebrating the fact that they are coming to us rather than the other way around.  I hope you’ll join us for a cornucopia of languages and cultures; read more about it and book your tickets here.

Jennifer Williams
Programme Manager