Right now in April 2022 the PTC has just released our latest World Poets Series Book ‘To Love a Woman’ by Argentinian poet Diana Bellessi, translated by Leo Boix. So this week we are taking a little thematic inspiration and playing you four poems about desire written by female poets.

You will hear 'Make Me Drunk with Your Kisses' by Maria Clara Sharupi Jua from Equador, translated from Shuar by Nataly Kelly and The Poetry Translation Workshop, 'Cat Lying in Wait' written in Dari by Shakila Azizzada from Afghanistan and translated by Zuzanna Olszewska with the poet Mimi Khalvati, 'The Lost Button' by Fatena Al-Gharra from Palastine, translated from the Arabic by Anna Murison and Sarah Maguire and 'Taste' by Ash Lul Mounamd Yusif translated by Said Jama Hussein with Claire Pollard. Remember to do as the Somali women would at the live readings and chant along to the repeating lines.

Say it- "If he's not to your taste, he's just a blocked path!"

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.

Welcome to the Dual Poetry Podcast’s department of births deaths and marriages.

Reflecting our remit, the  department of births deaths and marriages will be playing you three poems reflecting these three themes:

The Caesarean of Three Continents by Corsino Fortes from Cape Verde

Death of a princess by Gaarriye from Somalia &

the married woman by Adelaide Ivánova from Brazil

The start of the new year suggested a podcast about fresh beginnings, renewal and rebirth. But this, of course, is impossible as all poems are about death, or if not death, perhaps poems are simply about poetry, about form.

The idea that all poems are about death comes from Tom Boll, a Spanish Translator and lecturer who was once my boss at the PTC. He found that picking a poem to read at a wedding was near impossible because even love poems contain within them the seed of love’s withering.

It’s easy to think there is meaning on one side and form on the other but its never so neat and a poem tends to meld these two stands lightly together like the curing phosphate backbones of a DNA double helix. As the translation process itself often demonstrates, you ask a question about form and you will get an answer about meaning.