La vocación de San Mateo by Juan de Pareja
By a long way, most of the work that I pour into this project goes rather surreptitiously into the library of poetry anthologies found under the title “The Best Poems of All Time”. It is an active labour that will probably never be finished. So far I have published anthologies in English, Swedish, French, Italian and, most recently, Spanish. Should you be somewhat proficient in any of those, then I highly encourage you to explore the wealth that they contain.
I really want this project to be seen as a multilingual one because I believe that a love of poetry and multilingualism go hand in hand, and that one of the healthiest and most rewarding activities that any lover of poetry can engage with lies in exploring the poetic inheritance of languages that are not their own. For aspiring poets not least, acquainting yourself with the forms and poetic devices in other tongues will inform how you can play with and manipulate forms and words in your own. More importantly still, realising that your own culture, your own history and your own perspectives are not centre-stage is as humbling as it is enriching, because it opens your mind and your heart to the knowledge and experiences of humanity as a whole.
Owing to the global dominance of English in politics, education and not least, popular media, I have even met people who have come to view English as a superior medium of communication, and that whatever has been produced in other languages is therefore of a somewhat compromised value.
…Petty Anglophone, where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation…?
Take only the Spanish anthology that I most recently published. Consider the fact that poetry has been written in that vernacular for over a thousand years. Consider the fact that there are more native speakers (and therefore, poets) of Spanish than there are those of English. Consider that poetry written in the Spanish language might be as vast and as wealthy as any produced in the western world.
…Petty Anglophone, where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation…?
Because relying on translation will simply not do the job. Why? Well, on the one hand, the vast majority of works written in Spanish (or any other language for that matter), have simply not been translated into English. One might very well find handsome translations of Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, and Saint John of the Cross… but, well, not that much more if I have to be honest.
Therefore, even the most erudite monolingual will only gain glimmerings of the poetic treasures of other languages if he or she can only rely on the filter of his or her own tongue to access them. Anyone who is capable of reading poetry in more than one language will realise that transliterating the qualities of the original is always an enterprise of avoiding inevitable shortcomings. While I strongly encourage the translation of poetry (one cannot learn every language out there–and I grieve at the fact that I will in all likelihood never gain direct access to the wealth of Persian, Chinese or Akkadian literature), when one takes into account the metrical cadence proper to each and every language as well as the semantic and symbolic meaning these impute onto themselves, the task of the translator can only appear a somewhat impossible one.