Goethe Zentrum Hyderabad and Hyderabad Literary Fest brought ‘Poets Translating Poets’, a pioneering project that introduces German poetry, yet largely unknown in South Asia for the first time to the region, encompassing a diversity of regional languages from Karachi to Colombo.
Likewise, contemporary poetry from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka will be translated in German by well-known German authors in collaboration with our partner, Literaturwerkstatt Berlin. The project involves approximately fifty poets and comprise of almost 18 different languages.
About the project:
The project is about promoting the local and linguistic diversity of cultural expression in the
subcontinent, mirrored in German translation. In the participating countries, especially in Germany, the Goethe-Institut and Literaturwerkstatt Berlin, in collaboration with their South Asian partners, have assumed the role of initiators of the poetry translation.
This project aims to create a platform for poets from Germany and South Asia. Poets from Germany meet poets from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The languages covered include Hindi, Urdu, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, English, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, Sinhala, Sindhi and many more. Although the encounter is based on extremely varied cultural, artistic, historical and political differences, it will initiate new spaces of interaction and communication.
