Birth Certificate

Notes

It was really fun to translate this new poem by Diana Anphimiadi, a much-loved poet published by the PTC, with Natalia Bukia-Peters and the workshop group in Newcastle. Unlike our regular open-to-all PTC workshops, this group was largely made up of Brown Girls Write members, a group for South Asian women writers facilitated by New Writing North. Many of the members had experience with other languages like Bangla, Urdu and Arabic - and though we did have a Georgian hip hop fan in the group, nobody had worked with Georgian before. Only one person had translated before. We had travelled up to Newcastle to get to know the writing community there, ahead of the PTC’s 20th birthday showcase at Newcastle Poetry Festival later this year.

In ‘Birth Certificate’ (an excellent title we kept from Natalia’s guide translation), we see the speaker deal impatiently with the uncertainty of where they came from. You’d think this should be a source of greater grief - the speaker acts as though it’s an annoyance. But only at the end of the poem do we learn that it’s precisely this uncertainty that has enabled the creative life of this speaker and, we suppose, Anphimiadi and all poets too. It becomes a bit of an ars poetica or manifesto.

A little gloss: we only realised a few lines in that the poem references lots of different creation myths - it begins with Eve being born of Adam’s rib, then Greek goddess Athena emerging fully-formed from Zeus’s forehead, Venus rising from the waves… it goes on. Anphimiadi is known for her work on Classical Greek mythology, so this made total sense.

When translating, we had to pay particular attention to tone: were we being too formal, or informal? How could we communicate, for instance, the geography of ‘on whose shore my house stands’ without being too wordy? We also had to make sure we got the details of the myths right, and translated them using recognisable terms in English. And we spent an inordinate amount of time debating capital letters: Georgian doesn’t have upper/lower case, so should ‘black sea’ be capitalised? What about ‘God’? How much did we want to bring in the Judeo-Christian monotheistic concept of the divine, as opposed to the Greek pantheon of gods and goddesses?

There’s little I love more than a heated argument about capitalisation. It means we’re all invested in the act of translation, all of us engaged in a great deal of serious, collaborative play. I hope you feel the spirit of that play when you read this poem.

- Helen Bowell, Poet-facilitator