In our last workshop we translated two short poems by two poets from Afghanistan, Pir Muhammad Karwaan and Parween Faiz-Zadah Malaal, who write in Pashto. The literal versions of the poems were translated for us by Dawood Azami.

This was the first time we translated from Pashto and it was a particularly interesting workshop. Although the two poems were short, it took us nearly three hours to translate them! This was because it was hard to find workable English equivalents for many of the ideas and concepts in the originals as our societies and traditions are so different.

In the UK, to give a small example from 'Like a Desert Flower', we don't need to irrigate crops, so we don't have a word for crops that are cultivated but not irrigated.

And we had a long discussion about gender in relation to the title of 'Flowers and Man'; 'Man' here means people in general, not men as such. Some workshop participants felt that using 'Man' was sexist and exclusionary; others that the alternatives, such as 'humans' or 'people' sounded feeble in English. We would of course be interested to know what you think.