Read Harder Roc - Poems in Translation

This month’s two Read Harder challenge reading categories were A Book about Poetry Written in Translation on a Theme Other than Love and A Book You’ve Read Before.This post is about the poetry. We had estimated that this would be a harder category for most people, based on our own feelings about poetry, and we were right! 

So, all the members of the Read Harder Roc group had a hard time with the poetry. It was kind of difficult to find something in this unfamiliar genre, especially given the very specific kind of poetry that we needed. The librarian at one of my local libraries just pointed me to the poetry section and told me to "see what I could find." Nothing. I found nothing that day.

So, I asked an English proff friend of mine and she recommended an author. So, I read Song of a Prisoner by Okot P’ Bitek. This is the 3rd in a series of poems. I also read this little essay (also apparently translated) about the poem because I’ve been conditioned to believe that I won’t understand poetry. This is not something I am interested in changing. I liked the poem as much as someone who doesn’t read poems can like a poem about war and colonialism. 

 

Kristi read Poems from Guantanamo. There was a lot of dense preface to wade through but she ultimately liked it.

 

Sarah (at Sara Says Read) read a children’s book of poetry. I can’t remember the name. She’s thinking that reading a children’s book is “cheating” and she should read a second one, but I think that it’s impossible to cheat at your own goals! Well, maybe not impossible but it’s certainly hard. The rest of us thought it was a genius idea.

 

Shelley read View With a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems. She didn’t love it, but it seems that she didn’t hate it either. I actually think that’s all you can hope for from poetry. But I know other people like it. 

In general, I think we were mostly glad to get this task completed early and agreed that we would likely have missed this one altogether if not for the group. YAY, Book Groups!

See my other Read Harder Roc posts: