Get Your Foreign Friends to Read ‘Em To You

Along with my first ever full collection Tomorrow, We Will Live Here — November has seen a bunch of poems published in foreign magazines meaning you’ll be unlikely to read them. However, if you speak Turkish or Serbian, and have been dying to read my work — well, this is your lucky day!

This is all the outcome of the wonderful Word Express project which had me travelling in Serbia, Macedonia and Turkey earlier this month. The project involves dozens of excellent writers and translators who it has been a massive privilege to work with.

Many thanks to Milan Dobri?i? at Treci Trg who did the Serbian translations and to Efe Duyan &  Gokçenur Ç who did the Turkish work. And, of course, my deep appreciation for all the good people who put the Word Express project together.

If you visit the Word Express site you’ll find three short-shorts by  Alex Epstein (trust me, they won’t take long to read!) & Jasmina Topi?’s poetry in translation.

Here’s a run-down of where the work appeared:

November 2010: A translation of “A Raincoat, A Spell of Rain Ago” published in the Turkish magazine Akbük.

November 2010: Translations of “Babel” and “The Apartment” appear in the Turkish publication of the Word Express Anthology 2010

November 2010: Translations of “Untitled (Howe)”, “The Ocean I Call Mine”, “Window” & “Unfinished Rooms” appear in the Serbian magazine Treci Trg

And here’s a little video of me reading “The Apartment” at the  Nazim Hikmet Cultural Centre, Istanbul. This a wonderful bookshop, restaurant, cafe. If one is in Istanbul, one should find it. It reminded me of The Forest.

Ryan Van Winkle reads ‘Apartment’ from Literature Across Frontiers on Vimeo.