Former Oregon Poet Laureate’s peace poem translated into 50 languages

Former Oregon Poet Laureate Kim Stafford wrote a “A Proclamation for Peace” poem several years ago. But today it has a new resonance. It’s been published in a new book, along with translations into more than 50 languages and notes from the dozens of translators who were involved. The poem appears in Arabic and Hebrew, Russian and Ukrainian, Tibetan and Mandarin, Tamil, Vietnamese, Polish, Yoruba, Yucatec Maya, and a host of other languages. It also includes QR codes that link to recordings of people reading the poem.

Stafford will convene a series of readings at local bookstores, starting with Annie Bloom’s Books in Portland in October. Stafford and his collaborator, fellow poet, editor and translator, Allison deFreese, join us to talk about the project.

Note: The following transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Former Oregon Poet Laureate Kim Stafford first published his poem, “A Proclamation for Peace,” in 2019. It has even more resonance these days with wars in Ukraine and Gaza. The poem has new life in a book that comes out today. It appears alongside translations into more than 50 languages and notes from its global translators. The project also includes recordings of the poem in each of these languages so we can hear the translations come alive. Kim Stafford collaborated on this book with the editor-translator and fellow poet Allison deFreese. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.

Kim Stafford: Good to be here.

Allison deFreese: Thank you, Dave.

Miller: Kim, first – I thought we could just start with the poem itself. The beginning of this for so many people around the world. Could you read us the English version?

Stafford: [Reading “A Proclamation for Peace” in English]

Whereas the world is a house on fire;

Whereas the nations are filled with shouting;

Whereas hope seems small, sometimes

a single bird on a wire

left by migration behind.

Whereas kindness is seldom in the news

and peace an abstraction

while war is real;

Whereas words are all I have;

Whereas my life is short;

Whereas I am afraid;

Whereas I am free - despite all

fire and anger and fear;

Be it therefore resolved

a song shall be my calling - a song

not yet made shall be vocation

and peaceful words the work

of my remaining days.

Miller: As I noted, you first published this poem five years ago now, before the full-scale war in Ukraine, before the war in Gaza. What prompted it?

Stafford: I was in a faculty meeting at work. We were talking about the budget, the faculty handbook and a lot of little administrative things. And I have a colleague from Afghanistan, Zahyar. He stood up at the meeting and he said, “The world is on fire and we are talking about this.” The meeting ground to a halt at that point. And that idea stuck with me. Zahyar grew up in a country that’s been devastated by war. So I started the poem with that idea – the world is a house on fire.

Miller: I mean, it sounds like you both related to his frustration and then wrote the poem as an answer to him?

Stafford: We’re overwhelmed by things we can’t change. And the thing to do as a human being is find something that you can do. So words, songs, connection, and then, through this project, the enhancement of words through translation. It is something we can do.

Miller: I’ve been struck by how this poem seems like a subversion of the form to me. I mean, humans in general, when we talk, we don’t use the word “whereas.” That’s the language of official proclamations by mayors who want to seem important and want to recognize some day, in the end. But you start with this “whereas,” with all these clauses. And then it turns into, what strikes me more as a resolution, a kind of New Year’s resolution. It’s bigger than that, but the realm of, “I’m going to dedicate myself, just my own single small person, to do this.” But it starts with the fancy language of a city.

Stafford: And our translators had some trouble with that. Allison can talk about this. Many were puzzled by this word “whereas.”

Miller: A lot of them … I mentioned this in my intro, that we have the notes from the translators in the back of the book. But Allison, can you give us a sense for what you heard, from the many people that you brought into this, about that word?

deFreese: This project grew out of an Oregon Society of Translators and Interpreters (OSTI) conference, “Words, A Pathway To Peace.” And really there are translators from all over the world. It’s been interesting. A number of the translations are from pre-colonial languages, languages of lesser diffusion, for example, the Yucatec Mayan translation. With the language coming from that background and culture, of course, a word like “whereas” isn’t there. But also words like “wire,” and just a lot of words that we take for granted today that didn’t exist in some of the older languages or original languages of the Americas.

Miller: Do you remember when you first heard this poem or read this poem?

deFreese: It grew out of an OSTI conference with the idea of passing a poem around the world. The conference last year had, already, translators and interpreters from every world region. It was an international conference. But yes, when I began reaching out to translators who I know, both in Oregon and, literally, around the world, there was just such an outpouring of love and support. So many translators and interpreters wanted to share Kim’s message of peace with the world. They began referring other translators and it just turned into such a positive project. As Kim has said, there’s so much we can’t change in the world. But this was something we could change using the tools we have, which was a knowledge of diverse world languages.

Miller: Let’s listen to one of the translations. It is in Bislama, a creole language that is the official language of Vanuatu. It was translated by the Oregonian Bob Hazen, with help from Marie-Therese Serveux. She is who we’re going to hear in this recording;

Marie-Therese Serveux: [Reading “A Proclamation of Peace” in Bislama]

Miller: There’s something really moving about that recording, an intimacy that comes from what I think is insects in the background. Why did you want to include recordings as part of this project?

Stafford: It was really an afterthought, Dave. It’s already pretty complex to get all these scripts. Proofreading was a challenge.

Miller: When you say “scripts” because, literally, on every page here, some of them are in letters that I recognize that are used in English. But many of them are in completely different alphabets.

Stafford: Classical Tibetan, for example. When the collaboration happens, it gets bigger than any one person can think of. And as Allison and I talked we thought what if we could hear these languages? And so we fiddled with QR codes and got them online, put a QR code in there. So you can take your camera and actually hear 43 of the 50 languages. And I feel that’s when the book comes to life.

Miller: Let’s hear another recording. This is in Gaeilge in the Irish language by Sinéad Quirke Køngerskov.

Sinéad Quirke Køngerskov: [Reading “A Proclamation of Peace” in Gaeilge]

Miller: In the notes that the translator wrote that are in the back of the book, it’s really fascinating. She says that there is a lot of inversion in the Irish language. So when you wrote, “The world is a house on fire,” it became, in her translation, “A house on fire is the world.” And then other lines that she has translated from her Gaeilge translation read, in English, “Now small is hope and but true is war” – so reversals of the way you wrote in English. What is it like to get these glimpses of different cultures in these different languages?

Stafford: I think the poem is getting better. We had an initial online sharing of the poem and ideas about translation. Many of the translators said, “Would it be all right if I said it this way?” And I said, “It’s a poem about freedom, be free.” I feel that my humble poem, Dave, has gone forth and produced 50 better poems across the world.

Miller: Allison, I was struck by a word I don’t think I’d ever encountered before. But a couple of the translators, in their notes at the end of the book, used it. They didn’t refer to what they did as translation. They talked instead about trans-creation. What does that word mean?

deFreese: You can only translate as well as you can write, to a certain degree. So these poems are translations of Kim’s work, but they’re also new creations because every word is different than it was in the real original poem. So yeah, Kim’s right. They’re also new creations in their own way. And another thing that Kim mentioned that I really appreciate about the book is the collaborative element. If you’re a translator, you are already collaborating, just as you collaborate with music if you’re in a band, just as you collaborate if you’re in the theater. So to a certain degree they are translations, but they’re also creations.

Miller: In that sense, I guess the argument that every translation is also, by definition, a trans-creation. There’s always something new about a work if you take it from one language to another?

deFreese: Right. Yes. Correct. And there are so many choices within that, as far as word choices. The English language has already been around as a language of commerce and as a market language for years. So in many cases, even if you were to rewrite this poem in English, there are a lot of different ways it could go.

Miller: But there isn’t an English translation of this, is there?

Stafford: Back in the seventies, I wrote a dissertation on translation.

Miller: I did not know that.

Stafford: I took a poem that was written [in] about 1400 [CE]. No one read it for 400 years. It was rediscovered in a book and it’s been translated from middle English to modern English 18 times. And I saw how those interpretations were all over the map. So the poem is transformed. The poem itself is a living being. It seeds itself in another language and then grows up independently.

Miller: Part of what we’re talking about here is universal to the world of translation. But the specifics of this poem, I wonder if they change it. We’re talking here about the most significant traumatic realities of war and the hope for peace. How do you think – Allison, first – that affected the work of the translators?

deFreese: Certainly, just going back to the title with the Proclamation. The French translation, “a proclamation” becomes “a declaration of peace.” “If we can declare war, why not peace.” The Vietnamese translation by Tram Bui mentions “a plea for peace.” And then in the translation into Tamil, “call for peace” becomes “the beat of a drum.” So within the cultural frameworks in which the translators are working, they adapted, very creatively, Kim’s words to convey the urgency of the message into a language in a cultural context that worked for them.

Miller: Let’s listen to part of one more translation. This is in Ukrainian. The translator and the reader who we’ll hear is Ilana Ianovska.

Ilana Ianovska: [Reading “A Proclamation for Peace” in Ukranian]

Miller: That was Ilana Ianovska. Kim, what was it like for you to get back some of these poems and languages that are being spoken in wars right now? There’s Ukrainian there, but there’s also Arabic and Hebrew in this book?

Stafford: I cried. I was so moved by hearing a human voice speak for peace in all these different languages. It was like the Tower of Babel turned inside out. I felt I could hear the poem in another language through the urgency of the reader’s voice

Miller: Turned inside out, because these were legible and they made sense, as opposed to a kind of a metaphor for cacophony that is confusion?

Stafford: Yeah, I felt if all birds sang the same song, it would be a boring world. And if all people spoke one language, we would be impoverished. And so to have a poem travel from one soul to another soul and then come forth in a new song is just, brings me joy.

Miller: I wonder if you could read one more poem. This is one that is at the end of this book and it’s called “Found in Translation.”

Stafford: When I wrote my dissertation, Dave, I was bedeviled by this idea that many critics have used poetry as what gets lost in translation. And that is such an insult to the translator. And so I thought, well, what is found in translation.

[Reading “Found in Translation”]

Miller: Kim Stafford and Allison deFreese, thank you both very much.

deFreese: Thank you for having me.

Stafford: Thank you, Dave.

Miller: Allison deFreese and Kim Stafford are the editors of this new book. It just came out today – “A Proclamation for Peace,” translated in world languages. It is 50 translations of a poem that Kim Stafford originally wrote and published about five years ago. They’re going to be doing readings around Portland later this fall, including on Tuesday, October 29 at Annie Bloom’s Books.

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