Nineteen Ways of Looking at Awono - by Georgina Collins (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This unique anthology centres around a poem by award-winning Cameroonian writer, Jean-Claude Awono - Le Poème de Yambacongo - and nineteen very distinct translations of that poem from across the globe. Inspired by 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger, this collection highlights the diversity of Englishes in existence worldwide, with each translator rendering Awono's poem in their own form of English including Nigerian Pidgin, Jamaican Creole, Shetlandic, and "Sesotho-fied" English. Others show the diversity in so-called standard English, with every translator speaking in their own idiolect, taking a personal approach to rewriting the poem; some more literal, others adaptive, proving that no translators work in the same way, always influenced by their background and life experiences.

Translations by Aileen Ruane, Alyssa Salzberg, Bonnie Chau, Christine De Luca, Elizabeth (Betty) Wilson, Georgina Collins, JK Anowe, Jean Anderson, John T. Gilmore, Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Khadijah Sanusi Gumbi, Maneo Mohale, Mary Noonan, N. Kamala, Nfor E. Njinyoh, Prudence Lucha, Rohan Ayinde, Sarah Ardizzone, Sophie Herxheimer and Stephanie Smee.

Dr Georgina Collins is a Freelance Literary Translator, Writer, and Literary Translation Consultant at the University of Bristol. She also runs her own ceramics studio, Iremía Pottery in Warwickshire, England. Collins has an MA and PhD from Warwick University and has worked as a Lecturer in Translation Studies at the Universities of Glasgow and Warwick. Georgina is passionate about poetry and in 2007, she produced the first ever French-English bilingual collection of Francophone African women's poetry, entitled The Other Half of History. The foreword was written by Kadija Sesay. Collins has also translated the poetry of Jean-Claude Awono and Senegalese author Mame Seck Mbacké for Modern Poetry in Translation (2021; 2016), as well as the activist poetry of French writer Laura Boullic for Active Art (Paraguay Press, 2019). In 2021, Collins took third place in the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation with another text by Awono. Georgina has published a number of academic and professional articles on the translation of Francophone African texts and in 2022, she judged the Scott Moncrieff Prize (from the Society of Authors and Translators Association) for literary translation from French. She has translated the literary works of West African writers such as Sokhna Benga and Felwine Sarr (both from Senegal) as well as translated books by French writers such as Monica Sabolo and Lauren Bastide for Macmillan and Penguin respectively. In 2013, Georgina won a joint English Pen Award for Writing in Translation for her contribution to Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus (I.B. Tauris).