POTM Episode 19 – Poet to Poet Keijiro Suga and Sholeh Wolpe

Both Sholeh Wolpé and Keijiro Suga are noted translators of poetry. Suga is a scholar of poetic translation at Meiji University in Tokyo who regularly translates from French, English and Spanish into Japanese. Wolpé’s translations from Farsi into English (including influential Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, and the new translation of Attar’s Persian classic The Conference of Birds) have opened the rich tradition of Persian poetry to readers in English. In this discussion, hosted by Australian poet Melinda Smith, we asked them to speak together about the “art” of translating poetry