A World Created by the Powerful
They say “come here! go there!” with a gunto emphasize their words“just drive me, please!” they saymixing polite and threateningbecause they like to blur distinctions — the powerfulyes, life itself is a cold draughtbut once upon a time our earth was ours one unit, wholenot cut up in a thousand piecesnot spoiled like she is nowbefore things got so messed up she was just herselfand hugged us all no matterif our skin was black or white
Feature Date
- August 20, 2020
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- Translation
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“A World Created by the Powerful” from SONGS WE LEARN FROM TREES
Carcanet Press, Manchester, England
Translation Copyright © 2020 by Alemu Tebeje & Chris Beckett
from the Amharic original by Seifu Metaferia
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Seifu Metaferia is a fearless but soft-spoken writer and poet, a pioneer of the teaching and research of oral literature including children’s poetry in Ethiopia. He was removed from his post as professor of literature at AAU for political reasons in the early 1990’s and not re-instated until two years ago. His poetry is so wide-ranging it is hard to sum up, but there is a thread of humour and compassion, a focus on humble individuals, which humanise his steely-eyed explorations of truth and power. His much-loved collection of poems, Wistet, is titled with Seifu’s made-up word meaning ‘the deep inside’.
Alemu Tebeje is an Ethiopian journalist, poet, lyric writer and human rights campaigner who left Ethiopia in the early 1990s and now lives in London, close to Grenfell Tower. He runs the website www.debteraw.com and his poems have been published in Amharic, Chinese and English, as well as being projected on buildings in Denmark, Italy, USA and UK by the international US artist, Jenny Holzer. He has published one collection of poems, Greetings to the People of Europe! (Tamrat Books, 2018), which includes the script of a sketch commissioned by BBC Radio 4 for its migrant re-imagining of Homer’s Odyssey, My Name is Nobody.
Chris Beckett was born in London but grew up in Ethiopia in the 1960s. He has published two collections with Carcanet, Ethiopia Boy in 2013 and Tenderfoot in July 2020. His translations of contemporary Ethiopian poets have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, PN Review, The Missing Slate and Asymptote Journal. With Alemu Tebeje, he translated and edited Songs We Learn from Trees, the first ever anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry in English, published by Carcanet in May 2020. Sketches from the Poem Road (after Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North), a collaboration with his partner, the Japanese painter and sculptor Isao Miura, was published by Hagi Press in 2015 and shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. He is a trustee of the Anglo-Ethiopian Society and the Poetry Society.
An Anthology of Ethiopian Amharic Poetry
This is the very first anthology of Ethiopian poetry in English, packed with all the energy, wit and heartache of a beautiful country and language. From folk and religious poems, warrior boasts, praises of women and kings and modern plumbing; through a flowering of literary poets in the twentieth century; right up to thirty of the most exciting contemporary Amharic poets working both inside and outside the country.
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