Day Thirty

We’ve made it, everyone! Today is the last day of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2016! Congratulations to everyone who had made it through the month. And if you didn’t get all the way to thirty poems, don’t worry! You can always play catch-up, or try again in 2017.

I’ll be keeping the participants list up for a while, but I’m also planning to do a redesign of the website for 2017. If you have ideas on how to make the site more user-friendly and useful overall, please drop me a line at napowrimo-AT-gmail-DOT-com!

Our final featured participant is My Own Garden of Verse, where the “I remember” poem for Day 29 catalogs a host of sensory memories.

And now for our last poet in translation, Mexico’s Dolores Dorantes. Now living in the United States, Dorantes spent twenty-five years in Ciudad Juarez, and her poems interrogate the intersection between violence and gender. You can find a number of her poems at the link above, and bilingual editions of several of her books are available, including sexoPUROsexoVELOZ//Septiembre, Style, and her collaboration with Rodrigo Flores Sanchez, INTERVENIR/INTERVENE.

And now our prompt (still optional!) Because we’ve spent our month looking at poets in English translation, today I’d like you to try your hand at a translation of your own. If you know a foreign language, you could take a crack at translating a poem by a poet writing in that language. If you don’t know a foreign language, or are up for a different kind of challenge, you could try a homophonic translation. Simply find a poem (or other text) in a language you don’t know, and then “translate” it based on the look or sound of the words. Stuck for a poem to translate? Why not try this one by Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska? Or here’s one by another Laureate, Tomas Transtromer. Happy writing!