Mumbai | Poets Translating Poets Festival

Poets Translating Poets Festival takes place in Mumbai 25-27 November, on the theme of LANGUAGE | IMAGE | SOUND . The festival is the culmination of a two-year-long project initiated by the Goethe-Institut Mumbai along with the Goethe-Institutes in South Asia. A celebration of all things poetry, the festival features 20 Languages | 51 Poets | 187 Poems | 280 Translations The Poets Translating Poets Festival is a three day extravaganza, exploring ideas of diversity, identity, and multiculturalism through poetry, nudging at the boundaries between poetry and other forms of art, as well as a celebration of poetry in performance. The festival will create a platform for contemporary poets from South Asia – Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka – and Germany, featuring readings and the translation of each other’s works. In October 2014, the Poets Translating Poets project was initiated by the Goethe-Institut Mumbai along with the Goethe-Institutes in South Asia, and in collaboration with the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin / Haus für Poesie. The vision was to transcend boundaries of language and culture, through the act of translation and poetry. The project was aimed at creating a platform for poets from South Asia and Germany to translate each other’s works. Over the last year and a half, contemporary poetry from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka was translated into German by well-known German poets, and vice versa. This is the first time that contemporary German poetry has been translated into South Asian languages at such a scale and vice versa. The fruits of these ‘poetry encounters’ – the original poems and translations, as well as photos and audio recordings – are available online, on an extensive website that is documenting this project in order to make the work available freely and in the public domain www.goethe.de/ptp The culmination of this project is a celebration of all things poetry at the Poets Translating Poets Festival this November. A satellite festival is also being planned in Chennai immediately after the one in Mumbai, that will feature 15 of the 51 poets.