Rights to Speak

Abstract

Vignette Around the time I was preparing to write this commentary, I attended a poetry event in Glasgow celebrating Palestinian poetry. Due to unforeseen circumstances I was asked to step in and read the English translations, unprepared, in place of a distinguished Scottish poet/translator, alongside a Palestinian poet, Iyad Hayatleh, who read Arabic originals from an anthology followed by his own poems in the language and then a short story he had written in English. The anthology contained poems from a range of Palestinian poets with translations into Standard English with occasional Scots English expressions (e.g. ‘two wee hands’) and into Scots and Gaelic and Shetlandic. All the translations I in fact read were into this occasionally Scots-inflected Standard English. Iyad read from the anthology in the first part of the reading, and I read the English translations in my southern English accent. So far, so conventional. In the second part of the reading, however, it turned out that Iyad’s poems in Arabic were to be followed by his own translations of them into English. At this point it seemed to me rather odd that I should be reading Iyad’s own translations. So when he had finished reading the first poem and handed the manuscript over to me to read, I suggested to him that he should read the English (there having been no time before the reading to plan this). At this point, however, he indicated that he would rather not, so I carried on reading the English. After this Iyad went on to read his short story, which is an account of his experience of seeking asylum, his reading in English creating a very powerful effect in the room.