New Ethiopian Poetic Jazz by Girum Zenebe. “Hagere” is a beautiful poem by Gebre Kristo Desta.
“Hagere” is a beautiful poem by Gebre Kristo Desta. I wanted to emulate Ethiopian poetry, to get away from writing English-type poems about my childhood in Ethiopia, so I went online and found a website called Debteraw, run by Alemu and dedicated to Tsegaye Gebremedhin. It turned out to be a different Tsegaye Gebremedhin than the one I was looking for—Ethiopia’s poet laureate—but I got to know Alemu as a result!
Alemu Tebeje (AT): After that, we started translating poems together. The first poet whose work we translated was Bewketu Seyoum, whom Chris had met in Addis Ababa. We translated one of his poems, Kezaf Yetekeseme Zema, as Songs we learn from Trees, and we then started sending out our translations to different magazines, like Modern Poetry in Translation, and they were accepted. There were hardly any Ethiopian poems in English translation before this. I bought The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry, and there wasn’t a single Ethiopian poet in it.
I thought We’ve got to do something about this! A poem is not just the meaning. Some poems shout or cry, and it’s very difficult to convey the poet’s voice. I would have liked to have the Amharic original included in the anthology, or an accompanying CD. Many of the book’s poems were originally written in English, including Hama Tuma’s amazing poem Just a Nobody. But when you are translating, I think the most difficult thing is to capture the voice of the poet. Maybe we achieved that in a few cases, but I’m sure we haven’t in others. English just doesn’t sound like Amharic! We don’t have plosive consonants like km and up. Amharic also has the flexibility that inflected language gives you in rhyming and structuring the poem.
