Randi Ward’s translation of work by Faroese writer Kim Simonsen was recently selected for inclusion in the 2020 TRANSPOESIE Poetry Festival in Brussels, Belgium. The poetry festival is organized by EUNIC, the European Union National Institutes for Culture. The project was launched in the autumn of 2011 to mark the European Day of Languages and Linguistic Diversity, which is celebrated throughout Europe each year on September 26th.
This year’s TRANSPOESIE showcases poets from 26 countries and regions sharing poetry in their native languages alongside translations in French, English, and Dutch. Some poems are currently featured on posters in the trams, buses, and metro around Brussels in order to give the public a unique and creative experience of Europe’s languages and literary talent.
Kim Simonsen, who comes from the village of Strendur in the Faroe Islands, has authored five books and also serves as the chief editor of Forlagið Eksil, a publisher of Faroese literature. Simonsen’s TRANSPOESIE 2020 poems were excerpted from his collection What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium?. The collection was published in 2013 and received the Faroe Islands’ National Book Award for poetry, the M.A. Jacobsen’s Virðisløn, the following year.
Ward, a poet, translator, and photographer from West Virginia, USA, became acquainted with Simonsen’s work while she was pursuing her MA in Cultural Studies at the University of the Faroe Islands. Her translations of his poetry have since appeared in Stanford University’s annual literary journal, Mantis, as well as Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages. Ward also received a grant from the Faroese Cultural Foundation this summer to continue her translation of Simonsen’s award-winning poetry. This is the second time that her translations of Faroese literature have been selected for the TRANSPOESIE Poetry Festival in Brussels.
An abridged version of this staff report was originally published in The Parkersburg News and Sentinel.