Tag Archives: Indigenous
From Ocean to Ocean, a Translator’s Note by Jean Anderson
Jean Anderson offers a reflection on her translations of Marie Tamole Keletaona’s poetry in memory of her home island of Futuna.
Expanding Translation Routes in the Caribbean: Music, Memory, and the Sea in Alecia McKenzie’s “Marins désarmés/Unarmed Mariners” and Daniel Thaly’s “Looting Hummingbirds”
The recent publication of Jamaican writer Alecia McKenzie’s Marins désarmés/Unarmed Mariners (Vieux-Habitants, Guadeloupe: Atlantiques déchaînés, 2025) alongside Dominican poet Daniel Thaly’s Looting Hummingbirds (London & Trafalgar, Dominica: Papillote Press, 2026) offers an opportunity to reflect on contemporary Caribbean poetry’s engagements with mobility, memory, and translation. While distinct in form and emphasis, both collections are bilingual, pairing each source text with a parallel translation: McKenzie’s collection presents English poems alongside French translations by C. and S. Renard, whereas Thaly’s selected poems present French texts alongside English translations by Mark Andrews and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, who also co-edited the volume.
Coral Relation: Reading translated excerpts from Denis Pourawa’s “Our Coral Soul”
Denis Pourawa is a Kanak (Indigenous) writer born in 1974 in Nouméa, the capital city of Kanaky/New Caledonia, a French-speaking archipelago situated close to Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia in the Pacific Ocean. In 2003, he wrote his first children’s book; since, he has published (and performed) in a variety of literary genres, including poetry, theatre, short essays, and slam poetry. A member of the Mérénémé tribe, Pourawa’s work is influenced by his childhood memories, Kanak tradition, and his first encounter with “occidental thinking” through literature, which encouraged him to dedicate his life to the arts.