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Mercedes Belzú de Dorado was born in La Paz, Bolivia in 1835, and died in 1879 at the age of 44. She was the daughter of the general Manuel Isidoro Belzú, a one-time president of Bolivia, and the acclaimed Argentine novelist, Juana Manuela Gorriti. She was a writer, poet, and translator of varied works, including those authored by Víctor Hugo, Lamartine, and Shakespeare.

This Translation Tuesday, in honor of Mid-autumn Festival, we bring you five poems by the Chinese poet Ling Feng, in an immaculate translation by Jonathan Chen.

In 2022, the government of Tanzania began forcibly evicting thousands of Indigenous Maasai from 1,500 square kilometers, nearly 600 square miles, of their ancestral land to make way for elite tourism in the renowned Ngorongoro Conservation Area. A large group of Maasai recently blocked the road leading to Ngorongoro, protesting the evictions and denial of […]

Written by an unknown Guaraní poet.
Translated from the Spanish by Lina M. Ferreira C.-V.

Welcome to the second week of 100 Refutations. For one hundred days, we're publishing a daily poem from one of the countries recently denigrated by the president of the United States. Lina M. Ferreira C.-V., who conceived and compiled the series and translated many of its poems, has been working tirelessly on this enormous project, with the help of several collaborators, since the president’s comments in January. We're accompanying the daily poems with a weekly essay by Lina, and the second one is featured here.

Faraj Bayrakdar (b. 1951) is a renowned Syrian poet. He had been imprisoned by the Assad regime for almost fourteen years. Late Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury (1948-2024) took a key role in a campaign to free the poet.

The Buzuruna Juzuruna agroecology association travels around Lebanon in September to screen documentaries that poetically demonstrate the need for the Lebanese to preserve their environment.

This paper deals with the poetic debate engaged in by professional Palestinian poet-singers, primarily at traditional Palestinian weddings in the Galilee region.

Joaquín Pasos (1914-1947) was born in Granada, Nicaragua, studied law at the University of Managua, and was part of the Nicaraguan Movimiento de Vanguardia. He wrote plays, poems, and essays, and was occasionally incarcerated for his involvement in satirical work mocking the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García.

The ongoing discourse surrounding the repatriation of Naga ancestral human remains from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK, has sparked critical reflections among the Naga community.

BAOBAB FRUIT PICKING (OR DEVELOPMENT IN MONKEY BAY) (for Mary and David Kerr)

'We've fought before, but this is worse than rape!' In the semi-Sahara October haze, the raw jokes

Of Balamanja women are remarkable. The vision We revel in has sent their husbands to the mines

Of Jo'burg, to buy us large farms, she insists. But here, the wives survive by their wits & sweat:

Shoving dead cassava stalks into rocks, catching Fish in tired chitenje cloths with kids, picking

Baobab fruit & whoring. The bark from the baobab They strip into strings for their reed wattle,

The fruit they crack, scoop out the white, mix with Goat milk, 'there's porridge for today, children!'

The shell is drinking gourd or firewood split (They used to grate the hard cores into girls'

Initiation oil once). 'But you imported the Boers, Who visited our Chief at dawn, promising boreholes!'

These pine cottages on the beach shot up instead, some With barbed wire fences fifty yards into the lake!

(What cheek!) Now each week-end, the 'blighted-tomato- thighs in reeking loin-cloths' come, boating, grinning

At them baobab fruit picking. 'My house was right Here!' Whoever dares check these Balamanja dreamers?

source: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol8/iss1/11/

biobibliographical note: jack mapanje is a renowned poet from malawi

Juana Borrero was born in Havana in 1877 and died in Key West in 1896 at the age of nineteen. She was born into a family of intellectuals: her father and all her siblings wrote verses which were later compiled and published under the title Versos familiares.