Kate Armstrong: Scottish Poetry

Who am I?

No easy answer.

I wear several hats, or caps, sometimes simultaneously. I teach reading and writing to first-year students, poetry in English at all levels, post-colonial civilisations, and of course translation, to students in the postgraduate degree in translation that was set up in 1986 at the University of Liège I have been active in two European projects (apart from ARIANE), the Thematic Network Project in the area of Languages (sub-group Translation and Interpretation) and the European Module 'Translation in Action'. I translate literary and resolutely non-literary texts. As a scholar, I have also published two monographs and some 27 articles, both in the field of literary criticism and on translation, and I have edited three collections of essays.

I have translated poetry on a regular basis since 1984, first as 'standing translator English-French' for the European Poetry Festival in Louvain/Leuven. Some of my translations have been published in book form: The Visibility Trigger/Le détonateur de visibilité, by E.K. Brathwaite (Leuven, Leuvense Schrijversaktie, 1986), Terre et Paix, by Desmond Egan (Presses de l'Université de Lille, 1988, 35 out of the 78 pages of translation), Afrika/Afrique/Africa (50 pages out of 275, poems by Mazizi Kunene, Jack Mapanje, Sipho Sepamla and Taban lo Liyong, Leuvense Schrijversaktie, 1991), Poèmes du Pays de Galles : Sans moutons ni dragons (Anthology of contemporary Welsh poetry, editor Tony Curtis, Namur, Sources, 1994), La comète d'Halcyon, Poésie en Ecosse aujourd'hui (editor John Glenday, Namur, Sources, 1998. The next anthology in the same collection ('Poésie des régions d'Europe') is in preparation: Voix d'ailleurs, anthologie de poètes anglais des cinq continents.

Other translations of complete collections are ready and waiting for an interested publisher: Encore un nègre mort / Another Nigger Dead by Taban LoLiyong, DreamHaiti / RêvHaïti, by Kamau Brathwaite (video style poem), The Book of Balaam's Ass / Le livre de l'ânesse de Balaam by David Jones, La chanson de la violette, by John Glenday (poems on Magritte paintings).

Am I a poet?

This is a highly debatable question. I occasionally write poems in both French and English, but feel very deep down that this is something everybody can do: just allow sounds to shape into some sort of sense that echoes beyond or below the surface.

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Picture of woman:© Robert Atkinson

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