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As an English poet writing about my boyhood in Addis Ababa, I soon realized that
Shakespearean sonnets were not appropriate! I needed to find out about Ethiopian poetry and
literature, so that I could adapt some of their forms, wrap my English words in an Ethiopian gabi,
if you like. Only then could I get close to the feeling of being an English boy in Addis. So I
started Amharic evening classes at SOAS in London and, while waiting for my Amharic to
magically improve, I haunted the library looking for English translations of Ethiopian poetry and
novels.
What I found was that not much Ethiopian literature is available in English! There are a few
novels/short stories written in English, like Daniachew Worku's The Thirteenth Sun (1973) and
Hama Tuma's The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor and other stories (1993); also Nega
Mezlekia's memoir, Notes from the Hyena's Belly (2000); and more recently Dinaw Mengistu's
prize-winning novel Children of the Revolution (2007) and Maaza Mengiste's Beneath the Lion's
Gaze (2010). These are all well worth reading: I especially like Hama Tuma's mordant satire,
which is enough to shatter your rose-tinted spectacles about life in Ethiopia, even as you roar
with laughter! But where are the translations of contemporary authors writing in Ethiopian
languages in Ethiopia?
As for poetry, my main interest, I started with the religious form called q'ene, otherwise known
as Wax & Gold (Semenna Worq), that I read about briefly in Philip Marsden's Chains of Heaven.
Q'ene depend on double-meanings in Ge'ez so are obviously difficult to translate, but their
brevity and playfulness is the template for a lot of folk poetry and Azmari songs. A few
wonderful translations of folk poems are to be found in Jack Mapanje's Oral Poetry from Africa
(1983) and in Wole Soyinka's 1975 anthology Poems of Black Africa, which includes a beautiful
Ethiopian Love Song:
The Journal of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies is also rich in articles about, and examples of,
Ethiopian poetry, mostly from the early or mid 20th century: for example, George Savard's
translations of Afar warrior boasts, Werner Lange's translations of Kafa songs, and Enrico
Cerulli's version of a sensuous Oromo poem, Ox, which you may have heard on Poetry Please
on Radio 4 this August:
More recently, Alula Pankhurst has written a fascinating article on Jigger Flea poems (often in
the voice of the hated flea) and Prof. Fekade Azeze of Addis Ababa University has published a
seminal book on oral famine poetry from the 1980s, Unheard Voices (AAU Press, 1998):
As for written poetry, the late poet-laureate Tsegaye Gabre Medhin wrote some impressive
poems in English, notably Nile, which you can find on the internet. Solomon Deressa made
exciting translations of the artist/poet Gebre Kristos Desta in the 1960s, and Deressa himself
writes frequently in English (as well as French) - for example his wide-ranging poem/essay The
Poem and its Matrix. All these poems show an interest in experimental styles, influenced by
western literary movements, but are still fully engaged with Ethiopian social and political issues.
Deressa's Matrix, for example, is a plea for literary pluralism but political cohesion in post-Derg
Ethiopia: here English perhaps plays the negotiator with other Ethiopian languages for whom
Amharic is a whip-carrier. The Poetry Translation Centre in London (with Martin Orwin) has
also translated a wonderful poem by Mengistu Lemma, Longing, which is on their website:
When I was visiting Addis in 2007, I met the brilliant young poet and novelist Bewketu Seyoum.
Coming from a religious family in the countryside of Gojjam, his poetry has the concision of
q'ene with the social and emotional punch of oral poetry:
As my Amharic improves, I hope to Ethiopian poet and novelist Bewketu Seyoum reading from his work, In Search of
tackle other contemporary poets such as Fat, during the Poetry Parnassus festival held at London's South Bank Centre as
part of the cultural Olympiad.
Zewdu Milikit, Fekade Azeze, and Photo © Chris Beckett
Getnet Eneyew. There are magazines
here and in USA which are interested in publishing good translations of Ethiopian poetry and
fiction, such as Modern Poetry in Translation and Wasafiri (in which Fekade Azeze's poem
Addis Ababa is due to appear next spring). The Poetry Translation Centre at SOAS is also open
to working on Ethiopian poems, if anyone can supply literal translations (not only from Amharic
of course).
Even with my limited knowledge, it seems clear that contemporary Ethiopian literature and
poetry are full of a unique energy and vision. They really deserve to be better known outside
Ethiopia!