3 days, 14 venues
Featuring 100 poets,
speakers and performers from 5 countries
The Goethe-Institut /
Max Mueller Bhavan is organising its own Poetry Festival, Poets Translating
Poets from 25-27 November 2016 – a first in the Institute’s sixty-year history.
The Poets Translating
Poets Festival in Mumbai is planned as the concluding event of the Poets
Translating Poets project. It presents the results of an arduous translation
process between poets from South Asia (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka)
and their counterparts from Germany. Fifty-one poets participated in one-week
encounters across nine cities on the subcontinent – Mumbai, Dhaka, Colombo, New
Delhi, Trivandrum, Karachi, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Gangtok in 2015-2016. This
is a unique venture, which has transcended language barriers, and built bridges
between entirely diverse poetry traditions and cultural codes.
On Nov 25th, the first
day, the Festival throws its arms open to the city of Mumbai. Poets will
negotiate local cabs and buses to get to various tea stalls all over the city
and read poetry with other PTP poets, Mumbai-based poets, and also give an ear
to spontaneous readings by the audiences in the Mumbai Tea Party. We end the
day with the festival opening with conversations and a concert featuring
Liederabend with Benjamin Appl and Simon Lepper, at Tata Theatre, NCPA, Mumbai.
Nov 26th, the second
day of the Festival, is dedicated to Poetry of Resistance and Peace,
celebrating India's Constitution Day. The programme will include readings,
discussions, film screenings and
workshops around poetry of resistance, poetry across borders, aesthetics and
resistance, poetry in conflict zones, Urdu and Bengali poetry, poetry after
peace and more. With a special screening of Amar Kanwar's A Night of Prophecy,
and panels led by Ranjit Hoskote, Kaiwan Mehta, Arunava Sinha, Arundhati
Subramaniam, Nabina Das, Dr. Thomas Wohlfahrt, the day promises to be full of
raging thought. The day ends with a collaborative concert, Ulrike+ALIF on
Scratch Tap, featuring poetry and music in Kashmiri, Urdu, Hindi and German at
the wonderfully grungy Edward Theatre.
On Nov 27, we close
the Festival by showcasing poetry's romance with other arts - music, theatre
and visual arts. Watch performance presentations in theatre, music and visual
arts with Gerhard Falkner, Atul Dodiya, Kamini Sawhney, Swanand Kirkire,
Nicolai Kobus, Harish Meenashru, Christian Filips, Sunil Shanbag, Danish
Husain, Denzil Smith, Adil Manuel, Manoj Shah, Mamta Sagar, Sharmistha Saha,
Vasu Dixit and many others. There will be multilingual poetry readings by
children and adults, sessions on spoken word, open mics and workshops on
performance poetry and poetry and image. As we head towards dusk, we fuel our
thoughts with a lecture by Prof Ganesh Devy, the man renowned as the one out to
map the world's linguistic diversity, this is followed by a closing discussion
with festival director Dr. Martin Wälde, Deutsche UNESCO representative Prof.
Dr. von Welck, and author Kiran Nagarkar, with renowned sociologist Prof Dr.
Surendra Munshi. As a closing concert we bring the jazz group MELT Trio from
Berlin, who will feature poetry and interpretations of poems by Nicolai Kobus
and Rochelle D'Silva in their performances, at the famed quad of St Xavier’s
College.
The Festival ensures
that Poets Translating Poets would be presented across Mumbai, the poets are
visiting 11 colleges and schools across Mumbai, to conduct workshops and
present readings and lectures in the OUTREACH Programme. The Festival has also
partnered with poetry clubs and community centers to present a month of ‘Poetry
Across the City’ all through November. Additionally, young poets in the city
are also being encouraged to present their poetry in ‘Open Mics’ hosted at the
Festival venues. A masterclass and four workshops, which are free for
participants, are being organised and held at various art galleries in the city
including ARTISANS’, TARQ and Mumbai Art Room.
Poets Translating
Poets is a two-year-long project initiated in October 2014 by the
Goethe-Institut Mumbai along with the Goethe-Instituts in South Asia, and in
collaboration with the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin / Haus für Poesie and in
cooperation with Deutsche UNESCO, with an aim to create a platform for poets
from South Asia and Germany to translate each other’s works.
The Festival is being
organised with the support of numerous partners and supporters including venue
partners – National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), Chhatrapati Shivaji
Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), St. Xavier’s College and Edward Theatre.
The newly formed “Goethe-Institute India German Business Circle“ including nine German companies -Siemens,
Volkswagen, Hamburg Süd, Lanxess, TÜV, Rheinland, BASF and Thyssenkrupp, and numerous
educational, art, poetry, cultural and community institutions and groups in
Mumbai.
To view the full
festival program, and for details on all Poets, Speakers, Performers please
visit
http://www.goethe.de/ins/in/lp/prj/ptp/dfe/enindex.htm.
