Pupil wins first prize in national poetry contest
A Horsham pupil beat thousands of entries to win first prize in a national poetry translation competition.
Hannah Jordan, a yearten pupil at Christ’s Hospital, won the under-14 category of The Stephen Spender Prize 2020 with her translation of a Tamil poem and received her prize at a virtual ceremony on Wednesday, November 18.
The judges agreed that Hannah’s ‘thoughtfully translated’ poem And Yet – Our Tamil Life by Manushya Puthiran was a worthy winner, calling it ‘both funny and moving’, ‘boisterous, charming’ and ‘ a poem full of wisdom for our difficult times.’
One of the judges, Daljit Nagra, an award-winning poet and lecturer in creative writing at Brunel University, London, said: “I was delighted that a poem translated from Tamil became our winner, especially as this indicates the wide range of languages our winning entries came from.”
Hannah found the poem on a website, then worked with her mum on any tricky Tamil words then, in classic fashion, developed her literal version (what translators call a ‘trot’) into something more poetic, including, for example, the repetition of ‘And yet’ in each stanza.
She said: “One difficulty was making sure that the poem sounded funny in English yet kept the specific Tamil problems in the translation.”
Hannah described in the commentary that accompanied her entry how she liked the poem because it was so true to her experience of life in India.
She said: “When we visit my family are constantly fixing things for my grandparents. As soon as we arrive, my dad puts together a long list of all the things that need fixing; inevitably, when we return, there is another list, yet we all get by just fine, even if the monsoon winds blow through the gaps in the wall.”
Hannah continues a great tradition of poetry translation at Christ’s Hospital; many of the school’s students have had success in the competition in recent years, translating from a host of different languages, including Japanese, Swedish, Russian, Swahili and Modern Greek, among others, which reflects the school’s diversity.
Visit https://youtu.be/ kaq7ESAa16s so see Hannah read her poem at 16:37.