Catalan Centre

The Poem

Juny

Shi Tao

Mai de la vida
aconseguiré esquivar el “juny”.
Juny: se m’hi va morir el cor
i se m’hi va morir el poema,
també l’estimada
hi va morir en un romàntic bassal de sang.

Juny: un sol abrusador m’esqueixa la pell
i revela l’abast veritable de la ferida.
Juny: el peix se’n va del mar de sang,
neda cap a una altre lloc on hivernar.
Juny: la terra es deforma i els rius baixen en silenci,
munts de cartes ja no troben per manera
d’arribar a mans dels morts.

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Translated to Catalan from Chinese by Manel Ollé. Traducció del xinès: Manel Ollé.
Read by David Figueres, member of the Writers in Prison Committee of Catalan PEN and actor.

Manel Ollé, sinologist and poet, is Professor of East Asia Studies at the Department of Humanities of Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. He has published collections of essays on China and has translated authors such as Gao Xingjian and Pu Songling into Catalan. He regularly contributes to Catalan, Spanish and international newspapers and magazines.

Catalan is a Romance language of the Western Romance language group. It is spoken in Catalonia (Spain) and in a vast area of its bordering regions, both in Spain and France.

Yunyu

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Translated to Tamazight by Salem Zenia.

Salem Zenia is a poet and novelist in the Tamazight language. An advocate of the Berber cause, he founded the magazine Racines/Iz’uran in 1998 to advance Berber literature. He has published books of fiction and of poetry, some of them translated into French and Catalan. Zenia is currently a Catalan PEN writer-in-asylum in the ICORN Refugee Writer’s Program.

Tamazight, also known as Berber, belongs to the Afro-Asiatic languages phylum. It is a group of closely related languages mainly spoken in Morocco, Algeria, Niger, Mali, Libya, in the entire Sahara region and the northern part of the Sahel. There is a strong movement among speakers of the closely related northern Berber languages to unite them into a single standard Tamazight.

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