In this Armistice centenary year, Hay Festival invited poets from countries involved in the Great War to respond to poets and poems from their own cultures of the time. Performed in
a special Armistice Poetry Gala earlier this year, the poems have today (Sunday 11 November) been released digitally on the festival's
Facebook,
Instagram and
Twitter channels.
Six poets took part in the project, with Welsh poet
Owen Sheers responding to Wilfred Owen's 'Sonnet, to a Child';
Mererid Hopwood responding to poems by Ellis Humphrey Evans; German writer
Ulrike Almut Sandig responding to Wilhelm Lehmann's 'An meinen Sohn'; Austrian poet
Evelyn Schlag responding to Georg Trakl's 'Grodek'; Indian poet
Tishani Doshi responding to letters from Kala Khan; and Canadian writer
Margaret Atwood responding to John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields'.
Peter Florence, director of Hay Festival, said: "In 2018, when the need to understand other nations and languages is again immediate, in Europe and across the world, we invited poets from other countries involved in the Great War to respond to poems from their own cultures of the time. We are deeply honoured that Margaret Atwood, Tishani Doshi, Mererid Hopwood, Valerie Rouzeau, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Evelyn Schlag, Owen Sheers and Maria Stepanova took part. The voices from Canada, India, Wales, France, Germany, Austria and Russia articulate other, richly different realities that meet us with familiarity, compassion and a shared anguish."
A digital book of the poems will be released later in the year.
Watch
the full Hay Festival Armistice Poetry Gala again on Hay Player here.
Find out more information
here.