Poetry Extra: Mother Tongue

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BBC Radio 4 Extra

Poetry Extra

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Weekly opportunity for listeners to revisit the riches of the BBC radio poetry archive

A brand new poetry slot on Radio 4 Extra gives listeners a weekly opportunity to revisit the riches of the BBC radio poetry archive

Poetry Extra: Mother Tongue - Lost and Found

Mother Tongue - Lost and Found

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Poetry Extra, Mother Tongue - Lost and Found

Daljit Nagra chooses the best programmes from the BBC's poetry archive.

Daljit Nagra chooses Mother Tongue - Lost and Found with Imtiaz Dharker who explores exciting voices from around the world.  From 2019.

Daljit Nagra revisits the BBC's poetry archive and selects Mother Tongue - Lost and Found.  

Poet Imtiaz Dharker hears poems written in Persian, Korean and Torwali - an endangered language, indigenous to Pakistan. 

Starting with the phrase "Lost and Found", she reflects on how ideas of memory, loss and preservation have inspired these poets.

Imtiaz speaks to Azita Ghahreman, an Iranian poet now living in Sweden.  

Her poems address themes of loss and exile, drawing on experiences of Iran’s book-burning years and tender memories of family and her childhood. The poems featured are from her collection Negative of a Group Photograph, with the English versions read by the translator, poet Maura Dooley. They were paired by the Poetry Translation Centre. Elhum Shakerifar produced the literal translations.

Kim Hyesoon is South Korea’s leading poet. 

Her latest collection, Autobiography of Death, is an intense and startling sequence of poems, representing the forty-nine days during which, according to Buddhist belief, the spirit roams after death. She was driven to write them by the anger she felt at the deaths from the sinking of the Sewol ferry in South Korea, in 2014.  Imtiaz speaks to Kim Hyesoon along with the translator, poet Don Mee Choi.

Finally, we hear poems in the Torwali language, an indigenous language from the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan which appears on UNESCO’s list of endangered languages. 

Activist Zubair Torwali has collected several hundred ancient Zo poems from local elders, as part of his work to preserve and revive the Torwali language. We hear from British poet Chris McCabe, who has translated some of them and has edited an anthology of poetry in endangered languages, Poems from the Edge of Extinction, in which they appear.

Producer:  Caroline Hughes

A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4, first broadcast in September 2019.

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