Polyglossia 2017

Oh youthful hero, King Charles,
Amongst the smoke he stands.
Sword in hand he charges,
Attacking battled lands.
“Oh, how Swedish steel bites,
Let us show our stature.
Move aside, Muscovites,
With bravery and uniforms’ azure.”
And one to ten they stood,
Against angered Vasa’s son.
They fled, those who could,
That was his lesson done.
Three kings united haughtily,
Who sought to lead him asunder.
Against Europe he stood calmly,
A beardless god of thunder.
Gray-haired statesmen with plots to invoke,
Hurriedly form their treasonous act.
The courageous young hero spoke
One word and their snares cracked.
Full-bosomed, slender, and hair of gold,
A new Aurora came without delay.
The twenty-year-old with a warrior’s mould
Turned her unheard away.
There a great heart was beating,
From his Swedish chest.
In joyfulness and in grieving,
Justice he loved the best.
In times of success and challenge alike,
His triumph unmatched,
He resisted defeat with disgust and dislike,
He knew not when to detach.
See the glow of the stars of heaven
Over a grave so ancient.
Covering the bones of a legend,
Lies a century’s moss patient.
His tale of glory fades into reverie
And has begun to fade.
In the frozen North, his memory
Is left without parade.
Yet to the story one listens
To the venerable saga-land
And the sounds of dwarves are silenced
When the giant takes his stand.
Nevertheless, among Nordic forests
A high spirit does remain.
He is not dead, just asleep and glorious,
His force he still retains.
Kneel, Sweden, by his grave,
Your greatest son lies there.
Read his memorial filled with fray,
His heroic tale in his lair.
The bloody head rises,
There to learn history.
Swedish honor without vices,
Her banner of victory.
Extract from
I, too, am Catalan
Najat el Hachmi
In 2004 Najat El Hachmi, who would go on to win the
Premi Ramon Llull with the novel L’Últim Patriarca,
published a memoir entitled Jo també sóc catalana, as
yet untranslated to English. Jo també offers an insight
into the mapping of dynamics of gender, race
and religion onto a unique, bilingual cultural landscape.
The Catalan language is a supreme symbol of
belonging, and proficiency is expected of immigrants,
but signs that an immigrant has taken possession of
the language as their own also arouse jealousy. Here
El Hachmi experiences this hypocrisy whilst shopping
with her young song.
Translated from Catalan by Jessica Bullock
The linguistic milieu depicted in Jo també challenges
convention, which dictates that any speech in a ‘foreign’
language remain untranslated, especially in a
passage which plays upon the particular relationship
of two tongues. Leaving the Castilian untranslated
creates a greater divide between Najat and the shopkeeper
than in the source text, but translating the
whole dialogue into English would obliterate the tension
between the familiar and the alien that is crucial
to El Hachmi’s presentation of the experience of immigration.
✴
Rida gets off the bus with his usual smile,
hugging me just as tight day after day, rucksack
on his back. He smells like school.
We need to go shopping, son. As usual, he
doesn’t stop demanding, I want this, Mummy,
I want that. At the till he helps me to pack
everything up. The girl behind it, a little tired,
says to him:
“Hola guapo. Que vas a la escuela?” * The
Plana accent is a stamp that a whole lifetime
cannot erase.
answer.
Rida, shocked, stays mum and does not
“Que no habla este niño?”
“He does talk, in fact he’s very talkative,
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