Four poems on food and love

Vittles x Modern Poetry in Translation

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 6: Food and the Arts.

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In this final week of Season 6 Vittles presents poems selected by Sharanya, Jonathan and me from the latest issue and the archive of Modern Poetry in Translation. It feels appropriate to close a season about food and art with a literary form characterised by semantic openness, border-melting collaboration, and playful energy. We will publish three thematic selections of poetry on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week; the first of which is love. 

How to describe love? Its excess, disarray, quietness, oblivion, strangeness, revulsion, tragedy, and insatiability? For such range to be expressed in language, love wants an object to cleave to. Food gives this mad and various emotion a presence in both space and time – descriptions of texture or colour, the affecting appearance of seasonal delicacies, the gestures that produce a meal can convey a slice of love. 

Love is getting entangled like intergalactic pasta in ‘Humanspaghetti’; maternal love as hard boiled eggs in ‘A Menu for Mother’; ghee on steaming rice in ‘My Family by the Haor’, and arriving too late for tea to still be hot in ‘I Wanted’. Poetic form, liberated from ‘making sense’, allows writers to produce juxtapositions in language which on first reading bear the unforeseen intensity of a new flavour or a new love. RMJ

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Thanks so much to Modern Poetry in Translation for initially publishing these poems. You can buy the latest issue on food here: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/wrap-it-in-banana-leaves-the-food-focus/

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Humanspaghetti

Poem by Şafak Sarıçiçek. Translated by Csilla Toldy from German

imagine there would be wormholes
and people disappearing, pulled out lengthwise

like spaghetti

I’d look for you and grab your hand
we’d drift like humanoid spaghetti between space and time.

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A Menu for Mother

Poem by Aw Priatmojo. Translated by Ian Rowland from Indonesian.

1. The White Jenang and the Red

In that pot Mother cooked up her prayers
The rising smoke accompanying her wishes.

Father was the white jenang.
And with a splash of palm sugar
the red jenang was Mother.

The dining table was where all dreams were sown.
And all memories stored.


2. Gudeg

Memories floated in the coconut cream
among jackfruit green. Seeping into
the hard-boiled eggs, until I swept off to the city.

They were in the fast-food chicken and
the coffee shop drinks too.

Her prayers had followed me to town.
swaying among the vehicle fumes.

Jostling for space in
the rush hour trains.

3. Lemper

The scent of shredded chicken rose
from the ledgers
whose figures stuck like sticky rice.

I flipped the numbers
in the books

to show:
the furthest distance between me and her.

I wanted to wrap it in banana leaves
pinning both ends
with palm rib slivers.

Carry them to work each day, for lunch.


4. Wajik

I built this home from sticky rice
with pandanus-scented walls
and sticky stains of remembrance on the table.

I say to my wife who stirs the pan at the hearth:

‘Even in that flaring flame I see her’.

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My Family by the Haor 

Poem by Zafir Setu. Translated by Mohammad Shafiqul Islam from Bengali.

As you pour ghee on the plateful of steaming rice,
an astounding love billows.

Steam rises from rice, and I deeply feel you.
When you stretch on the yard to clasp a cow.

I feel I love both equally.

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I Wanted

Poem by Ro Mehrooz. Translated by the poet from Rohingya.

I wanted to share a cup of tea and sit with you,
A tough green, saturated, sugared tea.

The wrong path carried me on its back; pulled me away,
Far off, I couldn’t tread the right path.

I wanted to share a cup of tea and sit with you,
A tough green, strong, hot tea.

Tea leaves, sugar, cow’s milk, everything I bought
But being late, I couldn’t drink it hot.

The leaky kettle, the husk gas stove turned off,
A decayed coconut of fate; only the shell remains.

I wanted to share a cup of tea and sit with you,
A tough green, saturated, sugared tea.

I wanted to leave my lip kissing the cup
But, the air of fate swung left, what must I do?

Winter, snow, passing. I didn’t drink my tea.
A sweet smile, a whisper in ear, I couldn’t hear it.

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Credits

Modern Poetry in Translation is literary magazine and publisher based in the United Kingdom that specialises in translated poetry. To buy their latest issue on food in poetry, please view their website here: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/wrap-it-in-banana-leaves-the-food-focus/

Şafak Sarıçiçek is a law clerk in the Karlsruhe district. He’s published five poetry books, and won various literary awards and scholarships, most recently the Klagenfurter Literaturkurs of the Bachmann Prize.

Csilla Toldy is a writer and translator from Hungary. Her writing and translations appeared in literary magazines and anthologies and in book form in three poetry pamphlets: Red Roots - Orange Sky (2013), The Emigrant Woman’s Tale (2015) and Vertical Montage (2018), as short fiction in Angel Fur and other stories (2019, Lapwing) and as a novel with the title Bed Table Door (2023, Wrecking Ball). Csilla creates film poems as a visual artist. Her award-winning work has been screened at international festivals.  www.csillatoldy.co.uk

Zafir Setu, Professor of Bengali Literature at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh, is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. He has authored more than thirty books of poetry, short stories, novels and essays.

Mohammad Shafiqul Islam (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9880-4645 ) is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Inner State, and the translator of Humayun Ahmed: Selected Short Stories and Aphorisms of Humayun Azad. His work has appeared in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Critical Survey, Massachusetts Review, Poem: International English Language Quarterly, Journal of World Literature, South Asian Review, English in Education, Journal of Poetry Therapy, English: Journal of the English Association, Modern Poetry in Translation, Comparative Literature: East & West, Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Modern Poetry in Translation, Dibur, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in a number of books, including The Book of Dhaka: A City in Short Fiction, The Best Asian Poetry, Poems from SAARC Region, When the Mango Tree Blossomed, An Ekushey Anthology 1952-2022, Of the Nation Born, Meet Human Meat and Other Stories, and Monsoon Letters: Collection of Poems. Currently at work on his third collection of poetry and a few translation projects, Dr Islam is Professor of English at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh.

Aw Priatmojo is an Indonesian author whose poetry and short stories have been published on various platforms. He is one of the founders of Nyalanesia, a platform for promoting literacy in Indonesia.

Ian Rowland translates Indonesian literature into English, including short stories by Hadi Winata in Portside Review and Sugar Nutmeg, and by Pratiwi Juliani in BODY journal ; and poems by Erni Aladjai in Chogwa zine, Hadi Winata in the Oxford Anthology of Translation, and AW Priatmojo in Modern Poetry in Translation.

Ro Mehrooz is a young Rohingya poet, translator, award-winning photographer, and professional interpreter. He was born in late 1999 and is originally from Arakan (now Rakhine State) in Myanmar. Growing up under the oppression of the Burmese regime, he fled his country at the young age of sixteen to avoid arbitrary arrests. Primarily writing in Rohingya, he started writing in early 2016 about the longing for his homeland and the plights of his Rohingya community. However, his poems were first published in 2019 in the anthology "I am a Rohingya: Poetry from the Camps and Beyond" (Arc Publications, 2019). His poems have also been featured in "Modern Poetry in Translation" (Summer 2020), "Border Lines: Poems of Migration" (Everyman's Library, 2020), "No, Love Is Not Dead" (Chambers, 2021), and "Adi Magazine" (Spring 2021).

The illustration is by Klaussie Williams, a painter, drawer and ceramicist based in London. You can find more of their work on https://www.klaussiewilliams.com/shop and Instagram.

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Jonathan Nunn and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.