A true poetry rider

Måndag, 28 Februari 2011 00:00

 Blogging about the Poetry Ride is something I have been thinking about for a long time, so I was thrilled when I was offered the opportunity to do so in the Nordic Culture Points website. Blogging about the Poetry Ride is something I have been thinking about for a long time, so I was thrilled when I was offered the opportunity to do so in the Nordic Culture Points website.

I hope that writing about the formation of this years festival will help me and other Poetry Riders to make the next ride as good possible and maybe even better. And of course I also want to share the joy, because organising an international travelling poetry festival is not only hard work, it is also a great experience that helps wonderful people to connect with each other.

The Poetry Ride was born out of love for poetry and translating in 2006 as a Finnish-Estonian-Latvian travelling festival that visited all the three participating countries. This year the tour will have a fourth participating country, Sweden, which seemed like a logical direction to expand after touring up and down in Finland, Estonia and Latvia for a few years.

The original idea of the tour was to give people the opportunity to hear great poetry from other countries both in the original language and also translated into their own language. Translating poetry demands a lot from the translator, but when a great poem is translated well, it is almost magical. Another idea behind the tour was to be a travelling festival that has performances in different places each year. That makes it possible for more people to enjoy the multilingual poetry events, but it is also a great opportunity for the poets to get to know each other. Could there be more efficient  way to network than travelling in a minibus for hundreds of kilometres?

Before all this happens, a lot of phone calls, e-mails and other things qualifying as work have to be done. Right now we are in the phase where we have some vague and some already firmer ideas about how this years festival should be like.  But we already know that it will start from Latvia and go through Estonia and Finland to Sweden.  So we know something and soon we will know more.