The Poetry Translation Centre is very pleased to be once more exploring Georgian poetry with translator Natalia Bukia-Peters. This collaborative group translation workshop will focus on the work of Maia Sarishvili. Sarishvili surprises audiences with her new sound in Georgian poetry, displaying a realistic and concrete touch that she refashions in her spiritual search for the nature and power of woman.

This online workshop will take place over two 90-minute sessions on Zoom over two consecutive evenings. This format will let us spend time with a single poetic voice. The workshops will be led by translator Natalia Bukia-Peters a freelance translator, interpreter and teacher of Georgian and Russian. She has also translated two publications with the PTC, and a third, Why I No Longer Write Poems by Diana Anphimiadi, will be published in March 2022.

Poet and translator Leo Boix will be the facilitator for this workshop. Together they will offer insight into the nuances of the language and culture, and give helpful suggestions for the direction of the translation that is produced.

Our online poetry translation workshops can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Join like-minded poetry lovers from across the world to discover new poetry and different cultures, share insights and language skills, working together to open up a poem in its original language and reassemble it in English.

We have had participants from across the UK, Iraq, Nigeria, Sri Lanka and the USA. The workshops are the perfect way to keep you feeling creative, engaged and connected to the world at large. A rough and ready guide translation is provided by the guest translator so there is no need to know the language being translated, simply sign up and bring your love of language.

'Pay-What-You-Can' Pricing

We want to keep our workshop experience as accessible as possible, especially as we are aware that Covid has put many people at a financial disadvantage.

About the Poet

Born in 1968, Maia Sarishvili studied pedagogy and currently teaches at a primary school. A mother of four children, she surprises audiences with her new sound in Georgian poetry, displaying a realistic and concrete touch that she refashions in her spiritual search for the nature and power of woman. Sarishvili has published poetry collections and radio plays for children. Her radio play Three Buckets of Snow won a prize for the best radio play in 1997 at a Georgian-German radio play competition. Her work has appeared in Crazy Horse, Versal, Quiddity, Nashville Review, Asheville Review, Plume, Guernica and other publications.

She has taken part in numerous international festivals, including Poetry International (Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2007), SOTZIA (Tallinn, Estonia, 2008), Poetry Parnassus (London, UK, 2011) and was invited to Portugal, to a translators’ seminar, where her poems were translated into Portuguese (Casa de Mateus, 2007). Maia Sarishvili won Literary Award SABA 2008 in the category The Best Poetry Collection for Microscope.

About the Translator

Natalia Bukia-Peters is a freelance translator, interpreter and teacher of Georgian and Russian. She studied at Tbilisi State Institute of Foreign Languages before moving to New Zealand in 1992, then to Cornwall in 1994. She is a translator for the Poetry Translation Centre in London and a member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, and translates a variety of literature, poetry and magazine articles.

Natalia translates a variety of literature, poetry and magazine articles. Her translation collaborations with the writer Victoria Field include short fiction (Sex for Fridge by Zurab Lezhava and It’s Me by Ekaterina Togonidze in Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction Anthologies, 2011 and 2014 respectively), two collections of poetry by Dato Magradze (Giacomo Ponti, 2012, and Footprints on Water, 2015, both with Fal), a book-length collection of short stories, Me, Margarita by Ana Kordzaia-Samadashvili (Dalkey Archive, 2015) and an anthology, A House with no Doors - Ten Georgian Women Poets (Francis Boutle, 2016). In her collaboration with the writer Charlotte Hobson, she translated Aleko Shugladze’s novel All That We Hide (Francis Boutle, 2016). Her most recent books are Diana Anphimiadi’s Beginning to Speak in collaboration with the poet Jean Sprackland and Salome Benidze’s I Wanted To Ask You in collaboration with the poet Helen Mort (Poetry Translations Centre 2018).

About the Facilitator

Leo Boix is a bilingual Latino British poet, translator and journalist based in the UK. He has published two collections in Spanish, Un lugarpropio (2015) and Mar de noche (2017), and was included in many anthologies, such as Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe) and Why Poetry? (Verve Poetry Press). His English poems have appeared widely including in Poetry, The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, PNReview and The Rialto. Boix is a fellow of The Complete Works Program and co-director of 'Invisible Presence’, a scheme to nurture new young voices of Latino poets in the UK. His debut collection of English poetry, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant, was published by Chatto and Windus in 2021.

Full Details

To try and make the online experience as enjoyable and manageable as possible, places will be restricted - if you book please do make sure you can attend both sessions.

Workshop materials and the log-in details to join the sessions with easy to follow instructions, will be sent out by email after you book your place.

• The PTC will deliver these workshops online via Zoom.
• This online series will follow our usual workshop format, working as a group to translate the poem line by line.
• Working from a guide translation of the original poem, guided by a translator and poet to facilitate the sessions.
• Two sessions lasting 90 minutes over two days working on one longer poem
• In advance of the beginning of the series, we will share the original poem and the guide translation that the group will be working from as well as further materials to aid the experience like audio examples of the poetry and a video introduction to the poet by the translator
• On consecutive evenings Monday 20 and Tuesday 21 December, 18:30-20:00 GMT.
• Pay-What-You-Can donation when reserving your ticket.
• Reserve one ticket for both sessions.