A Poetry Revival: Three Poets on Ethiopia’s Thriving Amharic Poetry Scene
Published by Carcanet Press in the UK last year,
Songs We Learn from Trees is the first book of Amharic poetry in English translation. Editors Chris Beckett and Alemu Tebeje, themselves poets and translators, present over 250 pages of poetry ranging from folk and religious verse to work by contemporary and diaspora poets. While the anthology provides a representative survey of poems in Amharic, it is still only the tip of the iceberg, opening the door for readers to imagine how much more Ethiopian poetry remains to be discovered and shared with a global community through translation.