It’s fair to say that those who frequent Write Out Loud are a pretty diverse group of people; you can log on to WOL and read poetry and blogs, comments and opinions, from all sorts of people, about all sorts of subjects. In fact, WOL’s primary aim is to create and provide opportunities for people to share both their poetry, and their thoughts about poetry, with each other.

The only thing you need to be an active member of WOL is a love of language, the common thread that binds us as a community. And because WOL was started in England, and has significant reach in to English speaking communities around the world, English is the principal language you’ll find here.

Which means that we’re missing out on sharing poetry, and a whole other way of life, with countless people across the world. So many languages are spoken today in Britain alone - removing language barriers has stumped many a politician, and large multi-national companies employ whole teams of translators to ensure precision of meaning. As you might imagine -WOL has come up with its own, innovative approach!

When WOL founder-members Julian Jordon     and Dave Morgan had their first drunken trip to Bordeaux in the west of France, it was not with the intention of any kind of cultural exchange. Julian had lived in the area previously, and whilst visiting an English-style pub he knew, they had the idea of having a poetry evening for the regulars. To their surprise, the landlord welcomed the idea, declaring himself to be a big fan of W.H.Auden.

That first evening of poetry and music went so well, they organised another, and another, and they found that French poets were turning up, reading in French. Julian, a fluent French speaker, tried translating one of his poems in to French but found it an almost impossible task. He got talking to a group of French people who had turned up to the poetry evening and, with their help, translated his poem.

The problems that they encountered in that impromptu workshop highlighted some of the difficulties that are unique to translating poetry; the subtleties of meaning, nuances and word-play, sometimes coupled with restrictions of form or rhyme, means that a straight-forward, literal translation is not always the best translation. And many of these subtleties and cultural differences require the input of a native speaker.

Julian says, “In France we worked on translating English to French, and vice versa. Out of that grew our desire to open up the nights and the website, not just to poetry in translation, but to the discussions that can take place around that; the cultural understandings – and misunderstandings - that emerge, as well as the challenges it gives to the poet to try and explain the subtext of their own work. Sometimes these are subtexts of which the poet was previously unaware”.

So from those first un-funded and improvised nights, has grown the aim to try and break down some of those walls so that the diverse group of ordinary people who like poetry are able to share ideas, without the barrier of an un-shared language.

As well as the French connection, we have been working with Francophone African poets, the Gujarati Writers’ Guild UK, and other individuals and organisations. One such is BRASS – the Bolton based organisation that seeks to befriend refugees and asylum seekers, who already have a well-received profile here on WOL. We hope to be able to expand this work significantly, including offering translation workshops to anyone who might be interested.

In the meantime, go to the www.writeoutloud.net/poets/crossculturalpoetry and have a look at the examples – the first by Bolton-based, Gujarati poet, Siraj Patel; one by African poet Wenceslas-Kapesa Chanda – ‘Oh! Ma Ville Natale’ (translated from the French in to English by Julian Jordon     and David Andrews); and ‘Unsuited’ by Fred Holland translated in to Arabic by Fatima Al Matar. These are the first, we hope, of many; and we welcome any suggestions, comments or poems that you may have, please email us at: news@writeoutloud.net

Over two thousand years ago, the Roman playwright Publius Terentius Afer – known as Terence to his mates, said “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”; translation – “I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me”. Nothing could be more human than language – let’s not let a little thing like being unable to speak each other’s stand in the way of sharing our thoughts, our lives, and most of all, our poetry.