Down at Ngununggula, the Art Gallery in the Highlands
Poetry is how the world goes; it’s what the world is; poems are how we catch the world, sometimes, in the act of Being what it is and becoming what it will. Many cultures understand the role of poetry as a kind of saying of what otherwise goes unsaid by the world—a witnessing, a divination, a joining of and perpetuation of the perpetual recreation of the miraculous actuality of the world, in its forms, and of us and our forms. We humans in our poetry, in our singing and lyric saying, are the tongues of creation, some traditional cultures say. Some phenomenologists, too.
Poetry is for singing out and it is for running lyric repairs on reality. Poetry is the world’s language, how the earth finds voice; and because the languages of the world are manifold, the idioms in which the same world language is spoken are manifold, too, and not all of those dialects understand each other, and many of them come at their witnessing project differently. And only when all of them are spoken is the world said and known and shared.
The same week I went up to the Blake Prize, I was asked, on Pentecost Sunday, to read the story of Babel in my father’s church: “Now the whole world had one language and a common speech,” that story begins. Poetry, I thought to myself, but did not say. In the story, God sees that the people are become vainglorious, and so he sees to it that their one language is confused and that they themselves are scattered “over the face of the whole earth.”
What is understood in our many scattered poetries is how we are all still one, though as various also as places and moments in our different cadences and grammars. And so it has long been the ambition of readers and makers of poetry, just as it is of diplomats and peacemakers, that we might come to understand each other’s verses and in knowing them, know ourselves and each other better.
With all that in mind Steve and I at 5Islands have been keen from the start to publish what we hope will become a series of anthologies of the poetries of many languages—perhaps five or six per volume—all of the poems translated into that flawed and beautiful, complicit and complicated language, English. The idea of such volumes came to me first through Shaoquett Moselmane, the former Labor MLC and Mayor of Rockdale, a Lebanese man, an Arabic-speaker, who in office didbetter work for the wildly various, rich and fabulous and disenfrancished communities of Western Sydney, than many people realise. I saw him do some of it, when he had me speak with communites of Arab poets and Panjabi poets and others. So, we met with Shaoquett the other day down at Ngununggula, the art gallery in the Highlands, whose Gundungurra name means “belonging to here", to carry that conversation toward the first of the books, which we aim to publish next year. That’s my father there with Shaoquett and Steve Meyrick and me; and that is a Ben Quilty in behind us. We’ll share more news as the project takes shape.
