Translating Home
What does it mean to translate home? How does the concept of “home” change when you identify as multilingual/multicultural? What are the connections between the languages we speak and the lands we have inhabited? Ten poets from The Polyglot’s latest issues, Lunch Box and Unfaithful, explore multilayered meanings of home through poems in Arabic, Italian, Irish, Nêhiyawêwin, Portuguese, Romanian, Somali, Spanish, and Tagalog. Whether this land has been your ancestral home for generations or you have settled here after leaving your home behind, the need to “code-switch” between languages and lands results in the constant re-examining of our maps of meaning. Home becomes the place where our life experiences get lost (and found) in translation, as we simultaneously make new connections between past and present. Multilingual poetry then becomes the ideal vehicle to safely “break the code,” building a more spacious home, with room for the old and the new. […]