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Voice of the Two Shores

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Drawn from Agnes Agboton's two Spanish collections in a single volume for the first time ever, Voice of the Two Shores was originally written in Gun, a language of Benin, the musicality of which is faithfully reproduced through the net of two translations. Many of the poems are rooted in Benin, while others confront the absence of the living testimonies of that world and its traditions. Yet the poems are redolent of love - of the poet's beloved, and of the land where she was born, which is (re)born in her. The result is a book charged with deep emotion, in which ancient tradition is deeply rooted, poems that thrum with intimacy, nostalgia for her natal landscapes following years in exile in Spain, and a thread of dismay in the face of unacceptable realities.
Agnes Agboton, born in Benin in 1960, is a multilingual author and storyteller residing in Catalonia, Spain. She has published two bilingual books of poetry in Gun (her mother tongue) and Spanish, Voz de las dos orillas (Voice of the Two Shores) and Canciones del poblado y del exilio (Songs of the Village and of Exile). Her other titles include the autobiography Mas alla del mar de arena (Beyond the Sea of Sand) and Na Miton: La mujer en los cuentos y leyendas africanos (Na Miton: Women in African Stories and Legends). She has also written books on African food, and collections of African legends. She represented Benin at the Poetry Parnassus, at the London 2012 Olympics. Lawrence Schimel's translations into English of her poems have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation and the anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby
* Winner of PEN Translates Award 2021.
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