Abstract
‘great words carrying the world’: Intercultural Translation in B. Kojo Laing’s ‘No needle in the sky’
Highlights
In ‘No needle in the sky’, Laing parodies the intensity of the falcon’s movement in Hopkins’s poem, concluding with a very different, more gentle descent: Behold, down from the ironed sky with its steam of rain and birds, drops the giant kente flagless, twisting and unfurling, unstitching the great words carrying the world, AND: gently dropping the wonder right back into the poet’s lap
The volume is preoccupied with the developing state of Ghana: a Ghana, as Laing suggests in ‘One hundred lines for the coast’, ‘grown old without wisdom by generations of dire disconnection.’2 This sense of ‘disconnection’, of a nation neglected both by its political leaders and the pace of global development around it, pervades the thirty-one poems of the collection
In ‘The same corpse’, a poem concerned with international conceptions of Ghana and its culture, such uneven development is lamented explicitly: ‘in an interdependent world, the / inter does not belong to Ghana.’3
Summary
In ‘No needle in the sky’, Laing parodies the intensity of the falcon’s movement in Hopkins’s poem, concluding with a very different, more gentle descent: Behold, down from the ironed sky with its steam of rain and birds, drops the giant kente flagless, twisting and unfurling, unstitching the great words carrying the world, AND: gently dropping the wonder right back into the poet’s lap.
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