Passionate, yearning, sensuous, rooted in the villages and cities of Benin, the poems of Agnès Agboton are suffused with love – of the poet’s beloved, and of the land in which she was born, here reborn in her. Yet they also confront the absence of living testimonies of that world.
Agboton explores themes such as time, death, war, exile, displacement and existence, all infused with perspectives drawn from West African tradition.
The poet’s work has, here, been collected in volume form in English translation for the first time, rendered first into Spanish from Gun, her native West African language, and then into English. She has worked with noted translator Lawrence Schimel at each step to retain the musicality of the original Gun. (With an estimated 325,000 speakers in a West Africa, Gun is dominated by more widely spoken regional languages as well as French and English, and is thus considered endangered – lending an even rarer, delicate facet to this collection.)
