Haitian Times; Published By Noah Augustin
When Professor Elizabeth Emery first brought poetry to her class at Montclair University in New Jersey in early 2021, the students were iffy about it, not knowing what to expect or if the unit would be boring.
Emery asked if they had Spotify accounts, and everyone gave a resounding ‘yes.’
‘Well then,’ she recalls telling them, ‘You’re listening to poetry everyday.’
The class said ‘Ohhhhhhh, yeah,’ and got to reading more happily.
Fast forward to this year. Emery and her class, a mélange of French Literature, Language and History, have started a project called Les Phares Haitiens, French for Haitian lighthouses. It’s a digital repository of 19th-century Haitian poetry that the students have translated from French to English and French to Creole, named in reference to the shining lights that Haitian poets were to their culture.
Available online for anyone to access, the project also invites members of the public to contribute poems or help translate them.
“We want the poems to be translated into Creole too,” Emery said, stressing that everyone and anyone is welcome to participate in the project. “Some grandparents have offered to help make Creole audio recordings.”
Author and poet Danielle Legros Georges, who is not involved in the project, said upon hearing about Les Phares that the entire world of literature benefits from the translation of Haitian texts. Read more
