![]() Polish people living here, however, is not a new phenomenon: over 200,000 Polish people moved here after the Second World War, meaning there we have a substantial Polish and British Polish population across multiple generations. There are almost 800,000 Poles living in the UK, the vast majority settling here after Poland joined the European Union in 2004. This is something comedian Ava Vidal echoed in her interview about post-Brexit racist hate crime on Channel 4 News, where she also said that a new development she’d noticed is that hate crime is now not only against people of colour, but also white immigrants, primarily Polish people. I don’t have to tell you that Brexit didn’t make people aggressive, violent racists: it just normalised and legitimised pre-existing irrational fears and made racists and xenophobes feel comfortable performing that fear in public. Racist and xenophobic attacks rose staggeringly after Brexit was announced. What can’t be quickly forgotten in this brushing down and getting on with things is hate crime. Language was so misused and weaponised during the referendum, perhaps we find ourselves as anti-xenophobic pro-Remain writers and translators trying to cancel out or dethrone that language with our own. What I found I wanted to say, what I hoped I made clear, was that translation – like any kind of writing – has the potential to be a very human and humanising endeavour. To end his piece on that night, he asked everyone to “write a farewell message to your own continent” by writing a note of condolence in a concertina book he’d been given as a present in China, while Jacques Brel sung 'Ne me quite pas'.Ī few days after that, I gave a talk on translation as part of a series organised by Fowler at the Wellcome Collection for their States of Consciousness season. ![]() Fowler performs and hosts poetry events internationally, he curated the first European Poetry Night this year, and he curates The Enemies Project a series of events that partners up poets from different countries and of different nationalities to work and perform collaboratively. My first instinct was a practical one, supporting indie publishers who publish translations, but I still had a cloud of doubt hanging over me: Is literature really powerful enough to fight what we are facing? At a reading and discussion a few weeks ago I found myself asking halfway through my slot: What good are writers and words at times like this? I asked the same question a week later at another poetry evening I was reading at where Steven Fowler was also reading. I’m going to put my energy into what I always have: promoting translation, or in other words, promoting intercultural exchange and the values of openness and difference. I could write thousands of words about Brexit to add to the thousands that have already been written, lamenting this closed-up-quick-to-the-battlements-lock-the-doors atmosphere we find ourselves in.
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