The Australian Multilingual Writing Project is a new free online journal that showcases multilingual creative writing. The first issue features poetry by 13 different poets in 14 different languages, all of which capture the journal’s objective to share the way that multilingual poets think and speak. The introduction to this issue explains that while English-speaking poets may use one or two words from another language, poets who are multilingual “have access to multiple musics, multiple vocabularies, multiple idioms and … combine them in ways that create whole new musics, syntaxes, and idioms.”
The journal’s creator and editor, Nadia Niaz explains: “Each poem is accompanied by an audio file to add back in the dimension that the unfamiliarity of some of the languages may take away. Translations, transliterations, and glosses are provided at the poets’ discretion. Some poems invite you in for a cuppa and a chat, while others skulk by the door ready to bolt, but all provide glimpses into the lives and experiences of people who move between languages daily.”
The first issue is available at: https://australianmultilingualwriting.org/issue-1/amwp-issue-1/.