Welcome to Translations: Bates International Poetry Festival web presence. The festival is hosted by the language departments at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. For five days poets from around the world perform in their language of origin, and are welcomed into the classrooms and streets of our college and local community. Building on the Bates tradition of fostering intellectual creativity, this site brings together the efforts of faculty, staff, and students, as they undertake the translation of the poets’ work, and the artistic and technological challenge of representing their presence.

We invite you to peruse the site, listen to the poets, read the translations, take a look at their journey, and as you do, contemplate the promise of poetry as a vehicle for cultural transmission and translation as key to cross-cultural exchanges. Enjoy!