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02 November 2022

Posted by Susmita Bhattacharya

Your Name is a Poem

Photo by Jay-Pee Peña 🇵🇭 on Unsplash

We're back after the half term break and today we reflected on the Maning of our name. Who gave us our name? What does it mean? What root word from which language does it come from? We searched up the name Adam on Wikipedia and it can be translated to more than 50 languages. 

Modern Poetry is Translation is inviting young writers up to the age of 25 to a challenge to contemplate on the meaning of their name and write a poem about it. On their website they say:

"How often have you thought about your name as a word? Names are used every day, and they’re such an inherent part of how we view ourselves, so it’s always an interesting exercise to reflect on how names have an impact on our and others’ lives. Names have etymologies of their own, histories of being passed down or created anew within families, cultures, languages."

So we had a really interesting conversation about our names and everyone shared such lovely stories about how and why they were given the names they had. Now our challenge is to write a poem in translation about it, which is great because in our group, there are at least 5-6 languages spoken, so I'd love to see the variety come through in the poems we write over the next couple of weeks.

 My name is Susmita, and it means the one with a beautiful smile.

What's your name? And what does it mean?


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