Poetry, Translation and Trauma: Teaching Anglophone postcolonial poetrythrough critical care

This article reconceptualises the teaching of Anglophone postcolonial poetry as a practice of critical care, situated at the intersection of trauma studies, translation theory, and postcolonial pedagogy. Building on the theoretical contributions of Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Édouard Glissant, Walter Benjamin, and Lawrence Venuti, it advances the argument that trauma manifests itself not primarily through representation but through the formal disruptions, silences, and opacity of poetic language. Translation is consequently theorised as an ethically situated practice that resists the paradigm of equivalence, foregrounding instead the irreducibility of alterity and the productive force of interpretive incompleteness. Through close readings of M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!, Amanda Gorman's The Hill We Climb, and selected poems by Derek Walcott, the article examines how different poetics of trauma generate distinct translational and pedagogical challenges. It ultimately argues that the university classroom should become a space in which translation functions as a critical and ethical engagement with historical violence, cultivating responsible reading practices capable of inhabiting, rather than resolving, the constitutive incompleteness of traumatic memory.