“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” calls the Mother of Exiles in “The New Colossus,” the sonnet penned by Emma Lazarus in 1883 and inscribed on a plaque mounted in 1903 on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: a monument that has continued, even during the most turbulent moments of the 20th and 21st centuries, to inspire dreams of freedom around the globe and to remind us of the values of democracy.
In celebration of Poetry Month, “The New Colossus” Translation Project offers translations of “The New Colossus” in more than 40 languages, all accompanied by translators’ comments and some also by video recordings, and prefaced with introductory essays by Alicia Ostriker, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and State Poet of New York, and Mihaela Moscaliuc, Ph.D., associate professor of English.
Listen to the poem in Arabic, Bengali, Catalan, Chinese, Filipino, French, Hebrew, Igbo, Italian, Jamaican Patwa, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Scots, Slovak, and Ukrainian, with other recordings to follow. Curated by Ostriker, Moscaliuc, and Tess O’Dwyer, the project is hosted by the American Jewish Historical Society and coordinated by Rebeca Miller.