What happens to a poem when it crosses an ocean? This spring, Versopolis opened its first transatlantic route, and two poets set off in opposite directions to find out.

Volha Hapeyeva, a Belarusian poet, translator and linguist who writes in Belarusian and German, travelled through the United States, reading in Washington, Tucson and St. Louis. Rachel DeWoskin, an American poet and novelist who spent her twenties in Beijing, flew to Riga for the Page Break International Poetry Festival, where poets read in their own languages while translations glowed on the walls.

In this episode, the two meet to compare what they found. They talk about why translation can ‘oxygenate’ a poem, why Belarusian sounds like a song and what it means to write in a language you were not born into. Then the conversation takes an unexpected turn east, into Tang poetry translated with a father, a months-long argument over gibbons and monkeys, and a Japanese haiku master who wrote tender little poems for flies.

The conversation closes on poetry’s role in public life: not an answer to political crises, but a means of restoring nuance, fostering empathy and resisting isolation. In a world divided by borders and languages, poetry remains an invitation to listen and translate.

Volha Hapeyeva, born in Minsk, Belarus, is an award-winning poet who writes in Belarusian and German. She is the author of seven poetry books and two novels in Belarusian; in German she has published the essay The Defense of Poetry in Times of Ongoing Exile (2022) and The Dictionary of a Nomad (2026). Her poems have been translated into more than 15 languages, and her awards include the English PEN Translates Award, the Wortmeldungen Prize and the manuskripte Prize. Since 2020 she has lived as a nomad in exile in Austria and Germany. In spring 2026 she was the first European poet of Versopolis USA, reading at Georgetown University, the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Washington University in St. Louis. She is curating the Poetica festival in Cologne in 2027.

Rachel DeWoskin is an American poet, novelist and memoirist who lives in Chicago with her family. In her twenties she lived in Beijing, where she unexpectedly became the star of a Chinese television soap opera, an experience she recounts in her memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing. She is the author of five novels, including Someday We Will Fly, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the Sydney Taylor Book Award, and Big Girl Small, which received an Alex Award. Her poetry collections Two Menus and absolute animal were published by the University of Chicago Press; absolute animal includes her translations of classical Chinese poems by Li Bai, Wang Zhihuan and others. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Ploughshares and other magazines. She has taught at Boston University, NYU and the University of Chicago, and serves on the national steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action.