Specimen Types

Bao Wenyuan’s short-short story,”Wabi-Sabi” is like a set of strange dreams, in which there are kings, heroes, soldiers, and wardens, as well as husbands, fathers, grandmothers, and children, and everyone is talking non-stop at different decibel levels. From ancient battlefields to modern-day cubicles, the writer attempts to write down the memories of every life that has ever endeavored to exist through an allegorical narrative technique.

This excerpt was selected within the frame of New Voice, a project launched by One-way Street Journal  and supported by Pro Helvetia Shanghai, with the collaboration of Specimen. The Babel Review of Translations in Switzerland, Jalada Africa in Africa, HEAT in Australia, The Stinging Fly in Ireland, and Cardenal Revista Literaria in Mexico. The whole project was devoted to exploring new approaches to literature and identifying new writings in cross-lingual discussions, bringing together a new group of experimental and independent writers, and providing them with translation, editing, and publication support.

Bellinzona (CH), 12-15 settembre 2024

Nel 2024 Babel si rivolge alla Francia, la nazione dove forse più che altrove in Europa letteratura e pensiero filosofico – da Voltaire e Rousseau fino a Sartre, De Beauvoir e Camus, passando per Hugo e Zola – si sono confrontati intimamente con le questioni sociali, dando vita ad alcune delle più significative opere letterarie dell’Occidente.
Babel France va in cerca delle metamorfosi contemporanee di questa grande tradizione, ne indaga tecniche e strumenti, si chiede quali sono le problematiche con cui oggi sembra imprescindibile fare i conti – le differenze di classe, il passato coloniale, il neoliberalismo, la deturpazione del paesaggio, la crisi climatica, il capitalismo finanziario? – e come queste si traducono in letteratura per poi ritradursi in una più acuta coscienza del mondo.
Babel France invita autrici e autori che, lontani dal mero messaggio politico, mischiando e a volte stravolgendo i generi, provano a rendere una testimonianza complessa e stratificata dei traumi e delle aspirazioni di un intero paese, e di come questi si ripercuotono sui singoli individui. Perché la letteratura, per sua stessa vocazione, riporta continuamente alla dimensione umana e ci svela ciò che i densi manuali di teoria politica o di sociologia non riescono a prevedere.

Tra gli ospiti: Laurent Mauvignier, Sandra Lucbert, Gauz’, Diaty Diallo, Seynabou Sonko, Elitza Gueorguieva, Clément Camar-Mercier, Lorenzo Flabbi, Massimo Gezzi. Sara Rossi Guidicelli, Amiata, Jürgen Nefzger.

In attesa del festival, Specimen pubblica una serie di testi legati al tema dell’edizione 2024.

Every year since 2016, three Swiss poets meet at the Swiss Institute in Rome and translate each other’s work during a two-week residency. If they do not know the source language, they rely on interlinear versions or a common lingua franca. The result of their work is then presented at national and international literary events and finally published here in “Specimen.” The poets of Poethreesome 2023 are Matteo Ferretti, Ariane Von Graffenried, and Eva Marzi. Poethreesome is a project initiated and curated by “Babel. Festival di letteratura e traduzione.” More about Poethreesome >>

Known as one of the greatest writers of 20th century Swiss literature and a pioneering feminist novelist, Alice Rivaz (1901-1998) influenced generations of readers, both women and men, through her remarkable poetic writing and her ability to focus on life’s unfulfillments, on the stories and aspirations of the voiceless.

This selection of fragments from her novels, short stories, essays, and biographical writings was compiled by the Institut d’étude des intervalles (iEi) in connection with the project, “Le Tiret” (2021 – 2030) from the Villa Bernasconi Art Center in Lancy.

These extracts illustrate Rivaz’s recurring themes: the condemnation of “domestic slavery” and recognition of forms of invisible work, the portrayal of communication failures between people along with wonder at the power of a caregiving gesture, reflections on writing and music, celebrations of “sisterhood” and its transformative qualities and, always, a gaze that was both incisive as well as imbued with a profound empathy for everything and every being brought together on the page through words.

Specimen has curated the translation of such selection in multiple languages here gathered and published for the first time.

With the support of République et Canton de Genève, Ville de Lancy and Ville de Meyrin.

On June 22, 1948, The Empire Windrush docked in Essex, England. This single event, widely held as the beginning of the mass migration of Caribbean immigrants to the United Kingdom, was also the beginning of the problematization of immigration.

2023 marked the 75 Anniversary of The Windrush, and wishing to bear witness, Inua Ellams commissioned 10 writers of Caribbean origins to compose new work engaging with Windrush. The writers were Raymond Antrobus, Dean Atta, Casey Bailey, Malika Booker, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Courtney Conrad, Mr Gee, Keith Jarrett, Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, and Deanna Rodger. Their responses are as vast and nuanced as they are heart-breaking and truth-telling.

In this new Dossier commissioned by Specimen, you can now read the original poems along their French and Spanish translations by Jeanne Jegousso and Manuel Portillo.

In collaboration with the Royal Society of Literature.

Anche quest’anno “M’illumino d’immenso”, Premio Internazionale di Traduzione di Poesia, si è rivelato un concorso che attira l’attenzione di traduttori di molti paesi diversi.

In totale, 382 traduttori di 28 paesi del mondo si sono cimentati nella traduzione delle poesie proposte dagli organizzatori: “‘82. Scirea” del poeta italiano Roberto Mussapi ed “È un turbine che stritola” della poetessa svizzera di lingua italiana Prisca Agustoni, per la VI edizione del premio verso lo spagnolo; “Canción del burócrata” di Eduardo Lizalde (Messico) e “Ypacaraí” di Daniel Samoilovich (Argentina), per la I edizione del premio verso l’italiano.

Il Premio è organizzato dai poeti Vanni Bianconi (Svizzera) e Fabio Morábito (Messico), e dalla traduttrice Barbara Bertoni (Italia), con il sostegno dell’Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Città del Messico e dell’Ambasciata di Svizzera in Messico, e con il patrocinio di varie istituzioni (Ambasciata del Messico in Italia, Ametli, Biblioteche di Roma, Fondo de Cultura Económica, IILA, Istituto di Italianistica dell’Università di Basilea) e media: Biblit. Idee Risorse per Traduttori (Italia), La otra (Messico), Luvina (Universidad de Guadalajara, Messico), Periódico de Poesía (UNAM, Messico), Specimen. The Babel Review of Translations (Svizzera) e Vasos Comunicantes (Spagna).

La giuria è internazionale ed è composta da poeti e traduttori di grande prestigio: Jorge Aulicino (Argentina), Barbara Bertoni (Italia), Vanni Bianconi (Svizzera), Valerio Magrelli (Italia), Fabio Morábito (Messico).

Il vincitore di M’illumino d’immenso dallo spagnolo all’italiano è Gabriele Mancini (Pomezia, Italia). Menzione d’onore a Michele Morella (Zurigo, Svizzera).

Il vincitore di M’illumino d’immenso dall’italiano in spagnolo è Jorge Yglesias (Cuba). Menzione d’onore a Carlos Mayor (Spagna) e Marco Perilli (Messico).

I vincitori hanno ricevuto un premio di 1000 euro e la pubblicazione delle traduzioni.

Filmmaker and author Werner Herzog was the guest of honor at the 18th edition of “Babel. Festival di letteratura e traduzione,” which took place in Bellinzona, Switzerland, from Sept. 14 to Sept. 17, 2023.  Mr. Herzog discussed his work with Swiss-Italian poet Fabio Pusterla, starting from his novel The Twilight World, which tells the incredible story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War II.

M’illumino d’immenso, International award for the best translation of Italian poetry into Spanish, Arabic and German was first conceived to promote the translation of Italian language poetry, both from Switzerland and from Italy, within the Spanish speaking countries but now includes other languages (Arabic and German). The award is organised by Swiss poet Vanni Bianconi (Switzerland) and poet Fabio Morabito (Mexico), together with translator Barbara Bertoni (Italia), with the support of the Italian Institute of Culture of Ciudad de México, and Il Cairo, the Swiss Embassy in Mexico and Egypt, Toledo Programm – Deutscher Übersetzerfonds and Biblioteche di Roma. The 2022 prize winners are the following: Isabel Teresa García Casalta de Puglisi (Venezuela) for the Spanish translation, Reddad Cherrati (Marocco) for the Arabic translation, and Ruth Gantert (Svizzera) for the German translations.

Argentine writer and translator Pablo Ingberg during his time as a guest in Bellinzona for the Babel 2021 festival, discovered the vertical dimension of the Ticino town. The historic center of Bellinzona is in fact overlooked by three castles, placed one on top of the other and partly connected by a wall that has long marked not only a political-administrative border but also a linguistic one.

We thank Pablo Ingberg for allowing us to present his poem here, almost as an invitation to our readers to come to Bellinzona for the next edition of Babel, from the 15th to the 18th of September 2022.

Following my first few encounters with the English language as a teenager, I – an Italian native speaker born and raised in Italy – fell in love with it and pursued it as a major at University; I then spent several years working as a linguist between Nigeria and China, always feeling my Italian identity very strongly.
It was only when I settled in the UK twelve years ago that I started realising how complex it is to be a linguistically and culturally hybrid human being: just like parents, over time Italian and English have forged my personality, each through its own strengths and weaknesses. And like every child must eventually do, in this poem I reflect on my linguistic identity as a clumsy attempt to reconcile a two-fold legacy, trying to embrace what I enjoy about it and accept what I have absorbed from it in spite of myself. Considering the different natures of Italian and English (more complete vs more concise), it felt just natural to write this Italian poem in longer (eight-syllable) verses and then create an English version made of shorter (six-syllable) lines. Although the poem was first conceived in Italian, the English version is not a mere translation of it: rather, it was born out of the original but then engaged in mutual contamination with it, eventually becoming an independent being.
– Antonietta Bocci

‘엄마 없는 집에’ is the only Korean poem I have ever written. The Korean used is likely broken and outdated, as I left my first homeland in 1994 at the age of seven — but it is my own. The poem was written in 2013 during my doctoral studies in the UK, while visiting my childhood home in America. At the time, I was greatly struggling to write my thesis because I felt so unsure about my claim to literature of the American South. The poem came to me as fully formed as it could be (considering my mutated Korean), in the span of time it took for me to walk from my childhood bedroom to the kitchen of my family home. In the poem, I am home alone with my father, observing him doing dishes at the sink, while my mother is away in Korea visiting her dying sister. The poem makes no direct mention of my mother coping with her sister dying, noting only my mother’s absence. There is some sense that my mother might be dead. My mother and her sister were the closest in age of their siblings and my mother tells me they looked very much alike in their youth with their snow-white, full moon faces. They are present, my mother and her sister (my aunt I hardly remember as she is dying) in the poem’s closing focus on a rice bowl my father holds, gleaming like a pearl. I translated the poem into a monologue from my grieving mother, imagining her voice in English. Through this imagined, other voice of my mother, I found room to speak to things unsaid between me, my mother, and my father. In the monologue, instead of speaking directly of her sister’s death, the character of my mother poses questions around both the possibility and certainty of her own death and how my father and I would survive. The two pieces are extensions of one another, sisters in shared in-between spaces.
– S J Kim

I was born in the Basque country, Northern Spain in 1991, surrounded by the Pyrenees and the Cantabric Sea, yet not far from the Mediterranean. I was brought up by a family of poets who fed me books and songs until I left home at the age of 16. I came to London to study Chinese at SOAS in 2010, when  London was a pool where all of us Europeans gathered. After graduating, I worked in Asia for several years, but I always wanted to come back to this city I was still calling home –London.
I started writing poetry during my year abroad in Beijing- I was very far from home, I had no one to talk my language (Basque) with and I felt that after 5 year abroad I was slowly losing it. As Basque had been for a long time an endangered language I could not let losing it within me, ‘a language is not lost because those who don’t know it don’t learn it, but because those who know it don’t use it’. Thus I started writing to keep closer to my childhood roots, creating a world of language intimacy in my poetry.
Here in the UK I’m surrounded by all the languages I had the pleasure to learn around my years abroad: I speak Spanish with my Argentinian flatmate, Chinese with the friends I met in Hong Kong that recently moved to the UK, Italian with my neighbours, Basque with my mother (on the phone) and my notebook, and English with all the rest of the people around. In that multiplicity of words, I feel comfortably at home and it could not happen anywhere else but here – in London.
The poem here aims to represent that mix of sounds, smells and belongings that are represented in my small grammar mistakes, accents, thoughts, misunderstandings and emotional contexts attached to particular words dancing together in my mind.
– Beatriz Chivite

Basag/Broken is a non-fiction piece about my accidental discovery of the secret location of Margaret Thatcher’s body upon her death in 2013. The incident triggers reflections on my youth during the Marcos era, and the parallels and contrasts between my and my (British) husband’s experiences during the same epoch, and how these shape our different understanding of English words such as poverty, freedom, and oppression.
– Carla Montemayor

Yevgenia Belorusets is a Ukrainian writer, journalist, artist, and photographer who lives between Kyiv and Berlin. Her photographic work calls attention to the more vulnerable sections of Ukrainian society—queer families, out-of-work coal miners, the Roma, people living in the war zone in the East—and was shown in the Ukrainian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. Lucky Breaks, her first work of fiction, was given a 2020 HKW International Literature Award in Germany.
Her diary provides the news from a different vantage.
Updates are published by ISOLARII at 4:00 PM EDT each day

Elena Botchorichvili, born in Georgia, studied journalism and English in Tbilisi. She worked in the Soviet Union as a journalist and emigrated in 1992 to Canada. She is the author of eight books, translated into various languages, among them: The Butterfly Drawer (1999), Opera (2002), and Faïna (2007). She was awarded the Russian Prize in 2015.

Serhiy Zhadan is a Ukrainian poet, writer, musician, and political activist, born in Starobilsk, Luhansk Oblast in Ukraine, in 1974. He wrote 12 books of poetry and 7 novels and is the winner of more than a dozen literary awards. His works have been translated into more than 20 languages. Zhadan collaborated with Kharkiv-based music bands. Since 2014 Serhiy Zhadan has made numerous visits to the front lines of the Donbas region, in 2017 he co-founded Serhiy Zhadan Charitable Foundation to provide humanitarian aid to front-line cities.

Lyuba Yakimchuk is a Ukrainian poet, screenwriter, and journalist. She was born in Pervomaisk, Luhansk Oblast, in 1985, and now lives in Kyiv. She is the author of several full-length poetry collections, including Like FASHION and Apricots of Donbas, and the film script for The Building of the Word. Yakimchuk’s awards include the International Slavic Poetic Award and the international “Coronation of the Word” literary contest. Her works have been translated into eighteen languages.

Anastasia Afanasieva was born in Kharkiv in 1982. She is the author of six books of poetry and the winner of numerous major literary awards and prizes, including the Debut Prize and the Russian Award, two of the top awards in Russian poetry. Her poetry has been translated into English, German, Italian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. In the US, her poems in translation have appeared in Cimarron Review, Jacket Magazine, and Blue Lyra Review. She is the translator of Ilya Kaminsky’s book Music of the Wind (Ailuros, 2012). The English language translation of Afanasieva’s poem about refugees won First Place in the 2014 Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize Competition.

Poets around the world have always translated other poets, often without even knowing the source language. Given the poor contacts between Swiss poets from different language areas, and noting that mental barriers may be more granitic than physical ones, Babel conceived the project titled Poethreesome in 2016.

Each year, three Swiss poets translate each other into three national languages. When they do not know the source language, they rely on the mediation of interlinear versions-word for word, with notes on lexicon and prosody prepared by scholars or other poets or translators-or on a shared lingua franca. In any case, the translator and the translated always share a language, that of poetry. Poetic language knows no barriers, not even linguistic ones, that cannot be overcome. Both for writers and for readers. Translation between writers from different linguistic areas thus offers a model of mediation for approaching other people’s cultures and ways of being.

The results of this work are presented at national and international literary events and finally published in Specimen. The Babel Review of Translations.

The 2020/21 edition of Poethreesome is all-female, with three poets whose work of writing and translation intertwine almost to the point of merging: Michelle Steinbeck for German, Laura di Corcia for Italian, Rebecca Gisler, a Swiss-Romanian poet who writes in French and German

I am used to writing texts, but nothing prepared me for writing an original. In 2012, François Félix was putting together a publication for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences of China on “the field of aesthetics in Switzerland today and contemporary Swiss research into aesthetics.” He invited me to write an article on the aesthetics of translation, an article publish in Chinese in a volume titled 瑞士当代美学和诗学研究. The first publication of this text was therefore its translation; it was only later that it appeared in its original French (François Félix [éd.], Xi Dong – Voies esthétiques, L’Âge d’homme, Lausanne, 2015). It was this non-coincidence between the language of my writing and the language of the publication that, for me, initiated the singular experience of writing an original: not one of the words I was writing would be read by the person I was addressing; by the same token, the text that they would be reading would for me remain unreadable. Writing words to be translated that would not be read, making sense of translated signs that one did not write. This strangeness is nothing more than the ordinary event that translation makes happen. I think of it as its most beautiful miracle: that by releasing something between languages, taking something away from both you and me, in a place between there and here, there can be an encounter. Now, thanks to Kate Briggs, the text has found a new writing and a new language; it has been returned to its initial mystery. Once again, its words have been detached from their inscription; they are floating now, incomparably. Listen there, look: other fish are keeping silent, other worms are making their homes in other apples, other voyagers are registering the depths of other nights and, between us, are singing again.
– Arno Renken

Belarusian New Writing: In solidarity with the Belarusian arts and culture community and to draw attention to the country’s current situation.

Joseph Brodsky passed away 25 years ago, on January 28, 1996. We remember him today with the words of his great friend Derek Walcott, who, through the years, wrote various poems for Joseph, either directly addressed to him, like Midsummer, II, or in his memory, like White Egrets, VIII.

York to Teheran is the winner of “To Speak Europe in Different Languages: Hybrid and Collective Writing Competition.” The prize was awarded during Babel Festival 2020 in Bellinzona, Switzerland. (More on the prize and the winner.)
This week I sat down with my aunt’s travel diaries from 1963, making this piece a blend of my writing and her words. Two journals of inspiration have been greatly condensed to meet the word limit, reliving Ruth’s journey through 15 countries. Leaving from York, U.K, Ruth travels all the way to Tehran, with her best friend, in a Mini-Cooper. A trip of epic proportions, it spans an incredible array of languages, cultures and people. The required element of human hybridization is therefore met by this technically being the combined effort of two people, based on archival material. The nature of the itinerary also involves many different realities- from tongue to time zone.
A horticulturist and visual artist, my Aunt was especially observant of nature, and describes in detail how the vistas vary along the drive. With each border they cross, sense of time and communication change. It is a heady mix, for nine weeks.
There is a saying: “New York minute” referring to a super quick instant, a flash! My parents met in New York but my mother’s family hail from Old York, which has the questionable honour of being known as ‘the most haunted city in Europe.’ Perhaps not all that surprising, considering its violent history from Romans and Vikings to medieval monarchs and highwaymen. With the spectre of Brexit looming, maybe it will be demoted to ‘most haunted city in England.’
What could an ‘Old York Minute’ then be defined as, I wonder? Much longer, heavier than a New York one, and maybe somewhat of a hybrid measurement of time, dimensions. Expandable time, time where alternate planes exist, linking to those who have gone before us, and those still yet to arrive.
– Desta Haile

መጀመሪያ ቃል ነበረ… is one of the five texts shortlisted for “To Speak Europe in Different Languages: Hybrid and Collective Writing Competition.” The prize, which was awarded during Babel Festival 2020 in Bellinzona, Switzerland, went to Desta Haile for her York to Teheran. (More on the prize and the winner.)
The text I have submitted to “To Speak Europe in Different Languages. Hybrid and Collective Writing Competition” tries to satisfy the guidelines of the linguistic and genre hybridization, in that it is hybrid between languages, between written and oral forms, and between genres, mixing prose and poetry. It also tries to satisfy human hybridization within soliloquy since the story is written by the characters in a collective way.
– Yohanes Molla

Prendre Langue is one of the five texts shortlisted for “To Speak Europe in Different Languages: Hybrid and Collective Writing Competition.” The prize, which was awarded during Babel Festival 2020 in Bellinzona, Switzerland, went to Desta Haile for her York to Teheran. (More on the prize and the winner.)
“Prendre langue” is an invitation to think about what hybridity means. Is combining words or registers from two different languages the only way to create hybridity? This poem shows that, on the contrary, hybridity can also be reflected by addressing the question of who can make words and who can solely use these words. My relationship to French as a native tongue is shaped by the inherent colonial tension between two types of French: the French that my mother used at home as part of a creole of Darija, Amazigh and Spanish, and the French of Jacques Derrida who appropriated the decolonial question of language from Abdelkebir Khatibi to make it universal. In the first type of French, I observed my mother’s unconditional love for her children. Although she never learned French outside of home and barely left her house in an immigrant’s ghetto twenty kilometres away from Brussels, she made tireless efforts to use French, albeit in fragments. This domestic hybrid French was her own making of a mother tongue. In the second type of French, the official French which I learned outside of home, I suffered the absence of my mother and my reality. To think about a society that made my mother and my reality invisible, I had to disuse the dominant French and make my own language, one that recognizes my history as an indigène. This French is as hybrid as my mother tongue.
– S.C.

Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces is one of the five texts shortlisted for “To Speak Europe in Different Languages: Hybrid and Collective Writing Competition.” The prize, which was awarded during Babel Festival 2020 in Bellinzona, Switzerland, went to Desta Haile for her York to Teheran. (More on the prize and the winner.)
Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces was written as part of a project called Camel Meat and Cassette Tapes, an intergenerational project with the Somali elders of Bristol. During this project, myself, Ayan Cilmi and Fozia Ismail, collaborated with the elders to learn more about the cassette tapes the diaspora used to use to keep in touch with family members back home.
As we co-created more with them, it became clear that the elders were of course themselves and human and fallible, but also represented whole archives of knowings that stretched beyond themselves.
This text I wrote in response to that, is about us, the Somali diaspora living in the UK, the orality of Somalis, and the gaps that we are faced with as we try and connect, with each, older generations, those back ‘home’ and the intangible sense of ‘homeland’. The theme of archives emerged after we worked within those colonial institutions.
It is written in both English and Somali. Some of the portions in Somali are quotes or words and phrases that stuck with me from interviews with the elders we worked with. It is also, in two different dialects of Somali, both those spoken in Somaliland, and the one spoken in Somalia. As translator in the project, watching the elders reach across dialects + languages was humbling. We made meaning and found ways to understand each other, utilising the internet or bringing in physical examples.
Thanks to Fozia Ismail, Ayan Cilmi and the Somali elders of Bristol. And special thanks to Arnolfini, where this project was commissioned for Camel Meat and Cassette Tapes.
– Asmaa Jama

Lidija Dimkovska’s Кога заминав од „Карл Либкнехт“ is one of the five texts shortlisted for “To Speak Europe in Different Languages: Hybrid and Collective Writing Competition.” The prize, which was awarded during Babel Festival 2020 in Bellinzona, Switzerland, went to Desta Haile for her York to Teheran. (More on the prize and the winner.)

“When I Left Karl Liebknecht is a short story cycle which (in a modified way) received the Special Mention for “European cultural heritage” by the EU in 2018 in Vienna, Austria. In 2019 I published in Macedonian an entire short story collection with the same title When I left Karl Liebknecht, short listed for the Macedonian Writers’ Association Award for the best book of prose of the year, 2020. This cycle contains the shortest individual stories about Vitalie, a 32 years old fromTiraspol, Transnistria,  Moldova, moved to Bucharest, Romania, speaking Romanian language (or Moldavian, as it is officially called in Moldova), Dona a 47 years old from Skopje, (Northern) Macedonia, moved to Ljubljana, Slovenia, speaking Macedonian language, Oleg, a 25 years old from Minsk, Belarus, moved to Vienna, Austria, speaking Belarusian language and Taras, a 68 years old and Jamila, a 66 years old from the village of Libknehtivka in Crimea, moved to Prаgue, Czech Republic, speaking Crimean Tatar language. They all used to live or were connected with the name Karl Liebknecht, or more precisely, with an address named for the German leftist, comrade and like-minded thinker of Rosa Luxemburg. These are real places (toponyms), framed within real historical events, but original, fictional people. All the characters speak in their own languages and their stories are translated in English at the meeting in Leipzig. The cycle of stories When I Left Karl Liebknecht is a dissection of actual (political, cultural, migration) events and questions in Europe and the world.”

–Lidija Dimkovska

The Babel-Laboratorio Formentini Prize 2020 has been awarded to Silvia Manzio for the translation of Fran Ross’ Oreo (SUR, 2020). Congratulations to Silvia and her fellow finalists: Cristina Dozio for Ogni volta che prendo il volo by Youssef Fadel (Brioschi, 2019), and Giulia Zavagna for La parte inventata by Rodrigo Fresán (LiberAria, 2019).
The Babel-Laboratorio Formentini Prize, awarded every two years to a young literary translator into Italian worthy of attention, has a budget of 3,000 euros + a residence at the Translation House Looren.
The call for the next edition (2022) will be announced on the Babel Festival website and social media.
Go to the Prize webpage >>

When I was a child one of my favourite things was looking through the windows of strangers as darkness fell. I could have people watched for hours, had I had the chance, watched them living their lives illuminated in the windows. I painted myself a picture of what they did, who they were, their roles and relationships, the careers they pursued, and for some reason I struggled to imagine a single one of them ever having to deal with a problem, a tragedy, or a misfortune.
Framed in the cosy light and under the protection of the familiar they seemed predestined to be happy, secure, loved. In my childish naivety I bestowed upon those people a cloudless life.
Yet what fascinated me the most, and what placed this occupation so close to my heart, was the simultaneity of the flow of events I was witness to. Rarely did the narrow perspective of one’s own life afford this kind of insight. I was dimly aware of it even as a child, and on some subconscious level it made me sad: always being trapped in one’s own life; only ever so rarely partaking in the life of another to the extent that would, perhaps, be necessary to comprehend the sheer colossal scale of life in its total brutal parallelism.
Just why I was so dead set on grasping that I can’t say, but plain as day this attitude formed an important foundation for my choice of career. There, where insight was denied, where the curtains were left drawn, I wove my own whole cloth instead.
A lot of time has passed since then, but till this day when I walk along a street in the dark I find my eye drawn inexorably upward, catching on some bright window, and my imagination starts to gallop, as if my thoughts were a day at the races. The naivety of my childhood is long behind me of course, and I’m not enough of a utopian to fall for all these people enjoying the harmonious, carefree life. And yet for that, a peculiar, raw longing remains.

© 2020 Nino Haratischwili, Translation Bryn Roberts

This year marked the first edition of “M’illumino / d’immenso” for Arabic-speaking countries. Among the novelties of the Egyptian edition is the creation of a special prize for young translators. The jury evaluated the translations of fifty competitors and awarded the prize to Abdelrazek Fawky Eid. The special young translator prize went to Fatmaelzahraa Emad Hanafi Abdou Abdalla.

Author’s note: Every word said here by Coleridge is taken from his prose writings. The Narrator – Glyn Maxwell in a prolonged dream of an autumn term – is appalled that a famous actor has been hired to read ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ instead of Coleridge himself, but the great poet seems too drunk to care…. Maxwell finds him in the pub.

Described as “a landmark, not in the West Indian, but in the contemporary novel” by C.L.R. James, Earl Lovelace’s Caribbean classic tells the story of Calvary Hill – poverty stricken, pot-holed and garbage-strewn – where the slum shacks ‘leap out of the red dirt and stone, thin like smoke, fragile like kite paper, balancing on their rickety pillars as broomsticks on the edge of a juggler’s nose’. The Dragon Can’t Dance is a remarkable canvas of shanty-town life in which Lovelace’s intimate knowledge of rural Trinidad and the Carnival as a sustaining cultural tradition are brilliantly brought to life.

Conosciuto soprattutto per le sue prose brevi, i suoi racconti e i suoi romanzi, Robert Walser (Biel 1878-Herisau 1956) è anche autore di una libro di poesie e di un’opera in versi emersa nella sua ampiezza (quasi 350 liriche) soltanto dopo la sua morte. Le due poesie qui riportate fanno parte della raccolta pubblicata da Bruno Cassirer nel 1909 e ora riproposta in edizione italiana con testo originale a fronte dalle edizioni Casagrande, a cura di Antonio Rossi. Le versioni francesi di Marion Graf sono state pubblicate da Zoé nel 2008.

JUNIVERS, a project initiated by the program TOLEDO, enticed translators of poetry from around the world to the Literary Colloquium Berlin in June. Together, they approached the poetical and translative works of Erich Fried and worked on his poem “Angst vor der Angst,” which loosely translates as “Fear of Fear.” They came up with several versions of the poem – and almost as many versions of fear, which shows itself in a new light in every linguistic universe. Here are the collected poems, from language to Language, from fear to Fear.”
– Aurélie Maurin & Florian Höllerer
“The International Literary Festival Erich Fried Days is a biennial event taking place in Vienna with a focus on new literary developments and relevant socio-political discourses and debates of our time. A special theme is chosen for each festival by the Erich Fried Society – the programme then includes international new book releases as well as authors whose body of work reflects upon the subject. All books are presented by the authors themselves in their mother tongues– thus evoking a multitude of sounds, tones and voices. In 2019 the chosen theme is “NO|FEAR. Literary Spectres and Overcoming Fear.”
– Anne Zauner
www.toledo-programm.de
https://erichfriedtage.com/en/

M’illumino d’immenso, International award for the best translation of Italian poetry into Spanish was conceived to promote the translation of Italian language poetry, both from Switzerland and from Italy, within the Spanish speaking countries. The award is organised by Swiss poet Vanni Bianconi and Mexican poet Fabio Morabito, together with translator Barbara Bertoni, supervisor of Laboratorio Trādūxit, with the support of the Italian Institute of Culture of Ciudad de México, the Swiss Embassy in Mexico and Bibloteche di Roma. This year’s contest featured the works of 109 translators from 14 different countries, including Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Germany, Guatemala, Italy, Mexico, Nicaragua, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, and Venezuela. The jury composed of poets Fabio Morábito and Francisco Segovia and Italian translator Barbara Bertoni has awarded the prize to Rocío Moriones Alonso.

Kraft is Lüscher’s critically acclaimed debut novel, which won the 2017 Swiss Book Prize.
The protagonist, a professor of rhetoric Richard Kraft, travels to Silicon Valley to justify the benefits of scientific and technological advances and earn a million dollars for this. Jonas Lüscher creates a brilliant and fascinating satire by criticizing digital totalitarianism and demonstrating the clash of European cultural traditions with unreasonable American optimism. 

Nel 2019 Babel si spinge ai confini delle lingue naturali, alla ricerca di lingue immaginate, scomparse, futuribili, gergali, disprezzate, scientifiche, silenziose, visive ed enigmatiche.
Lingue per articolare un cosmo ipotetico, come quello di Tlön tratteggiato da Borges, o mondi, come in Tolkien o Star Trek, oppure paesi, come gli Antipodi di Rabelais e la Persia nel Dialogo dei massimi sistemi di Landolfi.
Lingue per chi è senza lingua, sia che la fugga o che la stia cercando: Nimrod, primo re di Babilonia e ideatore della torre di Babele, che si esprime in un linguaggio «a nullo noto»; le lamine d’oro orfiche, che infilate nella bocca dei morti guidavano nell’oltretomba l’anima iniziata, o la lingua ignota inventata da Hildegard von Bingen per riscattare il linguaggio dalla sua caduta.
E ancora, lingue per tutti, come l’esperanto e gli esperimenti di lingue ausiliarie internazionali, lingue perfette e lingue logico-matematiche. E lingue per pochi, come i gerghi, gli slang, gli argot, ma anche crittografie, controscritture e anagrammi; lingue scherzose, infantili e furbesche; lingue iniziatiche, magiche o segrete; i dialetti e i patois, le lingue marginali, espatriate e disprezzate.
Non parlerai la mia lingua sperimenta nuovi metodi e formati alternativi, per portare al pubblico di Babel lingue inaudite, inaccettabili, inaccessibili, accostando ai dialoghi con gli autori le dimensioni del laboratorio, della creazione collettiva e della performance.

Babel. Festival di letteratura e traduzione
12-15 settembre | Bellinzona | Svizzera

Compagnia delle poete is a theatre poetry ensemble created in the summer of 2009 on the initiative of Mia Lecomte. Its members are all foreign or Italian-foreign women poets writing in Italian – Prisca Agustoni, Cristina Ali Farah, Anna Belozorovitch, Livia Bazu, Laure Cambau, Adriana Langtry, Mia Lecomte, Sarah Zuhra Lukanić, Vera Lucia de Oliveira, Helene Paraskeva, Brenda Porster, Begonya Pozo, Barbara Pumhösel, Melita Richter, Francisca Paz Rojas, Candelaria Romero, Barbara Serdakowski, Jacqueline Spaccini, Eva Taylor –: twenty poets from various continents, each with her own particular history of migration and plurilinguism.
La Compagnia is a sort of “orchestra” that can harmonize the texts of poets influenced by their diverse linguistic and cultural traditions, to create performances in which the word is supported and amplified by different artistic languages. Besides its theatrical activity, the Compagnia is often invited to take part in academic and literary seminars, conferences and workshops, both in Italy and abroad, on the subject of transnational literatures.
This unpublished poem by Antonella Anedda was written in Italian and translated for the first time in the various languages of the Compagnia. This is part of a series of plurilingual translations of unpublished texts by contemporary poets edited by the Compagnia.
(www.compagniadellepoete.com)

“In tutte le civiltà, anche in quelle ancora senza scrittura, molti, illustri e oscuri, provano il bisogno di esprimersi in versi, e vi soggiacciono: secernono quindi materia poetica, indirizzata a se stessi, al loro prossimo o all’universo, robusta o esangue, eterna o effimera. La poesia è nata certamente prima della prosa. Chi non ha mai scritto versi?
Uomo sono. Anch’io, ad intervalli irregolari, ‘ad ora incerta’, ho ceduto alla spinta: a quanto pare, è inscritta nel nostro patrimonio genetico. In alcuni momenti, la poesia mi è sembrata più idonea della prosa per trasmettere un’idea o un’immagine. Non so dire perché, e non me ne sono mai preoccupato: conosco male le teorie della poetica, leggo poca poesia altrui, non credo alla sacertà dell’arte, e neppure credo che questi miei versi siano eccellenti. Posso solo assicurare l’eventuale lettore che in rari istanti (in media, non più di una volta all’anno) singoli stimoli hanno assunto naturaliter una certa forma, che la mia metà razionale continua a considerare innaturale.”
– Primo Levi, 1984

– – –

Per commemorare il centenario della nascita di Primo Levi, «Specimen. The Babel Review of Translations» presenta una selezione di poesie dello scrittore torinese, in italiano e in inglese, tratta dal volume «The Occasional Demon», un’edizione limitata a cura di Marco Sonzogni e Harry Thomas pubblicata nel 2019 da Cuba Press.

Oca Babel – performances of collective and multilingual writing
Oca Babel is the home of translation and linguistic hospitality: it hosts performances in Portuguese, Tupi, Swiss-German, Italian, broken English, Makushi, Quechua, Japanese, Spanish. Writers and translators from Brazilian, Switzerland, Argentina and Mexico have worked in pairs, confronting differences in languages, sharing visions, writings and voices.
Written especially and collectively for Oca Babel, the texts presented at Flip are the result of these meetings. Oca Babel works with writers of indigenous and African backgrounds, and from other migrations or other margins. The margins need to find ways to be heard: hegemonies need to hear them with the same urgency
Oca Babel runs at FLIP from July 11th to July 13th.

What is the process of assimilation implemented by the Brazilian state towards the Indian peoples? And what does their resistance mean for us? Inextricably linked to the land that generated them, the Indians and other indigenous peoples of Brazil are a living example of how it is still possible to resist the machine of Western civilisation. The exploitation of natural resources and the consequent destruction of forests and of all their human and non-human inhabitants clearly goes through the assimilation of all these peoples, for which an intrinsic link to the earth is still the only possible way of living. Through this public talk given during the Indigenous April event, Edoardo Viveiros de Castro tells us how the Brazilian state is preparing to launch its final offensive against the Indians. Held a few days after the symbolic occupation of the Congress by the Indian communities, it tells us how an alliance between all the minor peoples of the earth is possible. The Indians of Brazil are the first “Un-Volunteers of the Fatherland” and thanks to their five hundred-year resistance against whites they are a very rich source of inspiration, for those who no longer believe in the promise of happiness boasted by this economic system.

In the International Year of Indigenous Languages, Specimen will publish a series of poems and translations in indigenous languages.
Here are 3 poems by Enriqueta Lunez from Sk’eoj Jme’tik U/Cantos de Luna, written in Tzotzil, a Mayan language spoken in the Mexican state of Chiapas.
Published with a Spanish translation by the author and a German translation from Spanish by Johanna Malcher- 

At the beginning of 2015, students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) invited me to participate in one of their seminars as an Arabic-Spanish translator. They were graduate students from different departments at the UNAM who met once every two weeks as part of the “Heteronomías de la justicia: de exilios y utopías” permanent seminar, led by Prof. Silvana Rabinovich from the Institute of Philological Studies. The purpose of the invitation was that they heard about Mahmoud Darwish’s long poem خطبة الهندي الأحمر (translated into English by Sargon Boulos as “Speech of the Red Indian”) through Amnon Raz-Karkotzkin (Nono) when he was a visiting lecturer, and they wanted to translate the poem into Spanish and, through Spanish, to indigenous languages of Mexico.
The poem first appeared in Arabic, in 1992, in the book أحد عشر كوكبًا (Eleven Planets), in which Darwish commemorated the passing of 500 years since the fall of Al-Andalus and the beginning of America’s “discovery.”
The translation was a collective one: at our meetings every two weeks, I would read a number of verses of the poem in Arabic, first, and then I would read them in my own Spanish translation. My translation would be written down and was discussed word by word, constantly referring to the content, poetics, forms and sound of the Arabic original. After finishing each of the seven sections of the poems, we would revise the section as a whole. After finishing the seven sections, six months later, the whole poem was reread and revised a number of times by the group as well as by outsiders, such as the Puerto Rican poet Mara Pastor.
The second stage of the project was to search for indigenous translators, and those who answered the call were Gloria Martínez Carrera (Mazateco translator from San Juan la Unión, Zoquiápam, Oaxaca), Alicia Gregorio Velasco (Chinanteco translator from the Comunidad de San Antonio Analco, Oaxaca), Yasnaya Elena Aguilar (Ayuujk translator from Ayutla), Víctor Cata (Diidxazá translator from Juchitán) and César David Can Canul (Maaya T’aan translator, from the Mesatunich community, Motul, Yucatán).
The book Retornos del Discurso del “indio” (para Mahmud Darwish)  was the result of all these efforts, published in Mexico City by Apofis and the UNAM in 2017.
The students who took part in the Spanish translation seminar are: Silvana Rabinovich, Luz Tafoya, Dánivir Kent, Hugo César Vázquez Morales, Bernardo Cortés, Gabriela Macedo, Rafael Mondragón, Renato Huarte, Alexis Millán, Jorge Rodríguez, María Cataño and Satya Chatillon.
–Shadi Rohana

My friend Anja Lutz from ‘The Greenbox’ in Berlin had the idea to ask Fredrik Sjöberg to write a text for my monographic book after I told her about my fascination with his writing. I thought his way of writing has similarities to how I make art. It is a kind of visualisation of thinking and having associations which lead from one thing to another and another and it’s about spending time. His book‚ The Fly Trap inspired me for several works. I asked him to write a text for my book without any conditions. In the end we had the text in three languages: the original text is written in Swedish, my mother tongue is German, and the language to reach a lot of people is English.
Special thanks go to Anja Lutz, Fredrik Sjöberg, Karine Tissot, Benoît Chevallier, Timo Nasseri, Vanni Bianconi and Specimen.
– Franziska Furter

In collaboration with L’AutoreInvisibile, Specimen dedicates a full Dossier to some of the writers and translators attending this unique, translation focused space. You will find here gathered a wide range of thoughts and reflections on literature, languages and translation by Enrique-Vila Matas, Juan Villoro, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alan Pauls, Fernando Savater, and Adrian Bravi, with an introduction by Laura Pugno. Check the program of the industry talks, curated by Ilide Carmignani at bit.ly/AutoreInvisibileSalTo19

La disdetta di Anna Felder è uscito per la prima volta da Einaudi nel 1974, per iniziativa di Italo Calvino, ed è ora nel catalogo delle Edizioni Casagrande. Di Calvino si conserva una lettera, spedita alla scrittrice il 17 marzo 1973: “Mi pare che lei sia una scrittrice con una personalità molto netta. Il suo modo di raccontare attraverso oggetti, quasi nature morte; o comunque organizzazioni visive dello spazio, o ‘messe in scena’ di momenti della vita quotidiana è interessante e compiuto e richiama esperienze della poesia contemporanea”. Calvino lodava specialmente lo “humour sommesso e trattenuto e continuo” del libro e il suo “sapore linguistico”. L’io narrante del romanzo è un gatto che osserva con attenzione e ironia i piccoli tic quotidiani dei suoi coinquilini umani, i preparativi per il Natale, le ossessioni di un perbenismo ormai alla rovina.

Back in 2008, after several years of living in London, I adopted English as my main writing language. Without going into too much detail, I can say that this was born out of a need to make sense of the world around me, in a language this world could understand. At the time of typing these words (2018) I have all but stopped writing in my mother tongue, Spanish. I will never feel at home in my adopted linguistic medium, but it is precisely this discomfort that keeps me coming back to the empty page, day in, day out.

JOLTS forms part of a series of short stories penned between 2010 and 2017. Although these are quite diverse in nature and tone, they all explore different forms of being in-between places. Some of these stories will be published in December of this year by LCG Editores, from the USA, in a collection called Departure Lounge Music. JOLTS opens the book.

It is perhaps fitting to this state of dislocation that I was asked by Specimen. The Babel Review of Translation to translate these JOLTS — and to translate myself — into Spanish. At first I found this invitation intimidating, for it meant taming discomfort into familiarity. And it wasn’t only a matter of novelty: as corny as it might sound, words in Spanish have a direct sentimental punch for me — what if I cornered myself into some melancholy corner? Yet in the process of translation the opposite happened: translating my own words into my mother tongue had a healing effect. Expressions, names, locations that felt out of place in English gained weight and a new light in Spanish — a linguistic and cultural unconscious loitering in the dark came to the fore. None of these unconscious elements are central to the story and therefore aren’t necessary to the reader in order to make sense of JOLTS. But they are central to me as a writer, as I learned.

If JOLTS deals with the impossibility of being in one place at the same time, this translation attempts to bridge that in-betweenness. Who is this attempt for — for the reader or for myself? — I can’t really tell.

Il Premio Babel-Laboratorio Formentini 2018 per giovani traduttori di lingua italiana  è stato assegnato a Elisa Tramontin il 18 novembre nell’ambito di Bookcity Milano. Abbiamo chiesto a Elisa e alle altre due finaliste, Daniela de Lorenzo e Francesca Bononi, di scegliere un passo dai romanzi che hanno tradotto: Lascia fare a me di Mario Levrero (La nuova frontiera), Lo specchio vuoto di Samir Toumi (Mesogea) e La libreria della rue Charras di Kaouther Adimi (L’orma).

Moshe Khan’s German translation of Horcynus Orca is the first foreign language version of Stefano D’Arrigo’s linguistically intricate masterpiece, the crowning of a luminous career that in 2017 earned Mr. Kahn the Babel-BooksinItaly Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Translators.
Here you can read an in-depth interview (in Italian) with Moshe Khan about his translation work on Horcynus Orca.

Compagnia delle poete is a theatre poetry ensemble created in the summer of 2009 on the initiative of Mia Lecomte. Its members are all foreign or Italian-foreign women poets writing in Italian – Prisca Agustoni, Cristina Ali Farah, Anna Belozorovitch, Livia Bazu, Laure Cambau, Adriana Langtry, Mia Lecomte, Sarah Zuhra Lukanić, Vera Lucia de Oliveira, Helene Paraskeva, Brenda Porster, Begonya Pozo, Barbara Pumhösel, Melita Richter, Francisca Paz Rojas, Candelaria Romero, Barbara Serdakowski, Jacqueline Spaccini, Eva Taylor –: twenty poets from various continents, each with her own particular history of migration and plurilinguism.
La Compagnia is a sort of “orchestra” that can harmonize the texts of poets influenced by their diverse linguistic and cultural traditions, to create performances in which the word is supported and amplified by different artistic languages. Besides its theatrical activity, the Compagnia is often invited to take part in academic and literary seminars, conferences and workshops, both in Italy and abroad, on the subject of transnational literatures.
This unpublished poem by Jean-Charles Vegliante was written in Italian and translated for the first time in the various languages of the Compagnia. This is the first of a series of plurilingual translations of unpublished texts by contemporary poets edited by the Compagnia.
(www.compagniadellepoete.com)

Considered one of the most important novels of the Spanish post-war period, Uncertain Glory (Incerta glòria) tells the story of the Republican front in a bombed-out Barcelona during the Aragon Offensive through the voices of three of its main characters: Lluís, Trini and Cruells. The real protagonist of the work is however the enigmatic, cynical and unpredictable Juli Soleràs, who secretly loves Trini, partner of Lluís. Lucid and intense, the novel is shaped as an investigation around love, war, the uncertain glory of youth, violence and, even more, as a search for God and the meaning of life. Written between 1956 and 1971, subjected to censorship and several times amended, the work of Joan Sales is now a contemporary classic of Catalan literature.

M’illumino d’immenso. Premio Internacional de Traducción de Poesía del italiano al español es un concurso pensado con el fin de fomentar la traducción y la difusión tanto de la poesía italiana como de la poesía suizo-italiana en los países de habla hispana. Es organizado por los poetas Vanni Bianconi (Suiza) y Fabio Morábito (México), y por la traductora Barbara Bertoni, coordinadora del Laboratorio Trādūxit, gracias al apoyo del Instituto Italiano de Cultura de la Ciudad de México y de la Embajada de Suiza en México.
Sus características son que los participantes tienen que traducir un poema de un autor italiano y un poema de un autor suizo de lengua italiana y que el jurado está compuesto por poetas y traductores literarios.
En esta primera edición llegaron 118 propuestas de 16 países distintos: Andorra, Argentina, Bolivia, Canadá, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, España, Guatemala, Italia, Japón, México, Perú, Portugal, Uruguay y Venezuela. El jurado, compuesto por los poetas Fabio Morábito y Pedro Serrano, y por la traductora Barbara Bertoni, eligió como mejor traducción la de Eleonora Biasin Povoleri, que presentamos a continuación.

Poem “Suliko”of the Georgian writer and poet Akaki Tsereteli (1840-1915) became popular right after it was written in 1895. Soon this poem was transferred to music and the song by Barbara (Varinka) Machavariani-Tsereteli (1874-1948) was born. “Suliko” was translated into Russian and then into Armenian, although tremendous popularity came to the poem and the song in the 30-50s of the past century, when, according to the Stalin’s biographers, the dictator himself often sang Suliko. In the work of the Soviet composer Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) “Anti-formalistic Paradise », created in 1948-1968, Stalin’s aria opens with the melody of « Suliko.” The opera was classified until the collapse of Soviet Union.
While working in the archives, we found more than 70 translations of « Suliko » by Akaki Tsereteli in more than 20 languages, we also found unpublished Russian translations of the song’ stanzas, created for special events in the time of Stalin’s repressions that were hidden from the public eyes. The poem was translated in full into Abkhazian, Spanish, Turkish, Greek, Armenian and other languages for the very first time for the book “Suliko in World Languages”, Tbilisi State University Publishing, 2018.
Today we can say that the poem by Georgian Prince Akaki Tsereteli as well as a song of the same title are the simbols of Georgia alongside with Georgian wine, Georgian dance and Georgian polyphony.
– Nino Popiashvili, Suliko in World Languages, Tbilisi State University Publishing, Tbilisi, 2018.

Julio Monteiro Martins was born in Niterói, State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1955, and died in Pisa, Italy, in 2014. “Fellow in Writing” at the University of Iowa, he had taught Creative Writing in Brazil, Portugal and the U.S. before arriving in Italy, in 1996, where he taught a course of Portoguese Language and Literary Translation at the University of Pisa.

For several years, in Brazil, he carried on his political commitment along with his literary activities. After graduating in Law, he was among the founding fathers of the Brazilian Green Party and also member of the environmentalist movement Os Verdes. Advocating for human rights, he worked as a lawyer for the Centro Brasileiro de Defesa dos Direitos da Criança e do Adolescente, where he dealt with the safety of street children, the so-called meninos de rua. He published nine books including short story collections, novels and essays, such as Torpalium (1977), Sabe quem dançou? (1978), A oeste de nada (1981) and O espaço imaginário (1987).

When he moved to Italy, he settled down in Lucca where he run a narrative workshop as part of a Master in Creative Writing in a school he himself had founded and called Sagarana, along with a literary review of the same name, in 1999 (www.sagarana.net). He also published: Il percorso dell’idea (Petits poèmes en prose, 1998); the short story collections Racconti italiani (2000), La passione del vuoto (2003), L’amore scritto (2007); the metanovel Madrelingua (2005) and L’irruzione, a short story which was included in the anthology Non siamo in vendita – Voci contro il regime (2002). In 2013 he published his poetry collection La grazia di casa mia and, in 2015, his interview essay La macchina sognante, published posthumously.

Swiss poet Fabio Pusterla takes the stage at FLIP, Brazil’s main literary festival (www.flip.org.br.) For the occasion, a collection of Pusterla’s poems has been published in Brazil. Swiss poet Prisca Agustoni translated Pusterla’s poems from Italian, her mother tongue, into Portuguese, her acquired language.  Specimen has now combined a series of published and previously unpublished poems into a variety of first and second languages.
This project is part of a series of exchanges leading the way to Babel’s Brazilian edition, September 13-16 (www.babelfestival.com).

Xiaolu Guo’s take on Britishness and acquiring British citizenship, from Lucifer Over London, a collection of nine cinematographic, architectural and photographic tales, written in an English with Chinese, Arabic, Russian and Italian inflections by the foreigners of the latest wave of migration, those that make up today’s London just as much as they contradict it.

CONTRIBUTORS: Saleh Addonia / Chloe Aridjis / Vanni Bianconi / Viola Di Grado / Xiaolu Guo / Wolfgang Lehrner / Susana Moreira Marques / Joanna Walsh / Zinovy Zinik

Translations: Nausikaa Angelotti, Vanni Bianconi, Marina Mercuriali, Daniela Marina Rossi

Xiaolu Guo and Vanni Bianconi will read from the book at Internationales Literturfestival Leukerbad, June 29-July 1

Sulaiman S.M.Y. Addonia is British, born in Eritrea to an Eritrean mother and an Ethiopian father. His first novel, The Consequences of Love, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and has been translated into more than 20 languages. He currently lives in Brussels and has just finished his second novel.

In 1956, when Agota Kristof was in her early twenties, she fled from Hungary with her four-month-old daughter. As well as being separated from the country of her childhood she also left behind the notebooks which contained her first poems. The sorrow for the loss of those verses pushed the author to rewrite them as well as she could remember and perhaps to reinvent them. Over the years, Kristof composed other poems, both in Hungarian and in French, her new language, and shortly before dying expressed the wish to see all her poems collected in a book. Her wish came true in 2017, when Éditions Zoé published them in a bilingual Hungarian-French edition, which today also comes in Italian, thanks to the editions of Vera Gheno and Fabio Pusterla.
The themes of these compositions are those well known to the many and faithful readers of the novels and tales of Agota Kristof – dismay, loss, exile, the memory of love, waiting, desire – but here, in the spontaneity of poetry they seem to reach an even greater degree of intensity.

The five former Soviet Republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan became independent when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. How have these countries developed since then? With this in mind, Erika Fatland explores their recent and ancient history, their culture, and landscapes. Life follows a different pace in these countries, which used to be the furthest border of the Soviet Union. Alexander the Great’s army brought with them the walnut from Arslanbob in Kyrgyzstan to Europe, and in the Yagnob Valley, on the border of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the population still speaks Sogdian, the primary language of the silk trail. In between the treasures of Samarkand and the bleakness of Soviet architecture, Erika Fatland moves with her openness towards the people and the landscapes around her.

Ahmed Shafie is a writer, poet and translator living and working in Egypt. This piece was written while participating in the Iowa Writing Program 2014, and read before a group of postgraduate students who were studying the works of the participants in the IWP.

Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature and one of the greatest poets of our time, passed away on March 17, 2017. We remember him today with a poem excerpted from White Egrets, published by FSG in 2010.

Specimen. The Babel Review of Translations e Suisse Pride dedicano all’autore recentemente scomparso un doppio ritratto a cura delle sue traduttrici Monica Pavani e Luciana Cisbani, che lo presentano a Milano domenica 25 marzo 2018 alle 16 nell’ambito di Book Pride (www.bookpride.net). Con il sostegno della Fondazione svizzera per la cultura Pro Helvetia.

Giorgio Orelli (Airolo 1921 – Bellinzona 2013) è stato un poeta, critico letterario e traduttore svizzero di lingua italiana. Tra i suoi libri: Tutte le poesie, Mondadori, Milano, 2015. Quello qui proposto con un titolo redazionale è un estratto del suo racconto inedito, e incompiuto, Suite in là con gli anni (© Eredi Giorgio Orelli, che si ringraziano).

I came to these two very different poems quite separately, although through the same medium. The Seidl I first heard in its renowned setting by Franz Schubert–it is said to be his very last composition, written just before his untimely death–while the Kaléko was among the texts I consulted for inspiration when working on lyrics commissioned by Bendorim, the Zurich-based Yiddish-language quartet (in the end I settled on Ronsard and Joseph Roth for my material). I was struck, when I read the two elegies together, by their similarity of concern–love, loss, separation–and difference of attitude; indeed, it was as if the two texts summed up the difference between the romantic sentimentalism of Biedermeier and the cold-eyed, nearly cynical objectivity of the interwar period.
– Rafaël Newman

Below the ancient streets of Istanbul, four prisoners—Demirtay the student, the doctor, Kamo the barber, and Uncle Küheylan—sit, awaiting their turn at the hands of their wardens. When they are not subject to unimaginable violence, the condemned tell one another stories about the city, shaded with love and humor, to pass the time. Quiet laughter is the prisoners’ balm, delivered through parables and riddles. Gradually, the underground narrative turns into a narrative of the above-ground. Initially centered around people, the book comes to focus on the city itself. And we discover there is as much suffering and hope in the Istanbul above ground as there is in the cells underground.

Susana Moreira Marques traveled to the Caribbean coast of Colombia as a Fellow of the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation in April 2017. She traveled through the territory of 100 Years of Solitude 50 years after its publication. This is her resulting essay.

In «A Leuconoe. Ventidue odi», recensione dell’omonima raccolta di versioni oraziane del poeta polacco Adam Ważyk pubblicata a Varsavia nel 1973, Wisława Szymborska riesce in poche righe a trattare, con acume e leggerezza, alcune questioni cruciali della traduzione poetica. Nessun gergo accademico o di traduttologia per lei, ma semplici e preziose reazioni ai versi di due suoi colleghi.
Ringraziamo la casa editrici Adelphi e la Fondazione Wisława Szymborska per averci concesso di pubblicate l’estratto, in italiano e nell’originale polacco.

In Hermann Hesse’s 1927 groundbreaking masterpiece “Steppenwolf“, the reader first makes the acquaintance of the Editor of the manuscript, a character we know very little of. Nothing is revealed of him, not even his name, age or profession, although one cannot but feel the powerful and life-changing impact that his encounter with Harry Haller, the “Steppenwolf“, has made upon him. This is the story of his life, ten years after the enigmatic disappearance of Haller, as told by himself.

I visited Guatemala earlier this year for a migratory procedure. I was offered an urgent job to teach Arabic language at the university, replacing a professor who was forced to suspend his teaching for the rest of the semester due to the occurrence of a force majeure. In order to get paid, I needed to exit Mexico, with my new employment contract and passport, and visit one of Mexico’s embassies abroad. Avoiding our neighbors up north and the trouble it entails to visit them, and not knowing how long the procedure might take, I flew south to Guatemala City and reserved a room at the Hotel Spring, on 8th Street and 12th Avenue, Zona 1, for one week.
The procedure was efficiently carried out at the Mexican Embassy in  Zona 10 in one day, and so I found myself, unexpectedly, having to spend the rest of the week in Guatemala before I had to fly back to Mexico. Captivated by the city’s human scenery and Babylon sonority on the Zona 1’s pedestrian Sixth Avenue, where indigenous Mayan-languages speakers (Ixil, K’iche’ and Kaqchikel, to name a few) stroll through the “Sexta” shouldering Spanish speaking Ladinos, Palestinian merchant newcomers who speak Spanish with a Jerusalem accent, and black Garifunas speaking Garifuna, and amused by how the city is divided up into numbers of zones, streets and avenues one needs to constantly keep track of to move around, and feeling at home in the small-world but intense vibe of the place, I decided to spend the rest of the week in Guatemala City.
I was having coffee with my friend, a friend I had just made, at La Esquina Jazz Café on 6th Avenue, right on the border between Zona 1 and Zona 2. I asked her about Guatemalan literature and what I should read, and she mentioned the name of Rodrigo Rey Rosa and suggested that I would enjoy reading him. I knew of the author and had read a few of his stories that appeared in Siempre juntos y otros cuentos, published by Almadía in Oaxaca. “It’s literature on the violence in Guatemala,” was all my friend said. After having more coffee with milk, “the person who just walked in and sat at the table behind you is Rodrigo Rey Rosa,” she said.
As we were exiting the café, we approached Rodrigo to say hi. My friend reproached Rodrigo for not having written her back after she had written to him in the past. Rodrigo pronounced his easy to remember e-mail address, adding that “I always answer e-mails.”
Two days before leaving Guatemala I decided to write RRR to meet and chat, and he immediately wrote back, suggesting a time and a three-coordinated address. On the next day, my last, I met him in the afternoon in the café San Martín on 20th Street between 12th and 13th Avenue in Zona 10. When I told him what I was in Guatemala for, he asked me why I didn’t think of going to the Mexican Embassy in Belize and carry out the procedure there. Belize also shares a border with Mexico, he reminded me, and I remembered in amazement, followed by horror and then shame. Later we talked about a variety of things like Tangiers, his meeting with Muhammed Shukri in Tangiers, Bowles, indigenous literature, and violence.
Long story short, the idea of translating one of Rodrigo’s stories into Arabic came up, and here is “La peor parte” in Arabic, original Spanish and an earlier Italian translation (by Vittoria Martinetto). It’s the story of a Ladino man in Guatemala City forced into exile, but instead of exiling himself to the familiar abroad, he seeks refuge in the country’s foreign interior.
Many thanks to Iraqi poet Bassem Al Meraiby for revising the Arabic translation of the story.
– Shadi Rohana

A tower whose technical prowess and hubris is attributed to the homogeneity of language and a jealous God who smote both human tower and homogeneity by creating linguistic multiplicity from an original unity: Humans who were one are made many and in the many are the seeds of misunderstanding conflict rage and diminution. Babel is the relay between the city in which the human was one and the name for humanity dispersed. But whose story is this—whose account of the linguistic origins of conflict and rage, ethics and morality? These questions are discussed in a conversation for Specimen: The Babel Review of Translation among Karrabing members Angelina Lewis, Cecilia Lewis, Joclyn MacDonald, Elizabeth Povinelli, Linda Yarrowin and Sandra Yarrowin at Wagait Beach on 13 August 2017.

The Karrabing Collective was initiated in 2008 as a form of critical activism bringing together separate Indigenous clans in Australia’s Northwest Territory in the wake of their government’s Emergency Response intervention – measures taken in the name of protecting Indigenous children that have enabled police to enter homes at will, drastically increased Indigenous incarceration for minor offenses, lead to cuts in social welfare and pressured clans to open their land to mining corporations. These issues are all manifest in their collective’s films, appearing via staged and even humorous scenes that together form an approach the group has called ‘improvisational realism’.

Chirstos Ikonomou writes in that borderless country of existence that may appear meaningless but is still punctuated by flashes of great beauty, tenderness, and the occasional sliver of hope. In this short collection of stories, Ikonomou has managed to bring the tragic poverty of Greece’s working population into sharp focus, and has gone further by elevating this from a very specific political environment into a dark and compassionate meditation on the human condition.
– Stephanos Papadopoulos, from “When Greece Appears“, Los Angeles Review of Books, March 28, 2016.

Ruska Jorjoliani lascia la Georgia a sette anni, in fuga dalla pulizia etnica del 1992-93, e si trasferisce in Sicilia. A trent’anni pubblica il suo primo romanzo in lingua italiana, «La tua presenza è come una città» (Corrimano edizioni), che sarà presto tradotto in tedesco per le edizioni Rotpunktverlag di Zurigo. È un caso letterario: ne scrivono in molti e gli editori cominciano a contendersela.
Non ama scrivere di sé, ma per Specimen ha fatto un’eccezione: questi Frammenti di autobiografia restituiscono l’atmosfera di un tempo passato, un tempo fatto di persone e luoghi a cui la lega un affetto tenero e profondo. I ricordi sono schizzi, immagini che insieme danno forma a un quadro in cui uomini, donne, animali e montagne si prendono per mano in un girotondo che Ruska dirige con cura, mai soddisfatta, sempre alla ricerca di una sfumatura migliore: «Ogni frase la riscriverei fino ai limiti estremi del tempo, non esitando anche ad andare oltre, perché è sempre lo sconfinare, lo sguardo del dopo che m’interessa, sia un libro che, riletto, è un altro libro, sia una bevuta tra amici che assume un senso quando non si è più amici o lo si è più di prima».

On pourrait définir le style de Russell Edson ainsi : la description de situations impossibles, dans un langage simple et précis, sur un ton plat et raisonnable, avec des chutes souvent déconcertantes. Edson fait des phrases courtes, utilise peu d’adjectifs, presque pas d’adverbe, accumule les répétitions. Ces textes sont accessibles à tout le monde, mais complexes à comprendre. Ils sont construits avec une logique qui possède sa propre folie. On croise des femmes qui transforment leur fils en lampadaire ou des hommes qui épousent une chaussure. Mais Edson n’est pas surréaliste, ses textes n’ont rien à voir avec l’écriture automatique. Ce sont des sortes de miniatures poético-philosophiques.
C’est en lisant une interview de l’écrivain Lydia Davis que j’ai découvert Russell Edson. Elle cite souvent cet auteur comme une de ses principales influences. Je me suis dépêché de fouiller sur internet évidemment. On peut y apprendre les choses suivantes sur Russell : son père dessinait des comics dans la presse new yorkaise, lui-même faisait beaucoup de dessins, il a étudié l’art au Black Mountain College, certains l’ont surnommé « le Parrain de la poésie en prose », jeune il ressemblait étrangement à John Cale, vieux à un croisement entre John Huston et le Capitaine Haddock. Russell semble avoir eu une vie calme et discrète avec sa femme dans le Connecticut, où il est mort en 2014. Dans le monde anglo-saxon, beaucoup de poètes contemporains se réclament de lui. En dehors, il a l’air d’être complètement inconnu (du moins dans le monde francophone).
Je ne suis pas traductrice et je ne parle pas très bien l’anglais. Je me suis lancée dans cette affaire de traduction avec naïveté et inconscience. Et aussi une forme de culot. C’était l’été 2017, je n’arrivais pas à écrire mes propres textes, j’ai décidé de traduire une sélection des siens pour ne pas tourner en rond. J’ai beaucoup transpiré sur les détails. Comment rendre la simplicité et la fluidité d’un texte qu’on pourrait croire écrit par un enfant mais qui, lorsqu’on le décortique, révèle la précision d’une horloge suisse ? Dans un entretien, Russell Edson a dit un jour : « Tout le monde peut écrire comme Edson s’il le veut. Moi-même je le fais tout le temps ». Bonne lecture.
– Fabienne Radi

Ho scritto questa cosa, Buchi, in un momento di forte malumore, forse potrei dire che ero in uno stato un po’ angosciato, come credo che, ogni qualche anno, capiti più o meno a tutti. Credo che la scrittura abbia veramente un valore terapeutico e infatti poi il malumore, pian piano, si è consumato e mi è passato. Devo dire che in un certo senso sembra un po’ un ritornare su alcune cose che avevo già raccontato nel mio primo romanzo, che si chiama Sulla felicità a oltranza, e che è uscito a fine ’99, ma che avevo scritto tra il ’94 e il ’96. Quindi tra una cosa e l’altra erano passati quasi vent’anni. Vent’anni sono tantissimi si dovrebbe dire, ma nella testa, nella vita e negli affetti credo che a tanti capiti di essere allo stesso tempo vicinissimi e lontanissimi da alcune medesime cose. Delle volte lontanissimi da cose successe ieri l’altro e delle altre volte vicinissimi a qualcosa che è successo venti anni fa. Tutto va via, poi ritorna, poi rivà via. D’altra parte ho scritto una cosa abbastanza diversa, con un ritmo diverso, una voce un po’ diversa, eccetera eccetera, ma era la voce che avevo a disposizione in quel momento, che mi veniva su dalla gola, un po’ senza fiato, forse. Si vede che a una parte di me piace abitare coi fantasmi e dispiace lasciare le località infestate. Più di così non saprei cosa dire.
– Ugo Cornia

Originally written for the discussion “Local Literature in a World Context” at the Romanian Book Festival, November 17, 2016.

Voici venue l’heure du verdict, l’heure des révélations. Albert Moindre est mort et il découvre l’au-delà, ce qu’il en est, ce qui s’y passe. Sommes-nous vengés ? Sommes-nous punis ? À quoi ressemble le Royaume des cieux ? Ce témoignage de première main apporte des réponses à nombre de nos interrogations anciennes. On le lira si ces questions nous tourmentent, pour être fixés une bonne fois.
Éric Chevillard et son traducteur Gianmaria Finardi seront au Festival Babel le dimanche 17 septembre à 16h00.

Now and at the Hour of Our Death follows journalist Susana Moreira Marques as she attempts to report on a project of palliative home care in Trás-os-Montes, in the Planalto Mirandês, a rural area abandoned by the young. Susana writes about death in a way no journalist ever has and in a range of generic registers: travel notes, standard narrative, stream of consciousness, interviews, as well as what seem to be personal confessions. Rather than erase herself from the text, as most journalists would, she guides us through her impressions and transformation during her experience “at the end of the world” (or of Portugal) and of life.

– Julia Sanches

Susana Moreira Marques will be at Babel Festival in Bellinzona, Switzerland, on Sunday, September 17, 2017.

Poets the world over have always translated the work of fellow poets, even without knowing a single word of the language they were translating from. This situation, more relevant for poetry than any other genre, is widespread throughout the world.
In an ideal scenario, the translator works with an interlinear translation that combines a literal translation (mot-à-mot) with a series of notes about the form, tone, style, cultural references and so on. Otherwise, one would use a third, known language to translate from. Whatever the case, the source poet and the translator poet do share a language: the language of poetry.
Babel has been promoting this way of translating, less common in Western Europe, with several projects. The most prominent resulted in two mirrored anthologies, one, Il vetro è sottile, published in Switzerland by Edizioni Casagrande, and the other, Szyby są cienkie, in Poland by Biuro Literackie, where young Swiss Italian and Polish poets translated each other. The outcome has been brilliant and the books keep circulating widely.
Considering that Swiss poets from the country’s different linguistic regions don’t really know each other’s work, in 2016 Babel Festival got the project Poethreesome under way, by inviting Odile Cornuz, Laura Accerboni and Ulrike Urlich to translate each other’s poems. The result of their joint work has been presented at Leukerbad Literature Festival in July 2016, and subsequently at Babel Festival in Bellinzona. Here is a sample.

Pourquoi raconte-on des histoires depuis toujours ? Pour contrer le temps ? La peur ? Peupler la nuit par un feu et un récit ? Pour s’amuser ? Il y a dans ce rite immémorial une nécessité, un besoin et pas seulement un désir. Car lorsqu’on raconte ou lorsqu’on écrit, l’histoire a un début et une fin, contrairement au monde et à ses étoiles qui parsèment nos interrogations. L’histoire en est l’alternative, la possible cohérence, notre part : il y la pierre tombale et la première pierre, la quête et le triomphe. Cette nécessité de la parole, qui plus tard deviendrait langues, livres, bibliothèques, récits, m’apparut très tôt comme une évidence. Les Mille et Une Nuits en résument la formule : une femme raconte pour sauver sa vie. La sienne, seulement. Alors que toute la littérature est là pour sauver la vie des autres, autant que possible, la part humaine.
Sauf que, pour écrire ou raconter, il faut un feu pour fixer le voyageur et une langue qui maîtrise la peur nocturne. L’aventure de la langue n’est pas dans l’extension de sa synonymie vertigineuse et arbitraire mais dans celle de notre puissance, celle du narrateur et de l’auditeur. La langue est une aventure en soi. Possibilité de libération, preuve de liberté : prendre la parole, c’est amoindrir un dieu qui l’accapare. Dans mon pays, elle est dissidence et correspond donc à mon propre schisme. Elle est aussi le lieu des imaginaires désobéissants. Comment raconter le monde entre le récit de la guerre de libération, qui fait passer la mort avant la vie, et le récit des religieux, qui fait passer l’au-delà avant l’ici-bas ? C’est une question qui obsède mon écriture : prouver que le monde existe !
J’ai écrit Zabor pour raconter mes croyances : toute langue est autobiographique. Écrire, c’est se libérer ; lire, c’est rejoindre ou embrasser ; imaginer, c’est assurer sa propre résurrection. Le dictionnaire est une escalade du sens.
Mais aussi une impasse : les livres sacrés racontent la chute mais ne disent rien du goût du fruit défendu. La langue est dans l’antécédent du mot : le goût. C’est aussi le but de cette fable : rappeler cette hiérarchie.
L’idée était de sauver la Sheherazade des Mille et une nuit et s’interroger sur la plus ancienne des questions : peut-on sauver le monde par un livre ? Vieille vanité (et nécessité) à laquelle le dieu des monothéismes a cédé quatre ou cinq fois.
– Kamel Daoud

These texts were selected at moments of impotence in the face of recurrent events.
The first two, Kayyal’s and Omar’s, were selected in 2015 when my friend Benjamín García and I decided to publish a bilingual Arabic-Spanish anthology that would contain a selection of Palestinian and Mexican blog entries and translate them into Arabic and Spanish. The motive was rather simple: both of us were ardent readers of our respective national blogospheres and have been worriedly witnessing their collapse in front of our eyes. Once a free territory for insomniac individuals’ profound and authentic reflections defying all rules of grammar and morals, we were witnessing how the vast majority of bloggers—similar to Bertrand Russell’s turkey—were eventually induced to the use of the ephemeral “social media” and “smart phones” applications that raze everything in their path. Seeing how the “rich, diverse, free web that I loved is dying” (in the words of Iranian blogger Hossein Derkhashan), Benjamín and I desperately decided to print a book we called Tadwiniyyat: desde la blogósfera México-Palestina. Printed in Mexico City in May of 2016, the book contains 10 Mexican blog entries translated into Arabic and 10 Palestinian blog entries translated into Spanish. Our book was freely distributed in the city’s streets and its texts were read out on various occasions. Kayyal’s and Omar’s blog entries, written in 2014, appeared in the anthology in Spanish translation.
The other three texts (Yawda, Miqdar and Tuffaha) were written in July/August 2014 during Israel’s war on the population of the Gaza Strip, the third in seven years. This time, the Israeli army officially translated its war operation into English as “Operation Protective Edge.” In Hebrew, for the Israelis, the operation that killed 2,220 Palestinians, including 551 children, was named Tzuk Eitan: Mighty Cliff. On July 22nd, while war was broadcasted on tv, a group of poets and artists from Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Argentina, Syria, Guatemala, Iran, the United States, Switzerland and Palestine met in Mexico City’s Casa Refugio—a cultural center and residency for writers who have been targets of political persecution in their home countries—to read the Spanish translations of a number of short texts written on the social network by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and abroad.
In Abilio Estévez’ “Why do I write?,” published here on Specimen, we read that “maybe it’s true that whenever a person doesn’t have any answers he writes a story.” Isn’t that how we feel about writing, reading and translating, after all?

– Shadi Rohana, Mexico City, August 2017

Quello di “Bambini di ferro” è un complicatissimo mondo in cui il gesto d’affetto è ormai obsoleto, in cui il sentimento d’amore non è più spontaneo, e dev’essere messo in atto come uno spinoso rituale o un algoritmo. Un mondo in cui vengono progettati degli appositi dispositivi, le Unità Materne, per crescere i bambini. Programmate a un amore perfetto, le Unità Materne nascono per creare adulti più felici. Ma naturalmente si rivelano fallimentari e pericolose, a causa della contaminazione di un virus da parte di un gruppo sovversivo. D’altronde anche l’amore umano, non solo quello algoritmico, non può essere perfetto ma viene sempre trasmesso con tutti i traumi, le complessità e le imperfezioni della persona che lo trasmette. Volevo un romanzo la cui struttura rispecchiasse quella di una mente schizoide, in cui si scontrassero e sovrapponessero diversi testi e sottotesti, voci e contro-voci (ermetici sutra buddhisti, teorie scientifiche e antropologiche, narrazione storica e narrazione mitologica, voci effettive e voci interiori). In cui i personaggi stessi potessero essere letti come i cocci di una mente sofferente. In cui l’anima, secondo una visione shintoistica della realtà, non è prerogativa dell’essere umano ma viene dislocata dalla narrazione, così che risultino più umani certi oggetti (i robot, altri feticci come le bambole) rispetto agli esseri umani della storia (Sada ad esempio, la crudele direttrice dell’istituto, o Yuki, l’educatrice che percepisce i suoi stati d’animo come calcoli di un computer). E’ un realismo nuovo, non più antropocentrico, che tiene conto della realtà intera. Volevo che la narrazione, sia effettiva che simbolica, incarnasse l’idea buddhista di “identità”, che consiste di frammenti eterogenei e che solo illusoriamente si organizza in un’unità che per comodità chiamiamo “io”. Trovavo interessante che le antiche teorie buddhiste sull’identità corrispondano oggi a ciò che viene descritto e diagnosticato come schizofrenia. La protagonista, Sumiko, è un non-personaggio: non parla, si muove appena, su di lei si specchiano i traumi degli altri personaggi. Autistica secondo i suoi educatori in istituto, più probabilmente è un Buddha che si è spostato più avanti del livello comune di interazione umana. È su questo livello che si incontrano Sumiko e Yuki, la sua educatrice. A ogni lettura del libro può corrispondere un diverso percorso interpretativo: si può seguire la pista religiosa, neuro-psichiatrica, storica, e così via. A ogni lettura, Sumiko può essere qualcos’altro. È a disposizione del lettore, un piccolo Buddha inerme ma potentissimo, capace di raccogliere e mitigare il dolore dell’umanità. Come scrisse Laing, “la schizofrenia è solo un’etichetta appiccicata da alcune persone su altre sotto certe condizioni sociali”. E allora chi è davvero sano e chi è malato? In una società alienata, non sono gli “alienati” ad essere più prossimi a un concetto puro di umanità?
– Viola Di Grado

Quella di Lima Barreto (1881-1922) è riconosciuta – postuma – come una delle voci più importanti della letteratura brasiliana del Novecento. Esistenza difficile e breve, minata da alcol, depressione e internamento psichiatrico. Originale e struggente lo sguardo che dedica all’universo dei vinti della sua città; lucida e tagliente la critica militante alle faglie del brasile repubblicano. O homem que sabia javanês viene pubblicato per la prima volta sulla “Gazeta da Tarde” di Rio de Janeiro il 28 Aprile del 1911. Più che lecita la lettura allegorica del racconto in cui l’ironia dell’autore non risparmia una critica impietosa sul provincialismo pedissequo della cultura brasiliana coeva. La versione che qui si traduce è quella, più recente, pubblicata in Contos completos de Lima Barreto, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2010.
– Roberto Francavilla

Mikheil Kakabadze was a prominent Georgian sportswriter and the editor-in-chief of the first Georgian daily sports newspaper, “Lelo”.
At the age of 19 Kakabadze went to World War II as a volunteer. After being heavily wounded in 1942 he was discharged. Years later he published a collection of short stories describing his war experiences. By that time he was already an accomplished sports journalist and, with his friends and colleagues, had founded “Lelo”. Initially, even without an office space. During those years all Soviet media were heavily politicized, pushing communism propaganda and leaving almost no space for anything else. Short sports news items were squeezed on the last page between some apparatchik’s obituary and weather reports. But in fact they were the most coveted pieces of information. This explains the immense popularity of “Lelo”, which soon became the most comprehensive source of sports-related information. Unlike other newspapers in Soviet Georgia, “Lelo” sold out every day. But in 1976 Kakabadze was dismissed from his position as editor-in-chief after refusing to publish a major Kremlin resolution assessing the work of the Georgian Communist Party – not related to sports at all. His health declined rapidly after losing his beloved “Lelo” and a few years later he passed away. It was only after the fall of the Soviet empire that the Mikheil Kakabadze Award for the Best Sportswriter of the year was established in Georgia.
I came across Mikheil Kakabadze’s short stories a couple of years ago and immediately experienced a sense of encounter with true literature. And I felt regret that his legacy was in journalism and not in fiction.
Mikheil Kakabadze jr. translated the excerpt from Mikheil Kakabadze’s short story “The House” into English. He never got to know his grandfather.
– Elena Botchorichvili

We publish the Italian, Gaelic and Spanish versions of an erotic short story by Joanna Walsh, The Princess and the Penis, a tale of sex without body, or body without love, dependence and obsession, that touches upon issues of female sexuality and desire with amused originality and coarse and piercing details.
The Princess and the Penis is one of the intertwined fairytales that inhabit and roam the dark and sexy, absurd and funny realm of erotic possibilities outlined in Joanna Walsh’s Grow a Pair.

Book and ebook are published by readux.

These 5 new poems by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic have been written, and translated into Italian, expressly for La Milanesiana 2017. The event, which will run through July 13 in Milan and other Italian cities, has “Fear and Courage” as its guiding line. We would like to thank Charles Simic, Adelphi publishing house, and Elisabetta Sgarbi, founder and artistic director of La Milanesiana, for kindly granting us permission to publish the poems.

Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov was the recipient of the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature for his work The Physics of Sorrow. We would like to thank the Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing and Literature for kindly granting us permission to publish Mr. Gospodinov’s acceptance speech.

Le nouveau numéro de “Viceversa Littérature” vient de paraître, avec, entre autres, des inédits de Yari Bernasconi, Irena Brežná, Odile Cornuz, Jérémie Gindre, Dana Grigorcea, Thilo Krause, Silvia Härri, Rolf Hermann, Stefano Marelli, Philippe Rahmy, Tresa Rüthers-Seeli, Matteo Terzaghi et Dieter Zwicky.
Avec l’aimable autorisation de la rédaction de la revue et de l’auteur, nous proposons ici le récit de Jérémie Gindre.

viceversalitterature.ch

We would like to thank Don Paterson–who was among our guests at Babel Festival last year–for granting us permission to publish this selection from his latest book of poems, 40 Sonnets. The English and Italian translations have been commissioned by Specimen to poets Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke and Matteo Campagnoli, respectively. For a full appreciation of the scope of Paterson’s collection, we suggest Sarah Crown’s review in The Guardian.

Nel parcheggio di un motel di Marfa al calare della notte, Giorgio Vasta e Ramak Fazel, il fotografo che lo accompagna per i deserti e le ghost town degli Stati Uniti, si trovano a discutere, mentre preparano un piatto di maccheroni su un fornello da campo, di antropofagia e del senso ultimo del viaggio. Il “10 ottobre” non è che una delle tante tappe di un libro magistralmente orchestrato, nel quale lo scrittore e i suoi compagni di viaggio diventano altrettanti personaggi di una narrazione che attraversa incessantemente i confini tra scrittura documentaristica e fiction, riflessione e autobiografia.
Absolutely Nothing è il quinto volume della collana di scritti di viaggio pubblicata in collaborazione da Humboldt e Quodlibet. Ringraziamo l’autore e gli editori per averci concesso di riprodurre questo estratto.

Commentary to My Arabic Translation of She Is Another Country
By Saleh Addonia
I translated She is Another Country into Arabic, a language I once knew intimately. I say once because when I arrived to London, I decided to forget it (i.e. the written form at least–spoken Arabic is different from written Arabic), for then I felt it was the language of a master. I had to replace it from scratch, and perhaps without being conscious of it, with the language of another master. But learning English wasn’t that easy, if you take into account my deafness; because of it, my main source of learning was the written word. Perhaps, that is why I studied art and design: even if I failed at it, it was an attempt to communicate in images rather than words.
In translating the story, I was also unearthing memories. For when I was searching for words, online or in dictionaries, and found a few alternative meanings, I found myself exclaiming: Ah! yes! I remember this word. I remember that word. I felt enriched by both, the past and the present associations. My sensations and feelings about those words sometimes veered from their given meaning in the dictionary. When I was living in Sudan, I was called a refugee (لاجئ), in Saudi Arabia, a foreigner (أجنبي), and in Britain, I am an immigrant (مهاجر). At the time, I didn’t like the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘foreigner’ in Arabic, and now ‘immigrant’ in English. But ‘immigrant’ in Arabic has a positive connotation. Perhaps that is to do with the prophet Mohammed’s migration to Medina and that of his companions to Ethiopia (المهاجرين).
If I had originally written my stories in Arabic, I think I would  have over-written them. Arabic is a decorative language. I could needlessly have been lost in sea of adjectives and seduced by its lyrically derived words from (mostly) three root letters. I am struck by the child-like intensity of feeling I get upon reading an Arabic word aloud now. I couldn’t say the same with respect to English, which does not prompt me to utter the word and feel it sensually. However, writing the stories in the limited English I have acquired over these 20-odd years made me write very slowly, as the right words would not come easily. This failure to find the words to express my thoughts and the failure to write a sentence correctly after repeated attempts would often lead me to abandon my writing for long periods. Though time-consuming, this slowness gave me more time to think about what I was writing, until perhaps, my intentions had matured. This delay then would become a creative act. Writing in English, the thoughts lead my writing; were I to write in Arabic, the words would.
I am half Eritrean, half Ethiopian. We escaped the war to Sudan when I was 3 or 4 years old. I barely speak my mother’s tongue; Tigrinya. I speak Arabic as well as the Arabs and I speak English well enough (in my own accent) to communicate my ideas. I don’t know how I learnt those two languages, Arabic and English, nor do I know how I lost Tigrinya. And this leads me to say that language doesn’t belong to people nor is it given; it is found and can be lost too. But I would say you’d be better find it young, and when you find it, let it be erotic.

alPestine is a dossier of new Palestinian literary voices edited by Adania Shibli. The texts are “A Moment Must Come” by Mays Dagher, an excerpt from the novel “The Pick-pocketed” by Abd al-Mu’ti Maqboul, and “First Year London” by Mahmoud Omar, written in Arabic and translated into various languages for their publication on Specimen.

“Il mezzogiorno” è una sezione della poesia inedita di Vanni Bianconi “Ore del giorno”. Il giorno in questione è il 7 gennaio 2015. Le altre sezioni parlano del risveglio la mattina del compleanno, della separazione, di una casa lasciata e delle strade di Londra. “Il mezzogiorno” tratta della strage nella sede della rivista satirica “Charlie Hebdo”, avvenuta quel giorno, e lo fa attraverso il filtro dell’Iliade, non appropriandosi della sua dimensione epica, o tantomeno eroica, ma di quella meno evidente che ci restituisce i dettagli minimi, tristi, umani delle persone qualunque uccise in battaglia.

“Ever since I took to writing poems seriously–more or less seriously–I’ve tried to write a poem for every Christmas–as a sort of birthday greeting. Several times I’ve missed the opportunity, let it slip by. One or another circumstance blocked the road.” At the time of his premature death in 1996, Brodsky had managed to write 18 poems on the Christmas theme, later collected by FSG in the bilingual volume Nativity Poems. Variously inspired by the Gospel stories and, mostly, by Italian paintings, his poems are broad in scope, ranging from the birth scene in the cave to the Flight into Egypt, to Christmas celebrations in an unnamed province of the late Roman Empire, as well as the poet’s native Russia, or his beloved Venice. Brodsky was not a Christian in the strict sense of the term–definitely not a churchgoer–but he possessed a profound sense of the Christian tradition as a major force in the shaping of Western culture. And he was invariably drawn, in his poetry and his life, by the metaphysics of the Gospel and the Ancient Testament alike, which he often found himself expanding beyond the limits of doctrine. “Замерзший кисельный берег. Прячущий в молоке” is here presented in the original Russian, along with an English translation by Brodsky’s great friend and fellow Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, and a translation into Italian by Anna Raffetto, taken from Poesie di Natale, published by Adelphi in 2004.

Twenty years after the Rwandan genocide, Marembo, the book by Dorcy Rugamba from which “Back to Kimihurura” is taken, emerges as one of the most telling reports of what really happened. Unlike most accounts of the genocide, there are no historical reconstructions or political and sociological analyses in this book. It is simply the story of the author’s family that was decimated on the morning of April 7, 1994. In spite of the atrocities, Rugamba succeeds in giving us a luminous tale of familial love, a powerful meditation on culture and spirituality, as well as an antidote to the “culture of death” that haunts are age.

This is what you can call a great gift for Specimen’s launch! Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, has given us five unpublished poems which are also a world premiere of his latest book, Morning, Paramin, a collection of 51 poems inspired by Peter Doig’s paintings. Originally conceived by publisher and gallerist Harry Jancovici, Morning Paramin is due out in November 2016 from FSG in the US, from Faber & Faber in the UK, and from Actes Sud in France, under the title Paramin, in Pierre Vinclair’s translation. Our deepest thanks to Derek, then, and to Harry and all the publishers for granting us permission to print the original poems and the French translations, to Peter Doig for the reproductions of his paintings, and to Matteo Campagnoli for the Italian versions.