We are another country. Displacements and languages – Writers and Translators in conversation
Thursday 24 October, 6.30pm at ICI London
Babel is the literary festival focused on translation. Understood as linguistic hospitality, translation is the practice that prompts you to go towards the other, in order to invite the other to your own home, and serves as a model for other kinds of hospitality. This is the spirit that will inspire the conversation between Saleh Addonia, a London-based Ehtiopian – Erithrean writer, whose first book, She is Another Country, was first published in Italian translation; writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, always on the move between different languages and countries, always stopping-by in London and at the Babel Festival where she curates the writing workshops; the translator Nausikaa Angelotti, Saleh Addonia’s translator and Babel’s Exec Director; Vanni Bianconi, poet and Babel’s founder, who is also based in London and writes about is in a tangle of different languages.
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Saleh Addonia was born to an Eritrean mother and an Ethiopian father. He and his family survived the Om Hajar massacre and escaped to a refugee camp in Sudan. At the camp and at only 12 years old, he lost his hearing. At eighteen he arrived in the UK as a refugee. His collection of short stories “Lei è un altro paese” was published first in its Italian translation, thanks to Edizioni Casagrande in 2018. The English original had to wait 4 more years and was published in 2022 with the title “The feeling house”. In 2021 he was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s (RSL) Literature Matters Prize.
Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is a Somali Italian poet, novelist, playwright and librettist. She is the author of three novels, Madre piccola (Frassinelli 2007 ) Il comandante del fiume(66thand2nd 2014) (Little Mother and Commander of the river both published in English by Indiana University press as part of the Global African Voices Series), Le stazioni della luna (66thand2nd 2021), the dell’ekphrasis La danza dell’orice (Juxta Press 2020) and the collection of short stories Le ceneri della fenice (Hopefulmonster 2022). She holds a PhD in African Studies from the University of Naples, L’Orientale.
Nausikaa Angelotti is a freelance translator for various publishing houses and magazines (Marsilio, Edizioni Casagrande, Rizzoli, Humboldt Books). She is the chief operating officer of Babel festival and among the founders of Specimen. The Babel Review of Translations.
Vanni Bianconi. Born in Locarno, Switzerland, in 1977, he is the author of four poetry collections in Italian, Faura dei morti, Ora prima, Il passo dell’uomo, and Sono due le parole che rimano in ore. In 2016 he published his first English language prose book, London as a Second Language (Humboldt Books), and in 2021 the prose collection Tarmacadam (Nottetempo). He was awarded the Schiller Prize, the Marazza Prize for translation, and was shortlisted for the European Poet of Freedom Prize 2016. He has translated works by W.H. Auden, William Faulkner, W. Somerset Maugham, Denton Welch, Erich Fromm. He’s the main founder of Babel festival and among the founders of Specimen. The Babel Review of Translations. From 2021 to 2024 he has worked as director of the cultural programs at RSI.