Chosen Tongue

Eleonora Balsano
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  • LIVRES
  • CHAQUE SEMAINE
Chosen Tongue

A podcast about translingual writers and their journeys.

  1. 29 NOV.

    Sulaiman Addonia: Writing is Not Just About Language (Bonus Episode)

    Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. As a child, he lived in refugee camps in Sudan and Saudi Arabia. His third novel, The Seers, has been published in 2024. His first novel, The Consequences of Love, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In 2021 he published Silence Is My Mother Tongue. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Addonia now lives in London, where he runs a creative writing school for refugees and asylum seekers. In Brussels, he founded The Asmara Addis Literary (in Exile) Festival (AALFIE), a vagabond, multilingual celebration rooted in pan-African and feminist values. It aims to showcase the rich linguistic wealth and diversity of European artists with international backgrounds.

    32 min

  2. 27 OCT.

    Ruben Quesada: Bridging Cultures through Translation

    Ruben Quesada is a Costa Rican-American poet and translator based in Chicago. His latest poetry collection, Brutal Companion, winner of the Barrow Street Press Editors Prize, was published in October 2024. He edited the anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, which won an Independent Publisher Book Award in 2023. Quesada’s work appears in Seneca Review, American Poetry Review, the Best American Poetry series, Harvard Review, and The New York Times Magazine. We discussed the influence of Ruben's Costa Rican background on his poetry and the importance of storytelling and translation in bridging cultural gaps, as well as his desire to preserve his family's culture through his work.

    27 min

  3. 20 OCT.

    Noémi Kiss-Déaki: English is My Allspice

    Noémi Kiss-Deáki is a Hungarian author living in Finland. Her début novel, Mary and The Rabbit Dream, was published by Galley Beggar Press in 2024. Noémi currently lives on the Åland Islands with her daughter. We discussed her creative process, the challenges and joys of navigating languages and cultures, and how Noémi found her writing voice in English.

    26 min

  4. 13 OCT.

    Viviana Fiorentino: We are Collectors of Others

    Viviana Fiorentino is an Italian poet, novelist, and translator living in Ireland. Her poems in English appeared in anthologies (Dedalus Press, Salmon Poetry, and Arlen House), magazines (Banshee, The Stinging Fly, Southword, The London Magazine) , on public transports in Dublin (Poetry in Motion, Poetry Ireland), on air for RTÉ 1, in the The Irish Poetry Reading Archive. She translated into Italian the Irish poets Freda Laughton (Arcipelago Itaca, 2022), Doireann Ní Ghríofa (VersoDove, rivista di Letteratura, n. 23, 2024), Paula Meehan (Il Pietrisco, 2023) and Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier (Verodove, rivista di Letteratura, n. 22, 2023). She published an essay on Anne Carson with translations in the volume Trasparenze 8/22 of San Marco dei Giustiniani (2022). In Italian, she published a novel (Transeuropa Edizioni, 2019) and two poetry collections (Controluna Press 2019, Zona Contemporanea 2021). Viviana’s short stories, poems, interviews and essays have been published in Literary Journals and online magazines such as Italian Poetry Review, Nazione Indiana, Nuovi Argomenti, Balena Bianca. She is the 2022 Irish Chair Of Poetry Student Prize winner and finalist in the Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry Competition 2024. Viviana is currently a PhD candidate at the Seamus Heaney Centre (Queen's University Belfast.) We discussed Viviana's journey as a poet and writer who transitioned from Italian to English after moving to Ireland, the role of translation in her creative process, and the emotional shield English has given her.

    30 min

  5. 5 OCT.

    Yael van der Wouden: English Gave Me Control over My Experiences

    Yael van der Wouden is a writer and teacher of creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her debut novel, The Safekeep, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024 and has been translated into over fourteen languages. Her essay on Dutch identity and Jewishness, "On (Not) Reading Anne Frank", has received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018.  We discussed the role of displacement and otherness in Yael's work and how English gave her a sense of control over her experiences. Yael also reflected on the challenges of writing in multiple languages and the differences in tolerance towards foreignness in English and in Dutch.

    38 min

  6. 28 SEPT.

    Pegah Ouji: Glimpsing the Chosen Tongue through a Keyhole

    Pegah Ouji is an Iranian American writer who writes in Farsi and English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Joyland, Epiphany, Fugue, Split Lip among others. She has been a scholarship recipient from Kundiman, Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute, Hudson Valley Writer’s Center, Literary Arts, Grub Street, and Shipman Agency. She was a 2024 Emerging Writer Fellow at Smokelong Quarterly. She is currently an editorial fellow at Roots, Wounds, Words where she is working on an anthology of creative work by BIPOC justice-involved and impacted artists. We discussed the challenges Pegah encountered as an outsider in America, as well as the complexities of language and Pegah's desire to create a space that blends both Farsi and English. You can read Pegah's story, Is It Too Late? here.

    32 min

  7. 21 SEPT.

    Sumitra Singam: Learning and Translating Trauma as a Language

    Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian writer and psychiatrist living in Melbourne. Her work has been published widely, nominated for a number of Best Of anthologies, and was selected on Best Microfictions 2024.  She works in mental health. We discussed how Sumitra incorporates words from different languages into her stories and the impact of her Malay literary tradition on her writing style. Sumitra also explores the connection between trauma and language, highlighting the power of putting traumatic experiences into words and emphasizing the importance of language in shaping our understanding of ourselves and our experiences.

    33 min

  8. 14 SEPT.

    Aleksandar Hemon: When a Mother Tongue Stops Being Enough

    Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, as well as The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, Love and Obstacles, The Book of My Lives, The Making of Zombie Wars, as well as a couple of non-fiction books. His most recent novel is The World and All That It Holds (2023) Aleksandar Hemon has worked as a writer for Radio Sarajevo Youth Program, and then as a waiter, canvasser, bookseller, bike messenger, as well as a supervisor at a literacy center, and a teacher of English as a second language (all in Chicago). His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Esquire, Granta, The New York Times, Playboy, McSweeney’s, TriQuarterly, The Baffler, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, Ploughshares and The Paris Review, among others. He’s written for film and television, most recently The Matrix Resurrections. He produces and releases music as Cielo Hemon. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the PEN/ W.G. Sebald Award, a USA Fellowship, PEN/Jean Stein Oral History Grant etc. He has taught at Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champagne, Columbia College Chicago, University of Chicago, New York University. He finally settled at Princeton University, where he teaches now. We discussed the changes a second language brings to the author's voice and perspective, as well as Hemon's connection to his native Sarajevo and how he translates the city for a foreign audience. Hemon also shared his experience of writing columns in Bosnian as a diasporic person and how writers should allow themselves to write in as many languages as they wish because languages are superpowers.

    36 min
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À propos

A podcast about translingual writers and their journeys.

Informations

  • Création
    Eleonora Balsano
  • Années d’activité
    2023 - 2024
  • Épisodes
    32
  • Classification
    Tous publics
  • Copyright
    © 2023
  • Site web de l’émission
    Chosen Tongue

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