Tradurre (in) Europa. Translating (in) Europe Napoli. Festival della Traduzione a Napoli 22-29 novembre 2010

http://www.estranslation.net/it/index.php?lang_home=true 61 events, more than 100 guests and speakers; poets, translators, writers and critics, actors, musicians, subtitlers, scholars, film-makers, professional operators, social operators, articulated in 10 thematic routes in 8 days from 9.00 to 24.00., 24 locations, national and international partners. 42 spoken, performed and commented languages, and futher: minor languages, dialects and local idioms, ancient and medieval languages coming to life in modern performances. Naples’ location within Europe’s cultural geography has always been a stimulating topic of discussion. Naples is a territory where subtle borders cross each other, in a tragic or charming way. The Translation Festival «Translating (in) Europe» took place from 22 to 29 November 2010 in the city’s most emblematic venues: the universities and schools, buildings, castles, squares, streets and alleys, bookshops, theatres, ships and docks of a revamped city. This event was the opportunity to reflect on the identity of Naples as a crossroads, an in-between place where the Orient, Europe and the Mediterranean can come together. The Festival allowed to see how Naples’ cultural landscape can be the starting point of a new way of conceiving Europe as a space where languages and cultures meet and are revitalized. After Paris and Vienna, this itinerant international Festival concluded the biennial project E.S.T. aimed at developping a new and broader concept of translation as a way of approaching Naples’ complex, stratified identity both in its local and global dimension. The Festival had both an academic and a general strand and was focussed not only on poetry and narrative but also on dialect, music, comics, cinema and theatre. The Festival involved the people of Naples who are committed to the cultural renaissance of their city, together with the Italian and international institutions supporting this process of renewal. Three kinds of translational activities were planned and actually implemented within the Festival: translating from European into non-European languages and reciprocally, translating within the realm of European languages, and translating dialects and minority languages, which will be directed towards a wide public with workshops for creative translation/rewriting and intersemiotic or intermedial translation (poems into music, novels into films, subtitles and other sorts of audiovisual translation, language into performative arts and events) as well as readings with poets, writers and their translators and projections of films about translation and translators as a subject of inquiry and docu-fiction, theatre shows exclusively produced for the festival. To be successful in this ambitious and multi-tasked Project we gathered a wider support, that combined with the European grant brought to a really huge event. The European logo, motivated institutions and media, otherwise reluctant to join common ventures in interdisciplinary fields. The idea of doing a common Project in the name of Europe actually brought together under the same score different tunes of the cultural and economic actions around translation. Translation and Translators emerged fully as the bearers of a constructive Image of Europe’s Traditions but also of Europe’s Tasks, i.e. of Europe as a space of ageold cultural exchanges and intermediations. The Translation Festival in Naples was able to achieve what we planned, and even in such a difficult season for the city: a multicultural, multi medial event, really able to reach people in their own homes and imagination with a strict connection with the mass- media and social life (radio programmes, workshops etc.) Very successful was the series of encounters among translators and authors, some of them were filmed and screened on the web. The ten thematic itineraries of the Festival: The theatre of Translation; Translation, Music, Cinema; Translation towards the XXI century: performative arts, photography, comics, and the Internet; Philosophies of Translation; Practices and politics of translation; Classics rewritten today; Re-translating the classics of modernity; The Italy exported by translators; The Europe of languages and dialects; The world in Italy through the voices of translators.