Word for Word Exchange: Italian
Columbia University School of the Arts & Scuola Holden | 2014-2015
In November 2014, two School of the Arts graduate students from the Writing Program, accompanied by Professor Sam Lipsyte, travelled to Turin, Italy to participate in Word for Word’s inaugural Italian translation exchange. There they met their Italian translation partners and participated in a series of workshops, classes, and events hosted by Scuola Holden, including an intensive translation workshop led by distinguished translator Anna Nadotti & a public lecture delivered by Professor Lipsyte. Over the semester, these students continued to collaborate and translate each other’s work online, supported by the faculty at their respective institutions.
In late March, the students met again in New York City when the Italian students arrived at Columbia. The students participated in a final workshop and review led by translator & interpreter Michael Moore. A public reading event was held on April 1, 2015, with the students in this translation exchange presenting their work along with the students from their sister exchange to Barcelona, Spain.
Columbia University School of the Arts Participants:
SHANE MICHAEL MANIERI holds a BA in Liberal Arts with a concentration in Creative Writing from The New School, where he was a fellow of the Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy, and earned his MFA in poetry from Columbia University in 2015. He was a poetry fellow of the New York State Summer Writers Institute 2011, and was a finalist at the Bowery Poetry Club that same year. His poems have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, 12th Street Journal, Lambda Literary Foundation, and Blanket Stories. Shane is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and is currently working on a collection of poems about growing up in the South.
KEVIN ST. JOHN was born in Colorado and lived there until, at the age of twenty, he moved to Paris to spend a semester at the Sorbonne. He received a BA at the University of Denver with a triple major in Creative Writing, French, and Theatre. Since living in New York City, Kevin has worked as a barback, a bread salesman, a barista, and a writer for the Huffington Post. He is currently an MFA candidate in fiction writing at Columbia, and teaches French in Brooklyn.
Scuola Holden Participants:
ANNALISA AMBROSIO was born in 1989 and grew up in Turin. After attending a high school specialized in classical studies, she graduated in Philosophy in 2012 with a thesis entitled “The Love and the Spirit of Capitalism in the 20th Century”. Annalisa is currently studying storytelling at the Scuola Holden. She is a member of the Italian Philosophical Society and of the Global Shapers Community—World Economic Forum.
ALESSANDRO BIANCHI was born in Lucca in 1989. In 2013 he earned his three years degree in Computer Science from Università di Pisa. In the same year he moved to Turin, where he is currently studying Storytelling and Performing Arts at Scuola Holden. Alessandro has written for theatre and publishes blog posts on his personal website.
Institutional Partners:
Founded in Turin in 1994, SCUOLA HOLDEN is an institution devoted to training storytellers through courses spanning multiple disciplines of writing and performing arts. Scuola Holden also serves as a cultural production center in Italy by way of collaborations with schools, universities, bookshops, publishers, and festivals throughout Italy and Europe.
Institutional Funder:
The ANTONIA & VLADIMIR KUALEV CULTURAL HERITAGE FUND is a foundation based in Los Angeles with a strong interest in supporting collaborative and cross-disciplinary arts programs and arts education.
Participating Faculty:
SAM LIPSYTE's most recent book is The Fun Parts. He is also the author of The Ask (New York Times Notable Book for 2010), Home Land (New York Times Notable Book for 2005 and winner of The Believer Book Award), as well as The Subject Steve and Venus Drive. His fiction has appeared in The Quarterly, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Noon, Tin House, Open City, n+1, Harper's, McSweeney's, La Nouvelle Revue Francaise and Playboy, among other places. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Esquire, GQ and the Washington Post Book World. He was a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow.
Workshop Instructors:
ANNA NADOTTI (Turin) is a distinguished translator who has translated many prominent writers, including Antonia Byatt, Amitav Gosh, Anita Desai and Vikram Chandra. In the last few years she has been working on new translations of Virginia Woolf's novels. Her translation of To the Lighthouse will be published by Einaudi in fall 2014.
MICHAEL MOORE (New York) is the chair of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund and an interpreter/translator from Italian. His most recent translations include Live Bait by Fabio Genovesi, Agostino by Alberto Moravia, and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. He is currently working on a new translation of the nineteenth-century classic The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni.
Read more about the exchange and events on Words Without Borders.