Aulò! Aulò! Aulò!: 25 (World Poet Series) - Softcover

Sibhatu, Ribka

Softcover

ISBN 10: 191611413X ISBN 13: 9781916114135

Publisher: Poetry Translation, 2020

Synopsis

English PEN Award Winner.

Ribka Sibhatu is one of the foremost poets of the Eritrean diaspora and a prominent activist for refugee rights. The present selection captures the scale and range of her achievements to date, from recent poems of direct political intervention, through her decade-long effort to record the oral folklore and myths of Tigrinya tradition, back to her earliest taboo-breaking lyric poems. Sibhatu has devoted a considerable amount of her creative energies to the assemblage and recording of Eritrea’s folkloric canon, a body of oral literature which has been handed down through the ages in the form of ‘aulòs’, which literally means ‘Please give me permission! I have something to say publicly in rhyme!’. Naffis-Sahely has worked closely with Sibhatu for over 10 years, making translations of her poems and fables to bringing them to the attention of English speaking audiences. His dedication to making her voice heard has resulted in this new publication, which includes an afterword by Sasha Dugdale.

This publication was supported by funding from the EU''s Creative Europe Culture Programme.

"Naffis-Sahely’s translation captures the poet’s intricate weaving of multiple worlds – fable and grounded reality, elegiac and absurd, spiritualised emotion and reportage. Through [Sibhatu''s] poetry she allows us to step into her unique gaze as an artist and activist in self-exile..."
- Devina Shah, Modern Poetry in Translation

About this title

About the Authors

Ribka Sibhatu writes in Tigrinya and Italian. Her poetry reflects on the immigrant experience in Europe. Born in Asmara, Eritrea, in 1962, she was imprisoned for a year in 1979 and then fled the country in 1980. Travelling first to Ethiopia and then to France, Ribka Sibhatu moved to Italy in 1996 and settled in Rome, where she has lived ever since. She holds a Ph. D in communication studies from Rome's La Sapienza.

Ribka Sibhatu's first published work was Aulò! Canto Poesia dall'Eritrea (Sinnos, 1993), a collection of lyrics and prose poems originally written in Tigrinya and translated by the author into Italian. This bilingual meditation on her past life in Eritrea and subsequent experience as a migrant was followed in 1999 by Il Cittadino che non c'è. L'immigrazione nei media Italiani (EdUP): a sociological look at the Italian media's coverage of immigrant communities. In 2012 she published Il numero esatto delle stelle e altre fiabe eritree, Sinnos A bilingual Italian-Tigrigna collection of Eritrean fairy tales. Ribka Sibhatu speaks five languages and currently works as a trainer, consultant and interpreter of Italian Court and other international organizations.

Her 2009 collection Aulò has been likened to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and offers a remarkable personal achievement in giving lyric expression to the Eritrean oral poetic tradition. The former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, Sasha Dugdale, has written: "Ribka is a really important activist-poet for our times".

André Naffis-Sahely's second collection, High Desert, will be published by Bloodaxe Books in June 2022. He is also the author of The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin UK, 2017) and the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020). He has translated over twenty titles of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, including works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Alessandro Spina, Abdellatif Laâbi, Ribka Sibhatu and Tahar Ben Jelloun. He is a Lecturer at the University of California, Davis in the US and the editor of Poetry London in the UK.

Edition details

• Publisher: Poetry Translation
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 191611413X
• ISBN 13: 9781916114135
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 66