• 10/09/2026

TRANSPOESIE 2026 – WHERE VOICES MEET”

In Transpoesie 2026 – Where Voices Meet, poetry begins in place: in landscapes, in thresholds, in communities marked by memory, migration, and linguistic inheritance.

This edition gathers poets from across Europe and beyond whose writing is rooted in specific territories and lived realities—border regions, islands, rural margins, diasporic spaces, multilingual cities, and fragile linguistic ecologies. Their poems remind us that language is never abstract: it is carried by bodies, histories, weather, distance, and belonging.

At the heart of this edition lies a simple but radical proposition: translation is not secondary to poetry, but central to it. Translation is understood here not as replication, but as recomposition—an act of attention, interpretation, risk, and invention. Meaning does not pass intact from one language to another; it shifts, fractures, expands, and finds new forms. In that movement, poets and translators become co-creators, shaping how a voice can travel without being severed from its origins.

The festival foregrounds poetic practices that embrace multilingual layering, code-switching, oral transmission, rhythmic adaptation, repetition, silence, and productive misunderstanding. Rather than smoothing out difference, Where Voices Meet values friction, texture, and specificity. It welcomes voices working in minor, migrant, hybrid, unofficial, and endangered languages, as well as poets whose work reveals how language holds ecological knowledge, community memory, and the untranslatable dimensions of experience. 

Since 2011, Transpoesie has created a space where poems are heard in their original languages and opened to wider audiences through performance, translation, and encounter. Organized by EUNIC Brussels around the European Day of Languages and Linguistic Diversity, the festival brings together readings, debates, and public writing sessions that celebrate poetry not only as an art form, but as a way of inhabiting linguistic plurality.

In Where Voices Meet, poetry becomes a shared space of attention—one in which voices remain rooted, even as they move across borders.