Transpoésie : Where Voices Meet

Transpoesie 2026 – Where Voices Meet brings together poets from across Europe and beyond whose work is shaped by place, language, memory, and movement. In this edition, poetry emerges from borderlands, islands, rural regions, diasporic lives, and multilingual realities—then travels onward through translation, not as an afterthought, but as a creative act in its own right.

Here, translation is not simply a bridge between fixed meanings. It is a practice of listening, revoicing, and transformation. Poems carry the textures of local histories, endangered tongues, accents, silences, and distances; they arrive bearing the marks of where they come from.

Where Voices Meet invites audiences into a poetic space where languages do not dissolve into one another, but resonate side by side—distinct, restless, and alive.

What happens when a poem travels? What remains, what changes, what begins again?

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.

About festival Transpoésie

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, 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.