{"id":12563,"date":"2022-08-27T12:26:21","date_gmt":"2022-08-27T19:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/?p=12563"},"modified":"2022-08-27T12:26:22","modified_gmt":"2022-08-27T19:26:22","slug":"fabio-marabito","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/fabio-marabito\/","title":{"rendered":"\"Speaking more than one language and translating it on a daily basis is a richness\": Fabio Morabito"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"521\" height=\"415\" src=\"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Fabio-Morabito.jpeg\" alt=\"Fabio Morabito\" class=\"wp-image-12564\" srcset=\"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Fabio-Morabito.jpeg 521w, https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Fabio-Morabito-300x239.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Fabio-Morabito-15x12.jpeg 15w, https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Fabio-Morabito-150x119.jpeg 150w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 521px) 100vw, 521px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/PERSONAJE-DE-LA-SEMANA-FABIO-MORABITO.mp3\"><\/audio><figcaption><sup>Listen to Constanza Mazzotti's voice note<\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>With more than twenty years of teaching at the Institute of Poetics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) for over twenty years, Fabio Morabito knows very well that speaking more than one language and translating it every day is a treasure, as he recognizes the emotional and psychological value that this implies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For this teacher, poet and writer, the use of two languages is a practice that, contrary to popular belief, constantly enriches both languages, an act that, in his words, must be defended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the corridors of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), people spoke of him with a mixture of respect and a bit of fear. After choosing his subject, half blindly and out of curiosity, I heard a rumor: \u201cHe is very strict,\u201d said someone who had already taken one of his classes.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I decided to ignore those words and headed towards the Poetics Department. A place that, to get to, you have to take the \u201cPuma Bus,\u201d travel outside of Ciudad Universitaria and arrive almost at the outskirts of UNAM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There was Fabio, starting the class to which I arrived a few minutes late.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The discomfort of silence made me say, without anyone asking me, a greeting followed by my name: &quot;Hello, I&#039;m Frida&quot; and, in addition, add an obvious: &quot;I arrived late&quot; followed by silence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Who knows what Fabio must have thought, since until then I had only known him through a vague nickname given by his unknown companion: &quot;Fabio...strict,&quot; he doesn&#039;t seem that strict, I thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By then Fabio Morabito, an Italian born in Alexandria who has been writing in Spanish in Mexico since his adolescence, already had a prolific career as a poet and writer under his belt.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1985 he won the Carlos Pellicer Ibero-American Fine Arts Poetry Award for Published Work for his collection of poems &quot;Lotes bald\u00edos&quot;, a work that brings together two of his most significant poems &quot;Cuarteto de Pompeya&quot; and &quot;La ola que volv\u00ed&quot;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The imagined story of the last moments of two bodies embracing and petrified during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD \u2013 one of the greatest natural disasters of the last two thousand years \u2013 discovered by the Italian archaeologist Vittorio Spinazzolla in 1922 and which he named &quot;The Lovers of Pompeii&quot;, and of which Fabio recreated a last night full of passion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While \u00abThe wave that returns\u00bb, the title of the volume of poetry and short stories about everyday life that brings together three of his books \u00abLotes bald\u00edos\u00bb (1985); \u00abDe lunes todo el a\u00f1o\u00bb (1992), winner of the Bellas Artes Poetry Prize in Aguascalientes; and \u00abAlguien de lava\u00bb (2002), a poem that speaks of the strength of the sea and nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1997, with &quot;When Panthers Were Not Black,&quot; which tells the story of a young feline&#039;s journey in search of her identity, guided by a group of her peers &quot;who leave no trace,&quot; he was awarded the International White Raven Prize by the J\u00fcngenbibliotheke in Munich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 2006, \u201cGrieta de fatiga\u201d (Griet of Fatigue), fifteen short stories about the beauty and curiosity of everyday life \u2013 a favorite and recurring theme in Fabio\u2019s narrative and poetry \u2013 won the Antonin Artaud Narrative Prize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of all this, the only thing we knew was that the teacher was perhaps &quot;strict.&quot;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Whoever said that ignorance is bliss was not wrong. Because this ignorance created a kind of bond between the professor and his shy students in the Translation I and II classes. Thus creating a recurring familiarity on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in the faculty room of the Poetics department, so far from the hustle and bustle of the Faculty corridors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Over time we got to know each other. The translation \u201cteacher\u201d gradually acquired an air of respect that was diluted by the great sense of humor with which he praised each word we experimented with. \u201cWhat does the paragraph say?\u201d \u201cWhat other word can you think of?\u201d \u201cThat sounds good.\u201d \u201cNo, that doesn\u2019t convince.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Years and interviews later, Pen\u00ednsula 360 Press, from its segment \u201cPortraits of the Bay Area,\u201d returns to the same Poetics classroom at the UNAM Institute of Philology to meet up with that professor again and listen to his experiences from his role as a teacher of the subject of Translation of Modern Italian Letters at UNAM, which he has taught for more than ten years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A class that he says is \u201cmore like a translation workshop.\u201d Fabio also reflects on the constant work that is done when coming into contact with another language that is not \u201cone\u2019s own.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Years after those revealing classes, his students met and warmly congratulated their translation \u201cteacher\u201d because, in 2015, Fabio was again awarded the White Raven International Prize granted by the J\u00fcngenbibliotheke in Munich for \u201cCuentos populares mexicanos.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Later, in 2017, he was awarded the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/es.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Premio_Bellas_Artes_de_Narrativa_Colima_para_Obra_Publicada\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Fine Arts Award <\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/es.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Premio_Bellas_Artes_de_Narrativa_Colima_para_Obra_Publicada\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Narrative <\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/es.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Premio_Bellas_Artes_de_Narrativa_Colima_para_Obra_Publicada\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Colima for Published Work<\/a>&nbsp;for \u201cMothers and Dogs\u201d, while in 2018 he won one of the highest awards in Mexican literature, which is given each year to the best published book: the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize from Writers for Writers for his work \u201cThe Reader at Home\u201d.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This prize has been awarded in the past to writers such as Juan Rulfo for &quot;Pedro P\u00e1ramo&quot; in 1955, to Octavio Paz for &quot;The Bow and the Lyre&quot; in 1956, to Josefina Vicens for &quot;The Empty Book&quot; in 1958, to Elena Garro in 1963 for &quot;Memories of the Future&quot; and in 2021 to Cristina Rivera Garza for &quot;The Invincible Summer of Liliana&quot;, among many others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In addition, in 2019 Morabito wins the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/es.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Premio_Roger_Caillois\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Roger Caillois Award<\/a>&nbsp;awarded by the French PEN Club<sup>,&nbsp; <\/sup>An award given each year to an author of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/es.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Am%C3%A9rica_Latina\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Latin America<\/a>&nbsp;and another to an author of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/es.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Idioma_franc%C3%A9s\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">French language<\/a>.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Among the Latin Americans who have been awarded in the past are Chilean Jos\u00e9 Donoso in 1991; Colombian Jos\u00e9 Donoso in 1993;&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/es.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/%C3%81lvaro_Mutis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Alvaro Mutis<\/a>in 1995, the Argentine&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/es.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Adolfo_Bioy_Casares\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Adolfo Bioy Casares<\/a>in 2003, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes; and in 2006, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/es.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sergio_Pitol\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sergio Pitol<\/a>, to name just a few.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For more details about Fabio Morabito and his role as a teacher and translator, visit the interview on the Instagram account of&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/peninsula360press\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">@peninsula360press<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>You may be interested in: <a href=\"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/celina-rodriguez\/\">\"No one has the right to extinguish your dreams\": Celina Rodr\u00edguez<\/a><\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Con m\u00e1s de una veintena de a\u00f1os de dar clases en el Instituto de Po\u00e9tica de la Universidad Nacional Aut\u00f3noma de M\u00e9xico \u2012UNAM\u2012, Fabio Morabito sabe muy bien que, hablar m\u00e1s de un idioma y traducirlo d\u00eda a d\u00eda es una riqueza, pues reconoce el valor, incluso, emocional y psicol\u00f3gico que ello implica. Para este [&hellip;]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":12564,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,11],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12563","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cover","8":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12563"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12567,"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12563\/revisions\/12567"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peninsula360press.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}