Dispatch #32
Read about the fading legacy of Equatorial Guinea’s last troubadour, Italy’s public theatres caught between cuts and conformity, and the vanishing languages disappearing with a warming world.
Hello and welcome to Translator’s weekly Dispatch, where we bring you summaries of compelling stories written beyond the Anglosphere.
This week, we begin in Equatorial Guinea, where the memory of Eyí Moan Ndong – the last great troubadour – lingers in villages that once stayed awake until dawn for his epic mvet performances. His fragile legacy now hangs in the balance, awaiting preservation and recognition on the world literary stage.
From there, to Italy: a country known for its vibrant public theatre. Yet this summer season, instead of flourishing, it finds itself under siege. Graziano Graziani reports on how funding cuts and cautious cultural policies are rewarding conformity while stifling activism, experimentation and new voices.
And finally, a reflection on how the crisis of climate change is not only reshaping landscapes but also eroding languages. As communities fracture or disappear, so too do their words, carrying with them unique ways of understanding the world.
We hope you enjoy the read.
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From leper colony to legend: The troubadour of Equatorial Guinea
Eyí Moan Ndong, Equatorial Guinea’s last great troubadour, fused myth, humour and retro-futurism in his epic mvet performances, keeping whole villages rapt until dawn. His fragile legacy now awaits preservation, translation and recognition on the world literary stage.
In Letras Libres, Luis Castellví Laukamp provides a fascinating account of the life and work of Eyí Moan Ndong (1928-2000), the last great bard of Equatorial Guinea, who called himself “the animator of the people”. Virtually illiterate and suffering from leprosy, Eyí Moan Ndong nonetheless transformed the mvet (sometimes “nvet”), a traditional one-metre cane instrument, strung with gourds, into a vessel for epic storytelling that sustained an entire culture’s memory.
His art began in internal exile. After spending 12 years in the Micomeseng leper colony, his mvet sessions for patients and caregivers became legendary. The Spanish colonial authorities “never disliked him, but they didn’t take him seriously either, as they thought he was a folk clown.” But for the Fang, Equatorial Guinea’s ethnic majority, his presence in their midst was an honour. He performed mostly at night, in the House of the Word, where the community “ate, rested, played akong… debated issues affecting the community, and listened to their bards.” There, Eyí Moan Ndong could keep his listeners spellbound until dawn.
The structure of his art was fluid. “His mvet art began with a song, sometimes humorous. Eyí Moan Ndong then went on to tell the stories of the Ekang, the first immortal inhabitants of Earth.” He interspersed songs and autobiographical poems into narratives that could stretch endlessly, depending on the audience’s energy. Listeners marked time with bamboo sticks, bells or bottles, blurring the line between performer and crowd. Known for his memory and improvisation, he embodied an art that was at once literature, music, theatre and ritual.
The epics themselves are strange, vivid and wholly original. In The Strange Gift from the Other World, a mother sends her son from the afterlife to fetch fish cooked with onions and spices. In Akoma Mba before the Tribunal of God, an accused man faces trial before a divine court. Mbuandong, the Cannibal tells of villagers attempting to capture a monstrous giant, while Mondú Messeng depicts a terrorised village menaced by a beast. As one scholar puts it, “the plot of the Fang epics is somewhat surreal, but it must be understood from a profoundly magical worldview.”
What makes Eyí Moan Ndong most distinctive is his seamless weaving of the archaic and the futuristic. Castellví Laukamp describes how, in his world, “an elephant takes care of all the farming and domestic chores… in Mbuandong, a goat defecates edible fat that feeds an entire village.” Yet these mythical beings also “have many technological gadgets: telephones, cars, trucks… and flying saucers!” The “Mivulú” spacecraft, he notes, “fulfils the function of ships in Greek epics.” With equal ease, Eyí Moan Ndong moves from a magic mirror to “glasses that allow you to see for miles, a gadget that not even James Bond could have imagined.” Long before Afrofuturism gave us Wakanda, Ndong’s mvet conjured a vision of Africa where the past and the future coexisted.
Fragments of this legacy survive thanks to painstaking transcription. Ramón Sales Encinas and Domingo Elá Mbá have edited five epics; Julián Bibang published another in a bilingual edition; others remain unpublished, circulating on recordings or in doctoral theses. Yet the work remains precarious. “We cannot recover the lost epic poems,” Castellví Laukamp writes, “but it would be wise to translate, annotate and publish the untranscribed recordings in bilingual editions.”
The need extends beyond scholarship. Schools for the mvet exist in Gabon and Cameroon, but not in Equatorial Guinea. Without them, the tradition risks extinction. And yet, as Castellví Laukamp insists, Eyí Moan Ndong should be spoken of “with the same admiring respect with which I refer to Homer or Vargas Llosa.” His epics, richly annotated in Spanish but still largely inaccessible, deserve to travel further.
To hear Eyí Moan Ndong, through a surviving line, a fragment of song, is to glimpse an art form that fused myth, humour and science fiction. His voice reminds us that literature is not confined to the page; it can live in rhythm, in gourds and bamboo, in the night air of a village listening to its last troubadour.
Original article (“Las epopeyas del último trovador guineano”) by Luis Castellví Laukamp was first published in Spanish on 17 March 2025.
It is available here.
Letras Libres is a Spanish-language monthly literary magazine published in Mexico and Spain.
Summary by TMH
Curtains on risk: Italy’s public theatre faces cuts and conformity
Italy’s summer theatre season should be a celebration, but this year it’s overshadowed by cuts that punish risk and reward conformity. Graziano Graziani reveals how public theatre is being steered toward safety at the expense of creativity, activism and new voices.
The summer theatre season in Italy is usually a celebration: streets and squares filled with performances, ideas and audiences eager for discovery. In 2023, that festive atmosphere was overshadowed by “the spectre of ministerial cuts,” as Graziano Graziani observes in Lucy - Sulla Cultura. Historic theatres and festivals were downgraded or excluded from funding, while mid-tier venues, often less daring in programming, found themselves unexpectedly elevated. Though some of these cuts were reversed at the end of July, the episode revealed structural tensions that go far beyond a single year’s budget.
For Graziani, these decisions are not neutral or merely bureaucratic; they reflect “a very specific vision of what public theatre should be in Italy.” This vision privileges financial prudence, predictability and conformity over experimentation and pluralism, creating a system where “what was considered ‘rewarding’ becomes ‘penalising.’” The controversy extends beyond Florence, where the Teatro della Pergola lost its “national theatre” status, triggering the resignation of three minority members of the Drama Committee. Angelo Pastore, one of the resigning members, warned that the issue “goes far beyond the Florentine case and concerns the stability of the entire theatre sector.”
The brunt of the cuts has fallen on contemporary theatre and dance – the workhorses of innovation, inclusion and civic engagement. Organisations exploring new dramaturgical forms, audience development and socially conscious work found themselves penalised. Some were even marked down for adopting inclusive language, such as the schwa (a gender-neutral symbol proposed in place of the feminine “-a” and masculine “-o” suffix to Italian nouns). Santarcangelo, a festival long associated with experimental performance and activism, saw its score drop from 28.3/35 to 14. Graziani emphasises that this is not merely a matter of artistic taste: “The exercise of criticism is one thing, and the limitation of expressive possibilities, compromised by cuts… is quite another.”
Central to the problem is the Ministry’s conception of “quality”, which Graziani describes as a mix of financial adequacy, network building and numerical metrics. Programming, innovation or audience engagement, core measures of artistic vitality, are secondary. The Ministry, he warns, risks acting as “a sort of ‘abnormal’ artistic director, aiming to entirely direct the tastes of Italians.”
The consequences of these policies are both political and structural, the article suggests. Historic institutions like the Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione and the Teatro Metastasio in Prato, known for supporting independent companies, have been penalised, while theatres with weaker artistic profiles in centre-right regions were promoted. Graziani notes that the pattern appears arbitrary in some regions, such as Sardinia, and politically convenient in others. Yet he insists the problem predates the current government: centralisation under the Franceschini reform concentrated resources in a few politically controlled institutions, undermining the decentralised, diverse network that has historically defined Italian theatre.
Perhaps most worrying is the effect on public theatre as a civic institution. Drawing on Paolo Grassi’s vision of theatre as “a tool for growth, artistic risk and social maturation accomplished as a collective ritual,” Graziani critiques the push toward “safe” productions featuring already well-known performers or celebrities. “One wonders whether it makes sense to finance an enterprise like the public theatre to channel taxpayers’ money to artists who are already widely recognised… simply to flaunt a ‘sell-out’,” he writes.
There is also a human cost. Theatre workers, both established artists and emerging voices, face precarious contracts and uneven income. Policy decisions, Graziani points out, are informed more by the interests of theatre entrepreneurs and managers than by those of the artists themselves. “It’s as if, at a negotiating table on metalworkers, only the employers were listened to, not the unions,” he observes.
As a remedy, Graziani and advocacy bodies such as Cresco propose a vocation-based system: funding tailored to the mission of each theatre or festival, whether it be dance, new drama, tradition or community engagement. They call for reforms in touring and distribution to prevent overproduction of works that rarely reach audiences and for the creation of income protections that would allow artists to take risks without facing economic ruin.
In Graziani’s view, the stakes are existential. Rather than encouraging artistic vitality, the Ministry’s policies risk “worsening the disproportion between old and new players and confirming the vested interests of those institutional bodies most directly under political control.” The result is a theatre system that is, in his words, “gerontocratic, bloodless and… lacking a shred of imagination.”
Original article (“L’assurda guerra del Governo al teatro italiano”) by Graziano Graziani was published in Italian on 6 August 2025.
It is available here.
Lucy - Sulla Cultura is an Italian multimedia magazine and platform that explores culture, arts and current events through a monthly themed approach. It features articles, illustrations and audio-video contributions to offer diverse perspectives on various topics, including urban issues, modern spirituality and philosophy.
Summary by TMH
Vanishing words, vanishing worlds
How climate change erodes languages alongside landscapes
In a report we came across in Agência Pública, journalist Julia Webster Ayuso (republished from Noema Magazine) investigates how climate change is not only devastating ecosystems but also dismantling the languages that describe them. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Sámi communities of northern Sweden, where reindeer herder Lars Miguel Utsi is watching both the snow and the words for it melt away.
The Sámi, Europe’s only recognised Indigenous people, have sustained a vocabulary intimately tied to the Arctic environment. Their nine languages contain dozens of words to capture subtle variations of snow like åppås for untouched white expanses, habllek for fine powder, tjaevi for sticky flakes difficult to dig. They also have a sophisticated lexicon for reindeer, classifying the animals according to age, colour, fertility and temperament. Yet these words, Utsi admits, are increasingly absent from everyday speech. One term in particular, ealát, conveys the “ideal conditions for reindeer to find lichen.” It encapsulates a delicate balance of weather and terrain but such conditions are vanishing under rapid warming, making the word itself feel obsolete.
According to the article, the Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet. Earlier thaws bring abnormal floods, habitats have shrunk by 70% in a century and hydroelectric dams alter migration patterns. With each disruption, traditional Sámi knowledge becomes harder to transmit. UNESCO lists all Sámi languages as endangered, with one, Ume Sámi, spoken by fewer than 50 people. The erosion of vocabulary mirrors the erosion of culture: herders, quite literally, are losing the words to describe their changing world.
The report highlights that scientists have noted that this link between environment and expression is not confined to the Arctic. Across the globe, biodiversity hotspots coincide with high linguistic diversity like rainforests, coastal forests, Arctic tundra. Where plants and animals disappear, so too do dialects and ways of speaking. Both forms of diversity are now declining at alarming rates, raising the question: what remains when the things we name no longer exist?
Ayuso’s reporting suggests that the stakes are more than symbolic. Losing words means losing knowledge, memory and orientation in the natural world. Language functions as a repository of ecological expertise; its disappearance signals the erasure of entire systems of thought. As Utsi reflects on gaps in his mother tongue, it is clear that climate change is not just altering landscapes, it is also shrinking the horizons of human imagination.
Original article (“As mudanças climáticas estão matando palavras e línguas”) by Julia Webster Ayuso was published in Portuguese on February 17 2025. It was originally written in English for Noema Magazine.
It is available here.
Agência Pública is Brazil’s leading non-profit investigative journalism agency.
Noema Magazine is an award-winning, long-form journal dedicated to exploring the deep transformations shaping our world. Published both online and in print by the Berggruen Institute, it covers technology, philosophy, governance, economics, geopolitics and culture.
Summary by ZN
That’s all for now – we hope you’ve enjoyed the read. Keep an eye out for our next Dispatch of summaries this time next week!
The Translator team