Winners of the 2025 Edition of M’illumino d’immenso – International Poetry Translation Prize

Winners of the 2025 Edition of M’illumino d’immenso – International Poetry Translation Prize

Ilide Carmignani (Italy), Mariela Cordero García (Venezuela), Vittoria Massimiani (Italy), Antonio Luis Mendes Chagas (Brazil) and Ria Wijland (Netherlands) are the winners of the five 2025 M’illumino d’immenso International Poetry Translation Awards.

 

The winner of the Spanish to Italian section is Ilide Carmignani (Italy). Honourable mentions go to Matilde Accattoli (Italy) and Ilaria Sofia Perrino (Italy).

The winner of the Italian to Spanish section is Mariel Cordero (Venezuela).

The winner of the Italian to Portuguese section is Antonio Luis Mendes Chagas (Brazil).

The winner of the Italian to French section is Vittoria Massimiani (Italy).

The winner of the Italian to Dutch section is Ria Wijland (Netherlands).

The five best translations were selected by five juries composed of 15 highly prestigious translators and poets of eight nationalities: Helena Águila (Spain), Prisca Agustoni (Switzerland), Barbara Bertoni (Italy), Emanuel França de Brito (Brazil), Patrick Devaux (Belgium), Luigi Ianuzzi (Belgium), Matteo Lefèvre (Italy), Daniel Mangano (Belgium), Fabio Morábito (Mexico); Valerio Nardoni (Italy); Catarina Nunes de Almeida (Portugal), Mariangela Ragassi (Brazil), Stefania Ricciardi (Italy), Daniel Samoilovich (Argentina), Carmen Van den Bergh (Belgium).

Unlike other awards, the initiative does not reward works that have already been translated and published, but encourages participants to try their hand at translating two poetic texts proposed by the organisers. In the 2025 edition of the Prize, a poem by Italian poet Maurizio Cucchi and Quartine 92-99 by Swiss poet Leopoldo Lonati were translated by 180 competitors, aged 14 to 84, from 23 countries (Argentina, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Mozambique, the Netherlands, Panama, Peru, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the Dominican Republic, Spain, the United States, Switzerland, Uruguay and Venezuela).

Two poems in Spanish, Rodeos by Mexican poet Eduardo Hurtado and Ausencia de palabra by Peruvian poet Rossella di Paolo, were translated by 167 contestants, aged 13 to 78, residing in 18 countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom, USA, Uruguay).

The winning translations (in Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch) will be published by 16 prestigious media outlets in 10 countries: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.

The aim of this competition, created in 2018 by Barbara Bertoni (Italy), Vanni Bianconi (Switzerland) and Fabio Morábito (Mexico), which is to promote the translation and dissemination of poetry, has been greatly exceeded. This year, the M’illumino d’immenso Prize encouraged 347 translators residing in 24 countries on 3 continents to try their hand at translating the poems proposed by the organisers. The winning translations will be published in 21 magazines in 10 countries: Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.

The award is organised by Laboratorio Trādūxit, thanks to the support of the Italian Cultural Institutes in Mexico City, Lima, Montevideo, Rio De Janeiro and Santiago, and the International Italo-Latin American Organisation (IILA), with the patronage of Ametli (Asociación Mexicana de Traductores Literarios A.C) and the Fondo de Cultura Económica (Mexico).

 

The winners:

-VIII Edition M’illumino d’immenso from Italian to Spanish

Mariela Cordero (Valencia, Venezuela)

Venezuelan poet and translator recognised for her literary work with several awards, including the Third Alejandra Pizarnik Poetry Prize (2014), the Second Poetry Prize of the Tracceperlameta Edizioni International Bilingual Literary Competition (2015) and the Naji Naaman Literary Prize (2025). She has translated poetry, essays and fiction. Among her most important works are the translation of the anthology Tú eres todas las flores de cala (2021) by Taiwanese author Chen Ming-Keh, the essay Diez Cartas a Montaigne (2022), and the chronicle La sonrisa del cerdo (2024) by French writer Stéphane Chaumet.

 

-III Edition M’illumino d’immenso from Spanish to Italian

Ilide Carmignani (Lucca, Italy)

She graduated from the University of Pisa and specialised in Hispanic Studies and Literary Translation at the University of Siena and Brown University. Since 1984, she has worked as a translator and editorial consultant. She has translated, among others, Andruetto, Bolaño, Borges, Cernuda, Cortázar, Fuentes, García Márquez, Halfon, Neruda, Onetti, Paz, Pérez-Reverte, and Sepúlveda. She has won the Instituto Cervantes Literary Translation Prize, the National Translation Prize

from the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, and the “Vittorio Bodini”, “La Lettura – Corriere della Sera”, Fondazione Cultura Mediterranea and “Von Rezzori” prizes. He has collaborated with Linea d’Ombra, Il Manifesto, Tuttolibri – La Stampa, and Il Post. Since 2000, he has been editor of AutoreInvisibile and, since 2021, Dall’italiano al mondo, the professional meetings on translation at the Turin Book Fair. He has published Gli autori invisibili (Besa, 2008), Storia di Luis Sepúlveda e del suo gatto Zorba (Salani, 2021) and, with Elena Battista, Saltare nelle pozzanghere (Rizzoli 2024).

 

-II Edition M’illumino d’immenso from Italian to Portuguese:

Antonio Luis Mendes Chagas (Porto Alegre, Brazil)

Civil servant in the planning sector, professor, writer and literary translator. He has a background in International Relations and Literature and has published short stories and poems in various national anthologies, focusing on themes such as identity, memory, social inequality and mythology. He has contributed to literary anthologies on psychological terror and speculative fiction. He has experience as a translator of texts from English, Spanish and Italian into Portuguese. She won the Lila Ripoll Poetry Prize. She is currently working on her first book as an author, while her second writing project is competing for the Livros do Futuro prize in the Fantasy category, promoted by TikTok with the support of major publishers in the sector.

 

-I Edition of M’illumino d’immenso from Italian to French

Vittoria Massimiani (Rome, Italy)

 

Literary translator, Slavicist (Ukraine; Russia), independent researcher, creator and

producer of Italian works denouncing the Putin and Soviet regimes and fighting for the Ukrainian cause: she has published with Castelvecchi and Feltrinelli (with the latter, a preview of a forthcoming work). She has translated books for White Star and National Geographic. Human rights activist (UN PAM and Amnesty International – Moscow). She has collaborated with the Centro Coscienza (Milan office) on Russian poetry. She won a competition organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and has given lectures on literary translation from Italian into French at the Cité Scolaire Internationale Honoré de Balzac in Paris. She prepared the Italian edition of a volume of Sur champ de sable by Françoise Morvan (Éditions Mesures).

 

-I Edition M’illumino d’immenso from Italian to Dutch:

Ria Wijland (Amersfoort, Netherlands)

Italianist interested in early 20th-century literature and the colonial past. In 2020, she graduated with honours from the University of Amsterdam with a thesis on the translations of Mattina (M’illumino / d’immenso) by Giuseppe Ungaretti. Together with Reinier Speelman, she translated I colloqui (De gesprekken, 2024) by Guido Gozzano, published in the I Quaderni di poesia series by the Italian Cultural Institute in Amsterdam. She also collaborated on the translation of Notti di pace occidentale (Nachten van westelijke vrede, 2022) by Antonella Anedda, published in the same series. In 2022, her Italian translation of De weg naar Florence (La strada per Firenze) by Onno Kosters appeared in the article Poeti olandesi contemporanei (Contemporary Dutch Poets) in the magazine Letteratura e Pensiero.

 

The creators and organisers of the M’illumino d’immenso Award

Barbara Bertoni (Genoa, Italy)

She translates mainly from Spanish, but also from French, Catalan, Portuguese and English. Among the authors she has translated are Roberto Bolaño, Augusto Monterroso, Carmen Laforet, Alejo Carpentier, Georges Simenon, Valter Hugo Mãe, etc. In 2015, she created Laboratorio Trādūxit, a collective literary translation workshop that aims to train literary translators from Italian into Spanish and to disseminate Italian-language literature in Spanish-speaking countries.

Vanni Bianconi (Locarno, Switzerland)

He is a poet and translator. He has published three books of poetry, Ora prima, Il passo dell’uomo and Sono due le parole che rimano in ore, and two collections of short stories, London as a Second Language and Tarmacadam. He is the creator of Babel, a literature and translation festival, and the multilingual magazine www.specimen.press. Since 2022, he has been responsible for cultural programmes at RSI, the Italian-language Swiss radio and television broadcaster.

Fabio Morábito (Alexandria, Egypt)

Born in Alexandria, Egypt, he spent his childhood in Milan before moving to Mexico at the age of fifteen. Although his mother tongue is Italian, he writes in Spanish. He is the author of several books of poetry, short stories, non-fiction and two novels. He has translated the complete works of Eugenio Montale and Aminta by Torquato Tasso. His books have been translated into German, English, French, Portuguese, Italian and Chinese.