Translating cultures – Cultures of translation: Professor Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones at Nova Gorica

Tomorrow, Professor Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones, Director of the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies and Strategic Director of Wales Literature Exchange, will participate in a key panel at the 33rd European Meeting of Cultural Journals in Nova Gorica/Gorizia.

This event comes just one week after Aberystwyth Ceredigion became Wales' first UNESCO City of Literature on 31 October 2025, joining a global network of 350 Creative Cities.

Professor Gruffydd Jones will be part of the panel "Cultures within limits: Minority languages and translation" starting at 11:30am. The panel explores how multilingual polities negotiate relations between minority and majority languages, and the role of translation in these processes.

Three Poems from Three Centuries

Elin will present three pieces of Welsh literature from different periods, demonstrating the richness and continuity of the Welsh literary tradition:

Canu Heledd – a 9th-century narrative poem in Old Welsh, depicting a woman's voice lamenting her brothers and sisters following battle against the Anglo-Saxons

A poem by Waldo Williams – a 20th-century sonnet using strict metre alliterative conventions, addressing Wales and the Welsh language

An excerpt from 'Datguddio' (Revealing) by Meleri Davies – a 21st-century poem from 'Rhuo ei distawrwydd hi' (Roaring her silence) her award-winning collection lamenting the loss of her mother which features on our Bookshelf this year.

About the Conference

The 33rd European Meeting of Cultural Journals is taking place in the bilingual Slovenian-Italian cities of Nova Gorica/Gorizia, a 'borderless' European Capital of Culture in 2025. The conference is co-organized with Razpotja magazine.

The event reassesses translation's role in the formation of a transnational public sphere, exploring how translation, understood in both a figurative and functional sense, can help us negotiate the present moment.

Professor Gruffydd Jones will be joined by fellow panelists including Sofiya Zahova, Director of Vigdís International Centre for Multilingualism and Intercultural Understanding UNESCO, University of Iceland, and Marco Stolfo, Historian of Political Thought and Minority Languages Expert, University of Udine.

All panels and keynotes are open to the public.