FY 2006 Grant Awards: Literature Fellowships for Translation Projects

Some details of the projects listed below are subject to change, contingent upon prior Endowment approval.

Aron Aji
Indianapolis, IN
$20,000
To support the translation from Turkish of the novel The Evening of the Very Long Day by Bilge Karasu. Born in Istanbul in 1930, Karasu is the author of 11 book-length works of fiction, including nine novels and two collections of short stories. Published in 1970, The Evening of the Very Long Day revolves around the relationship between two 8th century monks. Through these main characters, Karasu explores the nature of various dualities, including faith and dogma, new and old, custom and law, truth and lie, image and signification, individual and society, east and west, and Byzantium and Rome. With this novel, Karasu achieves a deft synthesis between European genre play and local story-telling traditions, paving the way for an authentically Turkish fiction that exploits the poetic possibilities of the language and narrative.

Aron Aji is professor of English and the Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University. His other translations of Karasu's work include The Garden of the Departed Cats in 2004, winner of the National Translation Award given by the American Literary Translators Association, and Death in Troy in 2002.

Patrick Barron
San Francisco, CA
$20,000
To support the translation from Italian of selected poems by Andrea Zanzotto. Born in a small village in northern Italy in 1921, Zanzotto has become one of the most important living Italian poets. He is a rarity in contemporary Italian literature in that his work spans the political and cultural shifts between the agrarian, pre-World War II Italy to the modernized, industrial nation. His first book, Dietro il paesaggio, published in the 1940s, won him immediate acclaim. While this project will feature selected poetry from every stage of Zanzotto's 50-year career, the translated works from his later years will be most compelling as they have been largely neglected in English translation.

Patrick Barron is an assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and managing editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment. His most recent book-length translation is Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology, published by Italica Press in 2003.

Rhonda Buchanan
Louisville, KY
$10,000
To support the translation from Spanish of The Secret Gardens of Mogador: Voices of the Earth by the Mexican author Alberto Ruy Sánchez. Born in Mexico City in 1951, Sánchez is currently the director of the renowned editorial house Artes de México. Under Sánchez' direction, Artes has been awarded more than 100 national and international awards for its journal and books. He has published 18 books, including essay collections, poetry and fiction, and has written more than 600 journal and newspaper articles. The Secret Gardens of Mogador is the third novel in a tetralogy that explores the nature of feminine and masculine desire, using as a metaphorical point of departure the four basic elements of air, water, earth, and fire.

Dr. Rhonda Buchanan is a professor of Spanish at the University of Louisville. She has translated Limulus: Visions of the Living Fossil by Brian Nissen and Alberto Ruy Sánchez, and is currently translating the fourth book in Sánchez's Mogador series tentatively titled Dance of the Fire.

Rebecca Fanany
Vermont South, Australia
$10,000
To support the translation from Indonesian of the novel Entanglement and the novella Under the Waning Moon by Ismet Fanany, the translator's husband. Born in West Sumatra in 1952, Ismet Fanany has spent much of his adult life in the west, namely the United States and Australia. Entanglement and Under the Waning Moon, his most critically acclaimed work, focus primarily on the Indonesian experience in the western world. His experiences living in both places have afforded him a unique understanding of the differences between two cultures and the occasional difficulties in their relationship.

Dr. Rebecca Fanany is a professional translator and lecturer in Indonesian at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. She has lived and worked in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore periodically since her first contact with the region in 1981. She has worked in collaboration with her husband on many projects.

George Hochfield
Berkeley, CA
$10,000
To support the translation from Italian of Songbook, a collection of more than 400 poems, by Umberto Saba. Hochfield will collaborate with Leonard Nathan. Born in Trieste in 1883, Saba lived through World War I as a hospitalized soldier deemed unfit for combat and World War II hiding out in both Milan and Florence. While his first book, Poems (1910), received very little notice, his later, comprehensive work Songbook is viewed as a major work in 20th century Italian literature. Begun in 1921, Saba continued to add to this collection until his death in 1957, thus comprising the entirety of his work as a poet. The collection spans his entire life, including his difficult childhood without a father and his military service before and during World War I.

George Hochfield is a retired professor, whose career has featured three full books of translation, including The Officer's Camp by Giampiero Carocci, numerous excerpted translations of novels, various poem translations and two Fullbright Lectureships in Italy.

William Hutchins
Todd, NC
$20,000
To support the translation from Arabic of The Seven Veils of Seth, a novel by Libyan author Ibrahim al-Koni. Born in 1948, al-Koni spent his childhood in the desert as part of the Tuaregs, pastoral nomads who speak Tamasheq, a Berber language written in an ancient alphabet and related to ancient Egyptian. He learned to read and write Arabic when he was 12 and since 1974, has published more than 50 works of literature in Arabic. His fiction blends existential questions with folklore, ancient myths, and vivid descriptions of daily desert and oasis life. Published in Lebanon in 2003, The Seven Veils of Seth is a companion to the author's novel Anubis, scheduled for release by the American University in Cairo Press in the spring 2005.

William Hutchins is a professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department of Appalachian State University. He has translated more than a dozen book-length works of Arabic literature, including al-Koni's Anubis.

James G. Kates
Fitzwilliam, NH
$10,000
To support the translation from Russian of the poetry of Mikhail Aizenberg. Born in Moscow in 1948, Mikhail Aizenberg is a crucial part of the last generation of Russian poets that came to maturity under the regime of the Soviet Union. As a chronicler and interpreter of that generation, Aizenberg has spent a large portion of his career showcasing the works of his contemporaries, but this does not diminish the scope of his own writings as a poet. The collection of poetry will span Aizenberg's early years, through his involvement with the Moscow Conceptualists movement, to his later work, including a very recent manuscript published in 2004 titled Less Than a Meter. In all, Aizenberg has published five books of poetry, two books of prose and been featured in numerous anthologies, journals, and translations.

Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984, James Kates is also the translator of Self-Portraits and Masks by Isaac Goldemberg and The Score of the Game by Tatiana Shcherbina.

Chana Kronfeld
Berkeley, CA
$20,000
To support the translation from Hebrew of The Selected Works of Dahlia Ravikovitch. Kronfeld will collaborate with Chana Bloch. Born in 1936 in Tel Aviv, Israel, Ravikovitch published her first book of poems, The Love of an Orange, at the age of 23. Her oeuvre to date of ten volumes of poetry and two collections of short stories has won her numerous awards, including the Israel Prize in 1998 (the highest national honor), and been adapted to film, music and dance performances, the theater, and art exhibits throughout Israel. During the political upheaval of the late 1970s, Ravikovitch became the leading voice among anti-war activists. Her later work explores the parallels between the plight of the Palestinians and the suffering of Jews in the Diaspora, particularly the constraints on women. Kronfeld will include in one volume of poems not yet translated into English, revised versions of selected poems, three short stories, detailed footnotes explaining biblical allusions and cultural/historical context, and an introduction tracing Ravikovitch's distinctive style and growth as a poet.

Chana Kronfeld is a professor of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her collaborative translations with Chana Bloch include Yehuda Amichai's award-winning volume Open Closed Open in 2000.

William O'Daly
Auburn, CA
$10,000
To support the translation from Spanish of two volumes of poetry previously not translated into English, The Hands of Day and World's End, by Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda. Born in Parral, Chile in 1904, Neruda published his first book of poetry in 1922 and went on to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature 1971. While much of Neruda's earlier work has been translated, to understand the full scope and stylistic diversity of his oeuvre, one must also consider his later writings. The Hands of Day and World's End represent Neruda's later work that reconsiders themes he focused on in his earlier years. Issues such as the role of hope in the midst of great disappointment and suffering and the isolationism of writing poetry reappear in these works after he grappled with them in previous volumes.

William O'Daly has translated six of Pablo Neruda's books, including The Book of Questions, The Yellow Heart and The Sea and the Bells. The Hands of Day and World's End would complete O'Daly's translations of eight volumes of poetry from Neruda's late and posthumous work.

Gregory Pardlo, Jr.
Brooklyn, NY
$10,000
To support the translation from Danish of the three most recent books of poetry by Niels Lyngsoe. Born in 1968, Lyngsoe is regarded as one of the most original poets working in Denmark today. Recipient of the Michael Strunge Award in 1997, he has published four volumes of poetry: Mask & Machine (1992), Matter (1996), Force Majeure (1999), and Morpheus (2004). His experimental poetry plays with spacing and the placement of phrases and words on the page. In addition to writing poetry, Lyngsoe teaches at the University of Copenhagen, works as a literary critic for Politiken, and produces poetry programming for the national radio, Danmarks Radio.

Gregory Pardlo received an MFA in Poetry from New York University and currently teaches at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. His translations include a collection of Lyngsoe's poems titled Pencil of Rays and Spiked Mace (BookThug, 2004).

Mark Schafer
Cambridge, MA
$20,000
To support the translation from Spanish of a book-length selection of poetry by Mexican poet David Huerta. Born in 1949, Huerta has published 17 volumes of poetry, though only a dozen of his poems and fragments of poems have been published in English. A central figure in the neobaroque and postmodern language poetry movements of Mexico and Latin America, Huerta has won numerous grants and awards, including the Diana Moreno Toscano Prize (1972), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1978-79), and the Carlos Pellicer Prize (1990). Poems for the anthology will be selected from 10 of his books, including his first collection, Jardin de la Luz (1972), his latest collection, La Olla (2003), and his groundbreaking epic poem Incurable (1987).

Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship in 1993, Mark Schafer has translated book-length works by Gloria Gervitz, Jesús Gardea, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Eduardo Galeano, and Virgilio Piñera. Schafer's translations of 12 of Huerta's poems appeared in Copper Canyon Press's anthology Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (2002).

Timothy Sergay
Worthington, OH
$20,000
To support the translation from Russian of the novel A Gloom is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps by Aleksandr Chudakov. Born in Soviet Northern Kazakhstan in 1938, Chudakov has published more than 200 articles on classical Russian authors of the 19th century and the history of Russian philology, as well as five books. His only novel, A Gloom is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps, was published in 2000 and was short-listed for the 2001 Russian Booker Prize. Set in a fictional town in Northern Kazakhstan inhabited by political exiles during Soviet rule, the novel describes the struggle of life and culture under Stalinist Russia, but it also affirms the vitality of the people and nation through their survival.

Timothy Sergay is the former recipient of a PEN Translation Fund award for his work with Chudakov. His translations have been featured in numerous magazines and collections, including the first chapter of Chudakov's A Gloom is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps, published in 2004 in Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature.

Anne W. Twitty
Brooklyn, NY
$20,000
To support the translation from Spanish of the novel Ursula's Dream by the Argentine author María Negroni. Negroni has published 11 volumes of poetry, five collections of critical essays on topics such as the Gothic Imagination and Latin American Women Poets, and one novel. She was awarded the Octavio Paz Fellowship for Poetry in 2001, and has also received two National Book Awards in Argentina – one for her volume of poetry El viaje de la noche in 1997 and the other for her essay collection Ciudad Gótica in 1998. Published by Seix Barral in Buenos Aires in 1998, Ursula's Dream highlights Negroni's concern for challenging the distinction between dream and various forms of reality, all the while questioning the traditions of the epic genre. The translation has already been accepted for publication from the University of Nebraska Press and their distinguished Latin American Women Writers series.

Anne Twitty has translated works from such Hispanic writers and artists as Torres-García, Cecilia Vicuña and Magali Alabau. She has translated two other works of Negroni's, including Night Journey in 2002 and Islandia in 2001.

Total Literature Fellowships Awarded: 13
Total Literature Fellowship Dollars Awarded: $200,000

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