NEA Translation Fellowships Announced!

The National Endowment for the Arts has announced its 2016 Literary Translation Fellowships, providing $275,000 "in recommended grants to 20 translators to support the new translation of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry from 11 different languages into English, the latest in the NEA’s efforts to bring the work of writers around the globe to a larger audience."

“The NEA is committed to providing Americans with diverse art experiences,” said NEA Chairman Jane Chu. “Our support of literary translation provides opportunities for readers to expand their knowledge of other cultures and traditions while also experiencing some of the world’s most talented writers.”

Since 1981, the NEA has awarded 410 fellowships to 363 translators, with translations representing 66 languages and 77 countries. This year’s projects are for translation from 11 different languages: Albanian, Chinese, French, German, Danish, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Yiddish. The review criteria for these projects consisted not only of the translators’ skill, but also the importance of a particular work of international literature to English-speaking audiences, including those authors and languages which are often underrepresented.

A sampling of these projects follows; find details about the rest of the NEA-winning projects and fellows here.

Matvei Yankelevich, Brooklyn, NY ($25,000)
To support the translation from the Russian of selected, multi-genre works by Elena Guro. In her short lifetime, Guro (1877-1913) became one of the most influential Russian avant-garde female writers and artists who wrote during what is now called the Russian Silver Age, alongside such contemporaries as Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Velimir Khlebnikov. Yet, unlike many of these writers, Guro is practically unknown to English-language readers. What makes her work unique in the context of Russian Futurism is that Guro focused her writing on inner spiritual experience, intuitive awareness, and contemplation, more so than on formal innovation or shocking imagery. This project will collect her prose, diaries, critical notes, and correspondence into a single text.

Matvei Yankelevich is co-founder of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he edits the press’s Eastern European Poets Series. He is the translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, and contributed translations to OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, and An Invitation for Me to Think: Selected Poems of Aleksandr Vvedensky, which won the ALTA National Translation Award in 2014.

Maia Evrona, Framingham, MA ($12,500)
To support the translation from the Yiddish of Poems from My Diary by Abraham Sutzkever. In his lifetime, Sutzkever (1913-2010) wrote more than 1,000 pages of poetry, much of it chronicling his life in Lithuania during the German Occupation, the suffering and endurance of those around him, and his own personal losses (his mother was murdered in a mass execution and his infant son was poisoned). He escaped the Nazis by hiding in a forest until he was rescued by writers in Russia and eventually settled in Israel. Poems from My Diary was first published in 1977 as a collection of 75 poems, and later expanded to 180 and republished in 1985. Considered his masterpiece, it was awarded the Israel Prize in 1985 – the only time the prize was awarded for a work of literature written in Yiddish rather than in Hebrew. It has never been translated into English in its entirety.

Maia Evrona is a creative writer, as well as a translator. Her translations of individual poems by Sutzkever have been published in numerous North American literary journals. She has also translated poems from Yiddish by Anna Margolin, and several prose pieces for The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, an anthology forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Michael Leong, Durham, NC ($12,500)
To support the translation from the Spanish of Sky-Quake, a book of poems by Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro. Along with Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda and his close contemporary Pablo de Rokha, Huidobro (1893-1948) is among the most celebrated figures in Chilean poetry, with an oeuvre spanning 40 books of poetry, fiction, memoir, and drama. Throughout his colorful life, Huidobro experimented with hybrid and cross-genre forms and traveled to and from Europe many times, connecting the avantgarde communities of Paris, Madrid, and Latin America. The long prose poem Sky-Quake, which refashions the legend of Tristan and Iseult, is a sequel to his most famous book, Altazor, from which stems the Altazor Awards, a national prize in Chile that includes a myriad of artistic categories. Though Sky-Quake has been translated into English in the past, this project will present a more contemporary and accessible version to the American public.

Michael Leong is the author of two books of poetry, e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009) and Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions, 2012), which won a Face Out grant from the Council of Literary Magazinesand Presses. His translations from Spanish include I, the Worst of All by Estela Lamat (BlazeVOX, 2009). Currently, he is an assistant professor in the English Department at The University at Albany, SUNY. Leong will collaborate on this project with the translator Ignacio Infante.

Image at top: Elena Guro.