The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced yesterday that it has awarded sixteen translators Literature Fellowships for Translation Projects to work on specific literary endeavors. Six fellows were awarded grants of $25,000, and ten will receive $12,500 to work on English translations of works in Croatian, Turkish, and Catalan, among other languages.
The fellowships for poetry went to Olga Broumas to support translations from the Greek of works by contemporary poet Kiki Dimoula, author of twelve volumes of verse; Eléna Rivera for a translation from the French of Bernard Noël’s collection The Rest of the Voyage; Richard Tillinghast for a translation from the Turkish of selected pieces by experimental poet Edip Cansever; and Russell Valentino for a translation from the Rovignese, a rare Istro-Venetian dialect, of Conversations with Filip the Seagull in this Corner of Paradise by Ligio Zanini, who died in 1993. Each translator will receive $12,500.
Fellows in fiction are Charlotte Mandell, who will be working on a translation from the French of the five-hundred-page, single-sentence novel Zone by Mathias Énard, published in 2008; Daniel Shapiro for a translation from the Spanish of the short story collection Missing Persons, Animals and Artists by contemporary Mexican writer Roberto Ransom; and Martha Tennent for a translation from the Catalan of approximately forty stories from the lesser-known collections of Mercè Rodoreda. They each will receive $25,000.
Also given $12,500 awards in fiction were Ellen Elias-Bursac for a translation from the Croatian of the novel The Goldsmith's Gold by August Šenoa; Tina Kover for a translation from the French of Manette Salomon by brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, who wrote in the mid- to late-nineteenth century; and Tess Lewis for a translation from the German of Alois Hotschnig’s short story collection Die Kinder Beruhigte das Nicht (That Didn't Reassure the Children), published in Germany in 2006.
The nonfiction fellows are Brian Henry for a translation from the Slovenian of Ales Steger’s essay collection, Berlin; and Sandra Kingery for her translation from the Spanish of the memoir We Won the War by Esther Tusquets. Henry received $25,000 and Kingery received $12,500.
Eugene Ostashevsky received a $12,500 award for a translation from the Russian of a the philosopher Leonid Lipavsky’s Conversations, a portrayal of his talks with the OBERIU, a group of Russian avant-garde poets. Three playwrights, Diane Arnson Svarlien, Chantal Bilodeau, and Nahma Sandrow also received fellowships.
The fellowships, given annually by the NEA, have supported such projects as Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction last year. The next application deadline is January 7, 2010.
Two of this year’s fellows, Lewis and Shapiro, also recently received three-thousand-dollar Translation Fund Grants from PEN American Center to support the translations mentioned above.