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2004 Grant Awards: Literature Fellowships for Translation Projects in Prose
Some details of the projects listed below are subject to change, contingent upon prior
Endowment approval.
Alison Anderson
Mill Valley, CA
$10,000
To support the translation from French of the work of Christian Bobin. Born in
1951, Bobin has published more than 30 short works, including a biography of
Saint Francis of Assisi and several books for children. Alison Anderson will
translate several works including Une petite robe de fête, a collection of short
pieces ranging in themes from nostalgia for lost love to the experience of
readers and unpublished writers.
Anderson's translations include Let Me Survive by Louise Longo, Onitsha by JMG
Le Clézio, and History of the Surrealist Movement by Gérard Durozoi.
Danuta Borchardt
Gloucester, MA
$20,000
To support the retranslation from Polish of the novel Cosmos by Witold
Gombrowicz. Born in Poland in 1904, Gombrowicz is one of the great novelists
of the 20th century. He is the author of six books of fiction and three plays,
which use classical models of farce and the grotesque to convey larger ideas of
the times. Cosmos, his last novel, examines how an individual attempts to
create a personal cosmos by pegging his imaginations against the complexities of
the real world. Previous translations were done from French and German
translations, and this will be the first taken directly into English from
Polish.
Danuta Borchardt was born in Poland and lived in England and Ireland before
she moved to Boston in 1959 to work as a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General
Hospital. She won the 2001 National Translation Award from the American
Literary Translators Association for her translation of Gombrowicz's novel
Ferdydurke.
Erdag Goknar
Durham, NC
$10,000
To support the translation from Turkish of the novel The Museum of Innocence by
Orhan Pamuk. Born in 1952, Pamuk is the author of seven novels, all of which
explore the formation of cultural identity, nationalism, and the existing
contemporary Turkish experience on the periphery of Europe. The protagonist of
The Museum of Innocence comes from an upper-class Istanbul family who, after two
failed relationships, goes on an obsessive journey in search of places and
objects that remind him of his lost loves and that, once assembled, constitute
the bulk of a museum of his obsessions.
Erdag Goknar currently is Visiting Assistant Professor of Turkish Language and
Culture at Duke University. His translations include Pamuk's Earth and Ashes
and My Name is Red.
Howard C. Goldblatt
South Bend, IN
$20,000
To support the translation from Chinese of the novel My Life as Emperor by Su
Tong. Born in 1963, Su Tong is the author of six novels, short stories, and a
novella, Raise the Red Lantern, for which he is best known in the United States.
Narrated by a former child emperor, My Life as Emperor provides a chilling
glimpse of the decadence of imperial China.
Howard Goldblatt currently is a research professor at University of Notre Dame.
He has taught Chinese at San Francisco State University and University of
Colorado, and has translated more than 25 books of Chinese literature, including
Liu Heng's Black Snow and Chu Tien-wen's Notes of a Decadent Man.
Prasenjit Gupta
Iowa City, IA
$10,000
To support the translation of a selection of short stories of Bengali writer
Ashapurna Debi. Widely regarded as one of India's leading literary figures,
Ashapurna Debi (1909-95) explored the lives of Bengali society's middle class.
Debi was born in North Calcutta and never attended school. However, after the
publication of her first short story at age 13, she went on to publish dozens of
novels, short stories, and children's books over her 70-year writing career. In
1978, she received India's highest literary honor, the Gyanpeeth Award.
Prasenjit Gupta will translate about 20 short stories that were selected by Debi
in a longer collection entitled Self-selected Best Stories.
Gupta's translations have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Exchanges,
and Indian Literature. He won the Katha-British Council Contest in Translation
in 1997.
Clifford E. Landers
Naples, FL
$10,000
To support the translation from Portuguese of a selection of short stories by
Brazilian writer Rubem Fonseca. Born in 1925, Fonseca began his prolific
writing career at the age of 40, following careers as a high-ranking police
officer and a power company executive. Often focusing on alienation and
victimization in Brazilian society, Fonseca's oeuvre includes more than 100
short stories.
Clifford E. Landers has translated 14 novels, including two novels by Fonseca,
Bufo & Spallanzani and The Lost Manuscript, as well as Marcos Rey's Memoirs of a
Gigolo, Jorge Amado's The Golden Harvest, and Paulo Coelho's The Fifth Mountain.
Tiina K. Nunnally
Albuquerque, NM
$20,000
To support the translation from Norwegian of Sigrid Undset's first novel, Mrs.
Marta Oulie, and a selection of short stories written prior to 1918. Winner of
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, Sigrid Undset is best known for her
medieval trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter. Her early work, much of which has never
been translated into English, depicts the lives of poor and middle-class urban
women of Norway at the turn of the century.
Tiina Nunnally is executive editor of Fjord Press. She has translated such
works as Undset's novel Jenny and the trilogy of novels comprising Kristin
Lavransdatter, and Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow.
Robert Rudder
Claremont, CA
$10,000
To support the translation from Spanish of the novel Lo prohibido by Benito
Pérez Galdós. Robert Rudder will collaborate with Gloria Arjona. Born in 1843,
Galdos wrote 77 novels, 21 works for the theater, and several volumes of
literary criticism and personal essays, placing him second only to Cervantes
among Spain's greatest novelists. His novel Lo prohibido, exploring the moral
corruption of the Spanish bourgeoisie, has never been translated into English.
Rudder's translations include Galdós's Nazarin, Rosario Castellanos's City of
Kings, Francisco Rojas Gonzalez's Medicine Man, and Cristina Peri Rossi's
Solitaire of Love.
Laima Sruoginis
Peaks Island, ME
$10,000
To support the translation from Lithuanian of personal essays, a memoir and
fiction by Vanda Juknaite. Born in 1949 in a remote village along the
Lithuanian/Latvian border, Juknaite received the Lithuanian National Prize for
Literature in 2002. Her memoir is her first publication since 1995's novella
Land of Glass. During this time, Juknaite disappeared from the literary scene
to establish and run a summer camp for street children. Laima Sruoginis will
translate portions of Land of Glass, Juknaite's memoir, selections from her
novel The Funeral, and personal essays.
Sruoginis will soon have published a new anthology, The Earth Remains: An
Anthology of Contemporary Lithuanian Prose, by Columbia University Press. She
currently teaches at the University of Southern Maine.
Peter Constantine
New York, NY
$20,000
To support the translation from Greek of selected works by Alexandros
Papadiamantis, Greece's foremost 19th-century prose writer. Papadiamantis
(1851-1911) wrote more than 200 novellas and short stories, and numerous novels
including his most famous work, The Murderess. Woven into his stories are
vestiges of myth and ancient lore and the dour superstitions that governed the
daily life of Greek peasants, particularly the plight of Greek women.
Peter Constantine is the translator of Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, The
Undiscovered Chekhov - Thirty-Eight New Stories, and The Complete Works of Isaac
Babel. He currently is a senior editor for the journal Conjunctions.
Alyson Waters
Brooklyn, NY
$20,000
To support the translation from French of Vassilis Alexakis's most recent novel,
Foreign Words. Born and raised in Greece, Alexakis writes much of his work in
French, having moved to Paris in his twenties. His more than eight novels and
several works of short fiction employ elements of his life to explore the
relationship between identity and language, memory and the self, and exile,
loss, love, and death. Foreign Words follows the narrator on a journey from
Paris to Greece, where he grew up and his father just died, then to the Central
African Republic where he undertakes the learning of the language Sango in an
attempt for the narrator to fully meditate on language and loss.
Alyson Waters is currently the managing editor of Yale French Studies and a
lecturer in the French Department at Yale University. She has taught at Sarah
Lawrence College, Hunter College, and Queens College, and her translations
include Tzvetan Todorov's The Morals of History.
Total Literature Fellowships Awarded: 11
Total Literature Fellowship Dollars Awarded: $160,000
National Endowment for the Arts
webmgr@arts.endow.gov
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