2014 PEN/Heim Translation Series
PEN’s 2014 Translation Series focuses on the recipients of this year’s PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants, with an amazing array of projects from around the world. Included in the series you’ll find treasures like Eric Becker’s translation of a previously unpublished short story by Mozambican author Mia Couto, Sholeh Wolpé’s translation from Persian of Farid ud-Din Attar’s beautiful The Conference of the Birds, and Zachary Ludington’s translation of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s kaleidoscopic Pixel Flesh. We also asked this year’s PEN/Heim translators to write short essays about what originally drew them to their projects and why they matter now.
The PEN/Heim Translation Fund, now in its eleventh year, awards grants of $2,000 to $4,000 to promote the publication and reception of translated world literature in English. Among the 50 projects awarded grants in the Fund’s first five years of operation, 39 have been published or are forthcoming from a publisher. We hope to increase that number with this year’s projects.
Ministers, Gossips, and Communists: On Translating Guillermo Cotto-Thorner
"I decided to translate Manhattan Tropics when I came to grasp its significance as a historical and artistic document; as the first novel of the mid-century Puerto Rican diaspora… More
Manhattan Tropics
Manhattan Tropics is the first novel of the Puerto Rican mass-migration to New York City, offering a panorama of mid-century life in El Barrio. Maney's translation deftly captures the… More
Chistopol Notebook
Though Tarkovsky is one of Russia's greatest poets of the twentieth century—on the ranks with Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Brodsky—he remains little-known in the West. Philip Metres's and Dimitri Psurtsev's… More
The Language of King David: On Translating Arseny Tarkovsky
"In his poetic and spiritual freedom, Tarkovsky outlasted the slag and dross of totalitarianism. His poetry is the internal cinema of the Soviet era, an unscrolling testimony of the… More
Not Better, but More Humane: On Translating Romain Gary
"The Kites is the only book I have ever skipped work to finish ... Gary fully inhabits his language; he uses every square inch of every word, milking each… More
Of Sea, Sponge, Ant, and Prayer: On Translating María Baranda
"For Baranda, narration is not of social relations but of the essential. Her cry is resoundingly of sea, sponge, ant, and prayer, as related in rapture. It’s for her… More
Nightmare Running on a Meadow of Absolute Light
One of the leading Mexican poets of the generation born in the 1960s and a powerful presence in all of Latin American poetry, Baranda is best known for her… More
Lamentations of a Coconut Tree
This short story from the 2014 Neustadt Prize-winner was published after years of civil war following independence from Portugal in 1975 and is a chronicle of Mozambique's rebirth. Becker… More
Everything Full of Weight: On Translating Mia Couto
"My great satisfaction in translating this collection is not simply to be able to propose a different way of looking at our own familiar world, but to be part… More