PEN America is thrilled to showcase the work of 12 recipients of the 2018 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants and the winner of the PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature. In order to promote the publication and reception of translated world literature in English, winners of the Heim grant are awarded $2,000–4000, and the winner of the Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature, $5,000. The PEN/Heim Translation Fund, now celebrating its 15th year, received 177 applications in 2018, from a wide array of languages of origin, genres, and time periods. From this vast field of applicants, the Fund’s Advisory Board—John Balcom, Peter Constantine, Tynan Kogane, Allison Markin Powell, Fiona McCrae, Mary Ann Newman, Antonio Romani, Chip Rossetti, Ross Ufberg, Natasha Wimmer, and Chair Samantha Schnee—has selected 13 projects, spanning 12 different languages, including Japanese, Arabic, Korean, Farsi/Persian, Yiddish, and more.
The excerpts of the winning projects below, introduced by the translators themselves, cover a myriad of issues across several genres. Among their subjects are the inner lives of women of the Italian deep south; issues such as migration and the 18th century slave trade in Denmark; daily life in the postwar era of a fictional, unnamed Latin American country; transnational healing following the colonial intervention of Italy in North Africa; what it looks like for the “lyrical I” to exist between the realms of myth, identity, history, and the body; and Tehran’s contemporary countercultural movement.
Publishers and editors who wish to express interest in any of these projects are invited to contact PEN America Literary Awards at [email protected] for translators’ contact information.
2018 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Winners
Aaron Robertson, Beyond Babylon
Aaron Robertson is pursuing an MSt in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, where he attends on a Rhodes Scholarship. His research focuses on identity formation, multilingualism, and dislocation in contemporary literature by Afro-Italian women. He has written for The Nation, Detroit Metro Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Point Magazine. In 2018, he will begin reporting for The New York Times as a James Reston Fellow.
Read an excerpt . . .
from Beyond Babylon
They’d told her to go there and make no detours. Because that was where people refashioned their dreams. That was where people found all the Somalis again. More…
Alexander Dickow, Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: An Epic in Three Cantos
Alexander Dickow is a scholar, translator, and poet who works in French and English. He is an associate professor of French at Virginia Tech. He has published translations of Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, Henri Droguet, and others. A translation of the work of Swiss poet Gustave Roud, translated with Sean T. Reynolds, is forthcoming from Seagull Press. Scholarly works include Le Poète innombrable (2015), and poetic works include Caramboles (2008), Rhapsodie curieuse (2017), and Appetites (forthcoming from MadHat Press). You can find out more about Dicker at www.alexdickow.net.
Read an excerpt . . .
from Neverending Quest for the Other Shore
To all people of good faith embarked / on the obscure waters of immemorial chaos / where the djinn furiously unravel/ their long lamé manes / flying in the gusts of wind / a thousand regrets More…
Brian Sneeden, Rhapsodia
Brian Sneeden is the author of the poetry collection Last City (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2018) and translator of Phoebe Giannisi’s Homerica (World Poetry Books, 2017). His poems and translations have appeared in Asymptote, Beloit Poetry Journal, Harvard Review, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other publications, and translations of his poems have been published in international magazines in Greek, Italian, Albanian, and Serbian. He is the senior editor of New Poetry in Translation.
Read an excerpt . . .
from Rhapsodia
Do the wings itch as they sprout? / When from the belly’s opening / you first raised your head / and pushing from the pain / sprang into the light / to cry out More…
Bruce & Ju-Chan Fulton, One Left
Bruce Fulton is, with Ju-Chan Fulton, the translator of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction, most recently the graphic novel Moss by Yoon Taeho, The Human Jungle by Cho Chŏngnae, and Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader. Among their awards and fellowships is the first U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship awarded for a Korean literary work. Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation, Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia.
Read an excerpt . . .
from One Left
The last one is out of her coma. For three weeks she recognized no one. She speaks in a labored, halting tone: “I can’t die—not when I think there won’t be anyone after me to speak . . .” More…
Emily Drumsta, Revolt Against the Sun
Emily Drumsta is assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, specializing in modern Arabic and Francophone literatures. She has articles and chapters published or forthcoming in Middle Eastern Literatures, Social Text, Research in African Literatures, and The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Translation. Her translations have appeared in McSweeney’s, Circumference, Jadaliyya, Asymptote, Arabic Literature (in English), and the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation. She is a co-founder of Tahrir Documents, an online archive of broadsides, pamphlets, and other ephemera collected in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the 2011 uprisings in Egypt.
Read an excerpt . . .
from Revolt Against the Sun
She died, but no lips shook, no cheeks turned white / no doors heard her death tale told and retold, / no blinds were raised for small eyes to behold / the casket as it disappeared from sight. More…
Janine Beichman, The Essential Yosano Akiko: The Ripening Years
Janine Beichman studied Japanese poetry at Columbia University, where she received her doctorate, and has participated in poetry workshops with Maxine Kumin, Marie Ponsot, and Marie Howe. Her publications include biographies of the poets Masaoka Shiki and Yosano Akiko, a translation of Ooka Makoto’s anthology of Japanese poetry and a volume of Ooka’s own poems, as well as her original Noh play Drifting Fires. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Read an excerpt . . .
from The Essential Yosano Akiko: The Ripening Years
Hello my happiness— / the words said themselves / when we met / that second time, the time / I was ready to die for More…
Jamie Lee Searle, Winter’s Garden
Jamie Lee Searle is a literary translator from German, and a co-founder of the Emerging Translators Network. Since completing an MA in Anglo-German Cultural Relations, she has published over 15 translations of titles by contemporary German-language authors. She is currently working on Anna Kim’s Die Grosse Heimkehr for Portobello Books. Recipient of a BCLT Mentorship in 2011, she has since been awarded residencies at Writers Omi/Ledig House, New York, and by the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Literatur in Vienna.
Read an excerpt . . .
from Winter’s Garden
For Anton Winter, childhood was crammed with tall grasses and tea roses and green apples in the trees, which were stared at so covetously all summer long that they eventually began to blush with shyness. More…
Julia Sanches, Slash and Burn
Julia Sanches is a translator of Portuguese and Spanish, and also dabbles in French and Catalan. Her book-length translations are Now and at the Hour of Our Death by Susana Moreira Marques (And Other Stories, 2015) and What are the Blind Men Dreaming? by Noemi Jaffe (Deep Vellum, 2016). Her shorter translations have appeared in Suelta, The Washington Review, Asymptote, Two Lines, Granta, Tin House, Words Without Borders, and Revista Machado, among others. She has worked as a literary agent for the Wylie Agency and is a founding member of Cedilla & Co., a collective of translators that aims to bolster the presence of international literature in English by putting translators at the forefront of the publishing process.
Read an excerpt . . .
from Slash and Burn
He gave her one last chance: she had until the count of three to change her mind. After saying the number one, he said Only two left. After saying the number two, he loaded the clip. More…
Lindy Falk Van Rooyen, Hope
Lindy Falk Van Rooyen is a translator best known for her translations of Danish works of literature, including The Last Execution, What My Body Remembers, and A Thistle Flower from the Prairie. She received her MA in English and Scandinavian literature, specializing in Danish and Norwegian, from Hamburg University, and a Master of Laws (LL.M.) in Commercial Law from the University of Stellenbosch.
Read an excerpt . . .
Mariam Rahmani, Don’t Worry
Mariam Rahmani is working on a novel-in-progress and a translation from Persian/Farsi into English of Mahsa Mohebali’s Don’t Worry (2008) while pursuing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at UCLA. She served as one of five inaugural writers in residence with The Mastheads in Pittsfield, MA, in 2017, and in 2016 participated in VONA/Voices, a workshop dedicated to writers of color. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Rumpus and in The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Read an excerpt . . .
from Don’t Worry
Like always, she’s sitting at the out-of-tune grand piano, mashing down the pedal and making the windows of the Kolah Farangi Emirate tremble…Sara, when did you return? More…
Michael Gluck, Matisse
Michael Gluck is a translator of Russian and a Ph.D. student in Slavic Languages and Literature at Columbia University. His translation of Igor Sakhnovsky’s “The Jealous God of Chance” recently appeared in InTranslation.
Read an excerpt . . .
from Matisse
Vadya’s biography was as much invented as it was true. There were so many blown-out-of-proportion intricacies to remember that he’d long ago lost sight of the facts. More…
Ri J. Turner, Chaim Gravitzer
Ri J. Turner is a graduate student in Yiddish language, literature, and culture at Hebrew University (Jerusalem). She is currently studying in Paris, France, at the Yiddish immersion program of the the Medem Library ~ Paris Yiddish Center. She began translating Yiddish literature in 2014, thanks to a translation fellowship from the Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, MA). In addition to the novel Chaim Gravitzer, Turner is currently translating a book-length anthology of Yiddish humoresques by Joseph Tunkel, with the support of a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Read an excerpt . . .
from Chaim Gravitzer
At the head of the table sat a wide-shouldered young man with laughing black eyes, feigning a strict demeanor. More…
2018 PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature Winner
Jeanne Bonner, A Walk in the Shadows
Jeanne Bonner is a writer and editor who also teaches Italian at the University of Connecticut. Her essays and critical writing have appeared in The New York Times, Catapult, CNN Travel, and Literary Hub. She has translations forthcoming in The Kenyon Review and Aster(ix). She studied Italian literature at Wesleyan University and has an MFA in Writing from Bennington College.
Read an excerpt . . .
from A Walk in the Shadows
No threat or reprimand could calm our racing hearts and the restlessness spurred by a place where rules and prohibitions fell on us without weight, like a feather. More…
