National Endowment for the Arts Announces 14 Fellowships in Literary Translation for FY 2007

		Contact: Paulette Beete 202-682-5601 beeteg@arts.gov

August 3, 2006

Washington, DC - The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) today announced that it will award 14 grants to translators of prose and poetry for a total federal investment of $200,000. The grants will support the translation into English of literary works from 11 different languages, including Icelandic, Greek, and Romanian. The selected projects focus on a diverse group of works from the early 20th century through the present, and the translators will receive $10,000 or $20,000 based on the scope and merit of each project. (The amount of the awards is subject to Congressional ratification of the Arts Endowment's 2007 budget.) Grants are awarded based on the recommendations of a panel of experts, which this year included distinguished translators Gregory Rabassa and Allen Mandelbaum, among others.

"So many acknowledged literary masterpieces - Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Dante's Inferno, the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Octavio Paz, or Wislawa Szymborska - would be lost to us as Americans, if it weren't for the challenging art of translation," said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. "The NEA has supported translation projects for more than two decades, bringing to millions of Americans a glimpse of other cultures, and helping to globalize our experience of the arts."

Nine of the 14 grants will support the translation of prose works, including one project focusing on drama. Prose projects include the translation from Spanish of short stories by the late Argentine author Rodolfo Walsh, a founder of the South American news agency Prensa Latina; the translation from Arabic of Specters, a novel by the contemporary Egyptian writer and essayist Radwa Ashour; and the translation from Hungarian of the historical novel The Snake's Shadow by Zsuzsa Rakovszky, whose awards include the Hungarian Literary Prize, that country's most prestigious literary award.

Poetry projects represent five of the funded proposals. They include the translation from Icelandic of selected poems by Jóhann Hjálmarsson, who received the 2003 Icelandic Parliament Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to that nation's literature; the translation from Greek of ten volumes of poetry by Eleni Vakalo, one of Greece's most prominent 20th-century art critics and theorists; and the translation from Spanish of poems by the Cuban poet, essayist, and anthologist José Lezama Lima.

The recipients of the NEA Translation Fellowships for FY 2007 are:

Christopher Burawa (Chandler, Arizona): $20,000
Bogdana Carpenter (Ann Arbor, Michigan): $20,000
Thomas Cooper (Chapel Hill, North Carolina): $20,000
Karen Emmerich (Stony Brook, New York): $10,000
Ileana Orlich (Paradise Valley, Arizona): $10,000
John Penuel (Paris, France): $20,000
Barbara Romaine (Paoli, Pennsylvania): $10,000
Damion Searls (Corralitos, California): $10,000
Cindy Schuster (Irvine, California): $10,000
Marian Schwartz (Austin, Texas): $20,000
Antony Shugaar (Charlottesville, Virginia): $10,000
Roberto Tejada (San Diego, California): $10,000
Elizabeth Williamson (Berkeley, California): $10,000
Natasha Wimmer (Brooklyn, New York): $20,000

Please see complete descriptions of the funded projects.

Since 1981, the Arts Endowment has awarded 246 translation grants to support projects in 46 languages from 60 countries. Awards for prose and poetry have been awarded in the same grant cycle since FY 2006; previously, the awards had alternated each year between poetry and prose.

This year, the National Endowment for the Arts marks its 40th anniversary of leadership in the arts. The NEA is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education. Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the Arts Endowment is the largest national funder of the arts, bringing great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases.

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