The PEN Translation Fund

The PEN Translation Fund was established in the summer of 2003 by a gift of $730,000 from an anonymous donor in response to the dismayingly low number of literary translations currently appearing in English. Its purpose is to promote the publication and reception of translated world literature in English.

Over the four years of its existence, the Translation Fund has received a total of about 530 applications (averaging about 130 each year), which are evaluated by the Fund’s Advisory Board. The Fund has given grants of $2,000-$3,000 to a total of 42 translations from 23 languages, including Hindi, Finland-Swedish, Basque, Estonian, Farsi, and Lithuanian, as well as French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic.

Among the 32 projects awarded grants in the Fund’s first three years of operation (2004-2006), 17 have been published, and 4 more are forthcoming. Many of those published and forthcoming books found their publishers as a result of being awarded a grant by the Fund.

In addition to being excerpted in magazines including The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, Words Without Borders, The Literary Review, Mandorla, and many others, PEN Translation Fund projects have received the following awards:

• Finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry: Karen Emmerich for her translation of Miltos Sachtouris’ Poems (1945-1971) from the Greek(Archipelago, 2007).

• Winner of the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize from the Goethe-Institut Chicago: Susan Bernofsky’s translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s The Old Child and Other Stories from the German (New Directions, 2005)

• Support from the Lannan Foundation’s Translation Selections Series: Idra Novey’s translation of Brazilian poet Pablo Henriques Britto’s The Clean Shirt of It: Selected Poems from the Portuguese (BOA Editions, 2007).

• Short-listed for Canada’s highly prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize in 2006: Liz Winslow’s translation of Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail’s The War Works Hard from the Arabic (New Directions, 2005)

• Named one of the 25 Books to Remember of 2005 by the New York Public Library: Liz Winslow’s translation of Dunya Mikhail’s The War Works Hard (New Directions, 2005)

Who Is Eligible?
The PEN Translation Fund provides grants to support the translation of book-length works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, or drama that have not previously appeared in English or have appeared only in an egregiously flawed translation. The Fund seeks to encourage translators to undertake projects they might not otherwise have had the means to attempt. Anthologies with multiple translators, works of literary criticism, and scholarly or technical texts do not qualify. As of 2008, translators who have previously been awarded grants by the Fund are ineligible to reapply for three years after the year in which they receive a grant.

Robert Fagles Prize
The PEN Translation Fund is very pleased to announce that as of 2007 candidates who submit poetry translation projects to the PEN Translation Fund may now also be considered for the National Poetry Series' new Robert Fagles Translation Prize for the translator of a book of contemporary poetry written by a living poet. The winner of the Fagles Prize will receive a $2,000 cash award and publication by Dalkey Archive Press. The translated poet will receive a $500 honorarium.

Deadline:
January 16, 2008

How to Submit:
Click here to download an application

For Further Information:
Contact Esther Allen (esther.allen@centerforliterarytranslation.org) or Nick Burd (nick@pen.org).

2007 PEN Translation Fund Grant Recipients
2007 Advisory Board: Esther Allen, Sara Bershtel, Barbara Epler, Michael Henry Heim, Michael Moore, Richard Sieburth, and Eliot Weinberger.

Susan Bernofsky, for her translation from the German of Robert Walser’s 1908 novel The Assistant, the melancholy and mischievously ironic story of a penniless young man who works for and lives with a spendthrift family in a lavish villa on the shores of Lake Zurich. (Forthcoming from New Directions)

Jennifer Hayashida for her translation from the Swedish of Clockwork and Flowers: Explanations and Poems by Fredrik Nyberg. Fine, delicate and exact renderings of poems that simultaneously invoke Carl Linnaeus, the “Father of Taxonomy,” and the anarchic spirit of punk rock.

Wen Huang for his translation from the Chinese of Farewell to Jiabiangou, a collection of short stories by Yang Xianhui. Combining the passionate realism of fiction with the political outrage of journalism, these stories recount in devastating detail the experiences of intellectuals and former government officials shipped to Jiabiangou, a gulag in the desert region of northwestern China.

Ha-yun Jung for her translation from the Korean of A Lone Room, a 1995 novel by Shin Kyong-sook which was awarded Korea’s prestigious Manhae Literary Prize. A Lone Room vividly evokes the life of an intellectually ambitious young girl struggling to survive as a sweatshop worker in the 1970s.

Sara Khalili for her translation from the Farsi of  Seasons of Purgatory, a selection of short stories by contemporary Iranian writer Shahriar Mandanipour. As if the ghosts from the Arabian Nights had come to life among freeways, high-rises and fiber-optic networks, these stories embody the fierce clash of modernity and traditionalism in Iran today.

Paul Olchváry for his translation from the Hungarian of The Ninth, a 2005 novel by Ferenc Barnás. The story of the 9-year-old ninth child of a poor Catholic family in the Communist Hungary of the 1960s, the novel was hailed by critics as portraying “the unmistakable, throat- and gut-wrenching quality of distress that everyone remembers from his or her own childhood...”

Bill Porter (a.k.a. Red Pine) for his translation from the classical Chinese of an anthology of the poems of Wei Ying-wu, one of the greatest of the T’ang dynasty poets, whose work is singularly underrepresented in English. (Forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press)

Katherine Silver for her translation from the Spanish of Senselessness, a gripping and mordantly audacious novel by contemporary Salvadoran/Honduran Horacio Castellanos Moya, whose work was been praised for being politically and morally engaged without being predictably testimonial or politically correct. (Forthcoming from New Directions)

Christopher Southward for his translation from the Japanese of Acacia, short stories by Hitonari Tsuji, who also makes films under the name Jinsei Tsuji. Tsuji has been awarded the Prix Femina Etranger  (1999) and the Akutagawa Prize (1997) for his writing, and the International Critics Prize at the 56th Venice International Film Festival for one of his films. This is the first English translation of any portion of his extensive body of work.

Alyson Waters for her translation from the French of The Colors of Infamy, a novel by Egyptian writer Albert Cossery (b. 1913), whose work was championed by Henry Miller in the 1950s. This short, densely baroque novel echoes the meandering streets and wild variety of Cairo itself, and has been praised for its “characteristic blend of Olympian detachment and fine-grained moral inspection.”

2006 PEN Translation Fund Grant Recipients

2006 Advisory Board: Esther Allen, Sara Bershtel, Barbara Epler, Michael Henry Heim, Michael Moore, Richard Sieburth, and Eliot Weinberger.

Johannes Goransson for his translation from the Finland-Swedish of The Collected Poems of Henry Parland, by Henry Parland (1908-1930), intriguing and highly influential poems by a modernist prodigy who died at the age of 22.

Victoria Haggblom for her translation from the Swedish of To Mervas, a heartbreaking novel by the renowned Elizabeth Rynell which resonates with melancholy beauty as it unflinchingly describes the complications and brutality of human relationships.

Nicky Harman for her translation from the Chinese of Striking Root by Han Dong, a novel about Chinese city folk banished to remote countryside in 1969, which manages to be simultaneously subtle, funny, tragic, and earthy. Limpidly written (Han Dong is best-known as a poet) it is also a meditation on the meaning of family and roots.

Ann L. Huss for her translation from the Chinese of Beauty (Renmian taohua) by Ge Fei, the first novel in 10 years by an extremely important writer, and the first volume in a trilogy.  Full of allusions to the traditional utopian tale of the Peach Blossom Spring, Beauty is a parable, an analysis of revolution, and the story of modern China told by the young girl Xiumi.

Sawako Nakayasu for her translation from the Japanese of For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide, a book-length prose poem in 111 sections. The book is an integration of Hiraide's radiantly strange sense of prose, pseudo-scientific observation, fragmented narrative, poetics, autobiography, rhetorical experiments, and is the beginning of his lifelong investigation of prose poetry in Japan. (Forthcoming from New Directions)

Tegan Raleigh for her translation from the French of The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry: Algerian Stories, by Assia Djebar, who in 2005 was inducted into the Academie Française. The stories describe the politically driven violence that wracked Algeria during the 1990s, and its effects on intellectuals, teachers, and women in particular. (Seven Stories Press, 2006).

Constantine Rusanov for his translation from the Lithuanian of The Junction, poems by Tomas Venclova, Lithuania’s foremost living poet. Venclova belongs to the generation of Milosz and Brodsky, and many of his new poems respond to those late poets’ works. His poems explore borderland spaces: between consciousness and the unconscious, between historical epochs, and finally, between existence and non-being. In a series of formally intricate texts, Venclova paints a bleak landscape of frailty and loss, drowning despair in a steely tone of stoic resignation.

Stepan S. Simek for his translation from the Czech of two contemporary plays: Theremin by Petr  Zelenka and Three Sisters 2002.CZ  by Iva Volankova. Theremin is an account of the ten years that the Russian inventor, musician and agent for the Soviet Secret Service Leon Sergeievich Theremin spent in the United States in the 1920s and ’30s; in May, 2006, a staged reading of Theremin was performed at the Public Theater in New York. Three Sisters 2002 is a “variation” on Chekhov’s play set in the Czech Republic in 2002.

Alan Trei and Inna Feldbach for their translation from the Estonian of Robber’s Rise (Book 1 of the Truth and Justice pentalogy), a novel by Anton Hansen Tammsaare. This is the first English translation of an Estonian classic already translated into many other languages, a sprawling, rambunctious tale of farm life in the late 19th century, full of memorable characters, events and stories. It delves deeply into nature, childbirth, jealousy, young love, the private worlds of children, adultery, suicide, the Bible, and the Church, with a thread of mysticism running through.

2005 PEN Translation Fund Grant Recipients

2005 Advisory Board: Esther Allen, Sara Bershtel, Barbara Epler, Michael Henry Heim, and Eliot Weinberger

Chris Andrews for his translation from the Spanish of Last Evenings on Earth, a selection of short stories by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), who is widely regarded as one of the most important and original Latin American fiction writers to have emerged during the 1990s. The collection was published by New Directions (U.S.) and Harvill (U.K.) in 2006; two of the short stories included in it appeared in The New Yorker in 2005.

Rachel Tzvia Back for her translation from the Hebrew of Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama. Goldberg (1911-1970) was awarded the Israel Prize for her lifetime’s achievement and is a pre-eminent figure in modern Hebrew letters. This selection, the most extensive selection of the Goldberg’s poetry published to date in English, was published in the Toby Press’s Hebrew Classics series in the fall of 2005.

Susan Bernofsky for her translation from the German of The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck, which brings together  Erpenbeck's acclaimed novella “The Story of the Old Child” and five shorter stories from her collection Tand (Sand). These spare, haunting stories, many of them concerned with the relationships between generations and imbued with a sense of both the fairy-tale tradition and the realities of East German life, provide a strong introduction to the work of one of the most interesting younger writers in Germany today. The Old Child was published by New Directions in 2005 and in 2006 it was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, administered by the Goethe-Institut Chicago and funded by the German government.

Heather Cleary for her translation from the Spanish of The Persuasion of Days, a selection of work by Argentine avant-garde poet  Olivero Girondo, a contemporary of Borges whose wry, cosmopolitan eroticism expressed the sensibility of his age and retains great appeal  in ours. Some of the poems appeared in the spring 2006 issue of The Literary Review.

Karen Emmerich for her translation from the Greek of Poems (1945-1971) by Miltos Sachtouris, one of the most influential Greek poets of the 20th century. His work,
deeply emotional as well as formally experimental, is intimately tied to the violent history of his native Greece. After being published by Archipelago Press in 2006, the book was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2007.

Jason Grunebaum for his translation from the Hindi of The Girl with the Golden Parasol, a novel by Uday Prakash. This wildly postmodern narrative tells, among others, the uproarious tale of a young man’s all-consuming passion for the Bollywood starlet featured in the poster on his bedroom wall. (Forthcoming from Penguin India.)

Deborah Hoffman for her translation from the Russian of Children of the Gulag, ed. Semen Samuilovich Vilenskii, a volume of memoirs, diaries, and letters by the children of Soviet enemies of the people. Some were written at the time of the events recounted, and some from a perspective of many years later. Since receiving the grant excerpts from the project have appeared in the Toronto Slavic Quarterly, and others are forthcoming in other publications, including a monograph on children of terror to be published in 2007.

Elizabeth Macklin for her translation from the Basque of Meanwhile Take My Hand: Poems by Kirmen Uribe. In these lyrics and narratives are the paved-over rivers of newly urbanized medieval cities, the remains of loving relationships, whether entirely uprooted or making do with a companionable silence. The Basque phrase Bitartean heldu eskutik, which became the book's title, is, Uribe has said, "what you say when there's nothing at all you can say." (Gray Wolf Press, 2007)
Susanna Nied for her translation from the Danish of Butterfly Valley by Inger Christensen, a collection of four medium-length works by one of Europe's most revered poets, describing butterflies in the Bracjino Valley, piazzas in Rome, immortality in the whiteness of the page, and the "coming together" of a couple and their failure to connect. (New Directions, 2005).

Laima Sruoginis for her translation from the Lithuanian of My Voice Betrays Me, oral narratives of Lithuanian street children collected by Vanda Juknaite. Forthcoming from Columbia University Press as part of the East Europe Monographs series.

George Szirtes for his translation from the Hungarian of War and War by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. The second of the legendary Krasznahorkai's novels to appear in English, this is the visionary, dark, obsessive, funny, and finally terrifying story of a man who discovers a mysterious document in the archives. (New Directions, 2006).
 
Paul Vincent for his translation from the Dutch of Summer in Termuren by Louis Paul Boon, widely considered the greatest Belgian novelist of the 20th century. This saga follows the lives of a young married couple adrift in a Belgian landscape that, as the story begins, is darkening under the looming specter of World War I. (Dalkey Archive Press, 2006)
 
Susan Wilf for her translation from the Chinese of Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, a memoir by dissident Kang Zhengguo which traces his life from Mao's China in the 1940s to the present.  Branded a thought criminal as a youth, he was assigned to forced labor, served time in the Chinese gulag, and was driven into exile in the countryside until his eventual exoneration. Then came Tiananmen Square. (W.W. Norton, 2007).

2004 PEN Translation Fund Grant Recipients

2004 Advisory Board: Esther Allen, Sara Bershtel, Barbara Epler, Michael Henry Heim, and Eliot Weinberger.

Andrea Berger for her translation from the Hungarian of Bestiarium Transylvaniae, vol. I: The Birds of the Air, by Zsolt Lang. In this novel-in-stories, the first volume in a celebrated trilogy, Lang cunningly resurrects the medieval bestiary form with ingenious storytelling, exceptional knowledge of history and place, rich, mythical imagery, and a thoroughly contemporary wit.

Philip Boehm for his translation from the German of Landnahme by Christoph Hein, a novel that uses the voices of five narrators spread over five decades to tell the story of the war refugee Bernhard Haber as he works his way up from shunned outsider to local kingpin. Landnahme is a nuanced portrait of a man caught between the struggle for acceptance and the urge to reject all who once rejected him. Forthcoming from Metropolitan Books.

Peter Cole for The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, c.950-1492, a comprehensive anthology containing nearly 400 poems, a detailed historical introduction, short biographical essays on each of the 54 writers in the volume, and extensive annotation. The book tells the story of the renaissance of a literary culture that--as it fused elements of sacred and profane, East and West, Arabic and Hebrew--gave rise to what is arguably the most powerful body of literature in the post-biblical Jewish canon. (Princeton University Press, 2007).

Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander for their translation from the Spanish of the long poem The Night, the last work produced by Bolivia’s foremost 20th-century writer Jaime Saenz (1921-1986), a true poète maudit, whose lifelong struggle with alcoholism was wedded to a monastic dedication to writing. After receiving the grant, the two translators published an essay documenting a grant-funded trip to Bolivia in search of Saenz. A number of excerpts of the book-length poem appeared in journals such as Mandorla, No: A Journal of the Arts, and Octopus. (Princeton University Press, 2007).

Idra Novey for her translation from the Portuguese of a selection of poems by Paulo Henriques Britto (b. 1951), one of the outstanding poets of his generation, particularly admired for his keen sense of the relationship between form and content. The Clean Shirt of It: Selected Poems of Paulo Henriques Britto was published by BOA Editions in 2007 as part of the Lannan Translation Selections Series; an excerpt from it appeared as a translation chapbook in Mid-American Review that same year.

Joonseong Park for his translation from the Korean of a collection of contemporary short stories and novellas by Song Yong depicting a Kafkaesque world of ordinary people trapped in an authoritarian society.

Kristin Prevallet for her translation from the French of The Other World: Unpublished Writings, a selection of beautiful, dense lyric prose pieces found among the papers of Congolese novelist, playwright and poet Sony Labou Tansi, who died of AIDS in 1995.

Timothy Sergay for his translation from the Russian of Aleksandr Pavlovich Chudakov’s prize-winning “memoiristic novel” A Gloom Descends Upon the Ancient Steps (2000), set in northern Kazakhstan, which centers on the relationship between a Moscow historian and his grandfather, a titan of physical and intellectual rigor, and depicts many facets of daily life under Stalin in a new light.

Gerald Turner for his translation from the Czech of a prize-winning satirical jaunt through the last century by Patrik Ourednik, Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century. (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005)

Elizabeth Winslow for her translation from the Arabic of The War Works Hard, a collection of innovative, subversive poems by contemporary Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail, currently living in exile in the United States. Published in 2005 by New Directions, The War Works Hard was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the 25 Books To Remember of 2005. It was also one of four books short-listed for Canada’s highly prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize in 2006.