Announcing the 2011 PEN Translation Fund Grant Recipients
The PEN Translation Fund, now celebrating its eighth year, is pleased to announce the winners of this year’s competition. From a field of more than 130 applicants, the Fund’s Advisory Board—David Bellos, Susan Bernofsky, Edwin Frank, Michael Reynolds, Natasha Wimmer, and Jeffrey Yang, and chaired by Michael F. Moore—has selected 11 projects for funding. Read descriptions and excerpts from the projects at www.pen.org/blog
Among this year's recipients is our colleague:
Annmarie S. Drury for a collection of poems by Tanzanian poet Euphrase Kezilahabi, an acclaimed Swahili writer whose work is only now becoming more widely available to other readers. Saturated with vivid imagery, Kezilahabi’s poems reinvigorate traditional forms by introducing everyday language and free verse. An active promoter of accessibility, Kezilahabi’s work also offers a subtle social critique of the way language is used by those in power. (Available for publication.)
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Introduction
If anyone asks me
why, as for rhymes and meter,
I don’t use them and why, as for lines
and stanzas, they don’t add up,
I’ll say to him: friend
there are many ways of going
to the garden.
But if that same person
keeps on nagging and telling me
my way is a bad one,
I’ll say:
friend, let’s go to my house
on foot, and at my house—
when we arrive—try then to teach me
walking.
