2020 ALTA Travel Fellows - Conference 43rd Annual ALTA - The American Literary Translators ...
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43rd Annual ALTA Sept. 30 – Oct. 18, 2020
Conference
THE AMERICAN
LITERARY
TRANSLATORS
ASSOCIATION
2020 ALTA
Travel FellowsALTA Virtual Travel each year , between four and six $1,000 fellowships are awarded to emerging
(unpublished or minimally published) translators to help them pay for hotel and
Fellowships travel expenses to the annual ALTA conference. This year, with the shift of the ALTA
conference to an online platform, nine Virtual Travel Fellows, including two Peter K.
Jansen Fellows, were awarded $500 each. 2020 marks the fifth year of the Peter K.
Jansen Memorial Travel Fellowship, preferentially awarded to an emerging transla-
tor of color or a translator working from an underrepresented diaspora or stateless
language.
This year’s winners were selected by judges David Ball, Bonnie Chau, and Tenzin
Dickie. The 2020 ALTA Travel Fellowships are made possible thanks to the gener-
ous support of ALTA’s Past Presidents Council, the Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel
Fund, and numerous individual donors including established translators and other
devoted supporters of the craft and art of literary translation.
ALTA will celebrate this year’s Virtual Travel Fellows with a downloadable audio
chapbook of the Fellows reading selections from their translations, introduced by
2009 Travel Fellow Robin Myers. The chapbook will be released on ALTA’s Sound-
Cloud at 2:00 pm ET on October 8, 2020. Follow this link for a transcript of the
readings.
Congratulations to these exceptional emerging translators, chosen from among
eighty applicants. Their names and bios appear in the order in which they will read.
Öykü Tekten, 2020 ALTA Travel Fellow
Karen Hung Curtis, 2020 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow
Kristen Renee Miller, 2020 ALTA Travel Fellow
Ena Selimović, 2020 ALTA Travel Fellow
Alex Karsavin, 2020 ALTA Travel Fellow
Jamie Lauer, 2020 ALTA Travel Fellow
Dong Li, 2020 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow
Shoshana Akabas, 2020 ALTA Travel Fellow
Laura Nagle, 2020 ALTA Travel Fellow
Travel Fellows 2Öykü Tekten, 2020 ALTA Travel Fellow
(TURKISH, ENGLISH)
öykü tekten began translating poetry surviving the Dersim Massacre in
under the guidance and generous 1937–38. She says “Kurdish” poems
support of Ammiel Alcalay, whose since Süreya never wrote in his mother
impressive body of work and lifelong tongue—he lost both his mother and
dedication to literature, translation, his mother tongue to state violence—
and archiving can only be described but his Kurdish past appears, implicitly,
as a school of its own with a growing in his poems as a site of mourning and
number of students who would other- remembrance or a subtle, yet stubborn
wise remain “uneducated” despite resistance against forgetting.
their multiple diplomas and impressive Currently, Öykü is working on a book
résumés. of selected poems by Birhan Keskin,
Her early translation work included who, in her opinion, has reintroduced
the poets of the Second New Genera- the old Turkish poetic tradition through
photo credit Mario Pardo Segovia
tion, an avant-garde poetry movement a uniquely contemporary vocabu-
that began in the mid-fifties in Turkey lary that closes the gap between the
and transformed the poetic language of personal and the universal and brings, Öykü’s dream as a translator is to
the time by opening a space for exper- almost effortlessly, human and nonhu- reach the level of mastery required
imentation and new forms of expres- man subjects into an open field that to translate Turgut Uyar, one of the
sion more accessible for common blurs the existing distinctions between Second New Generation poets whose
readers. She particularly focused on the two. She is also against writing too death, according to Cemal Süreya,
translating Cemal Süreya’s “Kurdish” many poems since “it is a betrayal of caused all other poets to be fired.
poems to trace the trauma of displace- both the words and the trees.”
ment (both geographically and linguis-
tically) he experienced as a child after
Karen Hung Curtis, 2020 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow
(CHINESE—HONG KONG)
of translation while working as an editor phone literary world. One of Wong’s
for a bilingual contemporary art journal best-known novels, Portraits of Heroic
in Shanghai, but it was not until several Women, written largely in Cantonese,
years ago that she fell in love with liter- is the narrative of three generations of
ary translation when, during the punish- working-class women against a bleak
ing, isolating cold of a Minnesota winter, hundred years of Hong Kong history.
she began to translate into English a Karen strives to convey the fluidity and
stunning short story by the Hong Kong musicality of Cantonese in English and
author Dorothy Tse, and realized that to reclaim, in a sense, the language
translation was a way to bridge and closest to her heart with these stories
make meaning of the different frag- of struggle, resilience, and hope, the
ments of our selves and peripatetic stories of her own grandmothers and
lives. mother.
Currently an MFA candidate in Karen is grateful to ALTA for the
Creative Writing and Literary Translation opportunity to present her work. Her
at the Vermont College of Fine Arts— translations of short stories and poetry
karen grew up in Hong Kong speak- studying with writer-translators Evan by Hong Kong writers Dorothy Tse,
ing Cantonese, English, and French. Fallenberg and Jason Grunebaum— Hon Lai-chu, Ge Liang, and Stuart Lau
She trained as a cellist at the École she is translating the works of Wong Wai-sing can be found in Read Paper
Normale de Musique de Paris, and Bik-wan, grande dame of contempo- Republic and Cha: An Asian Literary
studied French Literature at King’s rary Hong Kong literature yet a name Journal.
College London. She got her first taste not as widely known beyond the Sino-
Travel Fellows 3Kristen Renee Miller, 2020 ALTA Travel Fellow
(FRENCH)
a poet , editor , and community arts logging, overfishing, and pollution into
advocate, Kristen Renee Miller first the natural landscape of the reserve.
came to translation looking for a new Throughout the collection, the unin-
writing ritual. In 2016, as a poet-in-res- habitable land is closely linked to the
idence at Blackacre Conservancy, she uninhabitable language of colonizers
began each morning by translating a (“Nous nous baignons dans le mal de
short poem from the French, Spanish, vivre de l’asphalte chaude / en atten-
or German. She was especially drawn dant de trouver la parole habitable . . .”).
to the way translation activates many Part of Gill’s project, formally, was to
modes of understanding at once: intu- create tension and discomfort through
itive and analytical, mechanical and language, to subvert the language
musical. She found the brief transla- she was writing within by resisting its
tions compulsively fun to make, and conventions. Her formal and stylistic
what began as an early-morning exer- choices amounted to a full-scale resis- photo credit Amber Estes Thieneman
cise soon eclipsed her other writing tance to imperialism that was as much
projects. about its effect on the land as on the porary Arts, Kristen lives in Louisville,
Kristen’s first full-length translation, language. In translating Gill’s poetry Kentucky, where she works as an
Spawn, by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-An- into English, Kristen worked to preserve editor for Sarabande Books. She is the
drée Gill, was published in April 2020. the tension of Gill’s formal choices: her program director for Sarabande Writing
Kristen first encountered Gill’s work in reversals of convention and shifts in Labs, which offers free writing, mentor-
a Montreal bookstore when she picked register, her project of disruption. She ship, and publishing opportunities to
up a volume of her poetry, Frayer, in the worked to render in English a voice as communities that have been historically
original French and was immediately sensitive and intimate as it is raw and and systemically excluded in Louisville.
drawn to Gill’s signature minimalist elemental. Sarabande Writing Labs have been held
poems, with their highly distilled music Selections from Spawn have in community centers, homeless shel-
and imagery. appeared in The Kenyon Review, Guer- ters, youth detention centers, libraries,
Gill’s Spawn is a collection of brief, nica, The Common, The Offing, and and virtual forums, producing seven-
untitled poems braiding themes of elsewhere. Kristen’s other poems have teen anthologies of writing and publish-
21st-century imperialism, ecological appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, ing more than two hundred Louisville
blight, ’90s-kid culture, and coming of DIAGRAM, and Best New Poets 2018. writers. In each of her roles as editor,
age, set on the Mashteuiatsh reserve in A recipient of grants and awards from program director, and translator, Kristen
Quebec. Ecological decline is viewed The Kennedy Center, The Humana intends to amplify the work of women
through the lens of imperialism and Festival, The Kentucky Arts Coun- and nonbinary writers, who are too
the encroachment of development, cil, and the Foundation for Contem- often underrepresented in publishing.
Ena Selimović, 2020 ALTA Travel Fellow
(BOSNIAN/CROATIAN/SERBIAN)
while learning english after arriving Turkey as refugees of the war and geno-
in the United States, Ena Selimović cide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She
completed her first translations: bills, learned Turkish and had begun attend-
residency applications, and other ing primary school when her family’s
convoluted word collections for her residential status expired. Still other
parents. The process was challenging, geographic migrations were accompa-
creative, important, exhilarating, and nied by linguistic ones. She enrolled in
unpaid. (Many of those initial impres- the second grade in St. Louis, Missouri,
sions have stuck.) She did not realize and, somewhere along the way, she
then that translation was anything but forgot Turkish.
a necessity, let alone a constant source Somewhere along another way, she
of future happiness or a career. began unforgetting her past. Litera-
Born in Yugoslavia and speaking ture had always anchored her, and she
Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian at home, continued reading and writing vora-
Ena and her family spent six years in ciously. During college and her increas-
Travel Fellows 4ingly comparatist training in graduate how racio-religious and antimigration embalms her Barbies for an uncertain
school, she realized that Comparative rhetoric grounded in language politics trip. Kolanović’s illustrations embolden
Literature and translation, not erasure, fuels inter-imperial racial discourses. the tragicomic voice whose obsessions
would measure up to the task of multi- The variously multilingual texts she with Barbie signal life-sized stakes.
lingual living and that she wasn’t alone analyzes engage and revise what she Ena’s translations are motivated
in that endeavor. calls “forms of foreignness.” She holds by the work of translators like Ellen
Thanks to supportive and commit- an MPhil in Comparative Literature Elias-Bursać, Julia Sanches, Jennifer
ted faculty members, Ena defended from Trinity College Dublin and a BA in Croft, and Annelise Finegan Wasmoen.
her PhD dissertation in Comparative English from the University of Missouri– She and her two translator friends,
Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Mirgul Kali, who translates from Kazakh,
St. Louis in May 2020. Her research Currently, Ena is translating the novel and Sabrina Jaszi, who translates from
focuses on the racialization of language Underground Barbie by Maša Kola- Russian and Uzbek, have recently
in contemporary multilingual Ameri- nović. Set in 1990s Yugoslavia-partial- started a Turkic-Slavic literary transla-
can and Balkan literatures. The texts ly-turned-Croatia, the story follows an tion collective. In addition to translat-
in her archive—including the work adult’s recollections of her childhood ing Underground Barbie, Ena is working
of Gary Shteyngart, Jhumpa Lahiri, in the midst of war as she accumulates on essays that fall under the rubric of
Téa Obreht, Bekim Sejranović, and Barbies, or what the narrator calls “sliv- Comparative Literature and writing her
Dubravka Ugrešić—dramatize alterna- er[s] of plastic perfection.” It retains the first novel, Rather the Ant. She looks
tive models for comparative race stud- voice of a child whose wit and humor forward to the new writing she has in
ies and migration studies, revealing cut through air raid sirens while she the works and is now relearning Turkish.
Alex Karsavin, 2020 ALTA Travel Fellow
(RUSSIAN)
alex karsavin is a Russian–English “Queer Russophone Poetry: Readings,
translator, with translations published Translations, and Contexts,” hosted
in Sreda, PEN America, Columbia Jour- by Globus Books. Their translations
nal, and HOMINTERN magazine. Ilya of feminist Russian poets Stanislava
Danishevsky’s hybrid prose-poetry Mogileva and Elena Georgievskaya will
novel Mannelig v tsepyakh (Mannelig in appear in F-Letter: New Russian Femi-
Chains) forms Alex’s main translation nist Poetry, edited by Galina Rymbu
project, a collaboration with veteran and Eugene Ostashevsky.
Russian–English translator Anne Fisher, Mogileva’s work presses the folk
funded by the University of Exeter’s song and oral epic forms into the
RusTrans project. Mannelig is a highly service of Russian feminism; Geor-
experimental work, braiding several gievskaya queers the language of
narrative threads that span queer biblical revelation. Alex is similarly inter-
coming-of-age to geopolitical annex- ested in the precursors to contempo-
ation into a tapestry loosely inspired by rary queer Russian writing, especially
Homer’s Odyssey. since the historic logocentrism of
Alex’s current projects revolve the Soviet Union allows literature to, Alex is currently attending the Univer-
around Russia’s contemporary queer contrary to W. H. Auden’s claim (made sity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as
poetry community, a milieu that in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”), make a graduate student in the Department
includes Danishevsky. They encoun- things happen. To this end, they are of Slavic Languages and Literatures. In
tered these writers after a childhood working with fellow translator Signe their spare time they are working on a
as a queer Russian-American, reading Swanson on a series of translations of debut collection of poems. They are
Russian novels in cars as they moved poems by Yevgeny Kharitonov, a gay very grateful to ALTA for the opportunity
around the Soviet expatriate archipel- writer and theater director who rose provided by the travel fellowship.
ago in North America. As an editor of to some literary prominence in 1970s
HOMINTERN magazine, they were able Moscow before dying of a heart attack
to consistently publish and translate in 1981. Kharitonov’s depiction of gay
poetry from this queer literary commu- life in the Soviet Union is often encoded
nity. These promotional activities at the level of language, a choice that
included an essay in The New Inquiry, is mirrored in the cryptically written
and culminated recently in their partic- Mannelig in Chains.
ipation in an online bilingual reading,
Travel Fellows 5Jamie Lauer, 2020 ALTA Travel Fellow
(SPANISH)
Ibáñez in Viña del Mar, Chile, and the the legacy left to Chilean society by the
experience gave her a deep appreci- dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, now
ation for Latin American culture and infamous for its violations of human
the singularities of Chilean Spanish. rights. As Resha Cardone points out in
(And, after visits to both of Pablo Neru- “Refashioning the Book in Pinochet’s
da’s ocean-view houses, it instilled the Chile: The Feminist Literary Project,
dream of someday owning her own Ergo Sum,” the dictatorship frequently
eccentrically decorated waterside relied on gendered terminology to
getaway.) position itself as dominant (“mascu-
While abroad, she was introduced to line”) over subservient (“feminine”) citi-
Pía Barros’s collection of flash fictions zens. For Barros, then, writing against
titled Llamadas perdidas (Missed gender stereotypes becomes part of a
Calls). Barros is well known in Chile larger political protest, and this creates
and throughout Latin America for her an intriguing overlap between gender,
short fiction. Nonetheless, it wasn’t protest, and literature that breathes new
translation is a process of both until Lauer participated in a literary life into the established genres of liter-
creation and collaboration, so it makes translation workshop as part of her MA ary reflections on the Pinochet dictator-
sense to Jamie Lauer that she would in Comparative Literature at Indiana ship and feminist literature.
be drawn to the endeavor of sharing University Bloomington that she prop- That the traditionally male-dominated
another author’s unique voice, tone, erly appreciated the wit and literary landscape of Latin American litera-
and style with an audience in a new evocativeness of Barros’s writing. The ture in translation has overlooked great
linguistic and cultural setting. As a translation process foregrounded each female literary writers such as Barros
Spanish–English translator and free- story’s careful selection of language is something Lauer wishes to rectify.
lance editor, her ambitions lie equally in and manipulation of literary conven- She will continue translating Barros’s
expressing her own creativity and work- tions, the primary techniques that work and hopes to see the full collec-
ing with others so their voices can be enable so few words to hauntingly play tion published in translation someday.
heard and understood. with audience expectations and lead In addition, she intends to identify addi-
Her interest in translation grew out readers to gut-punching revelations or tional female authors whose voices and
of a love for the Spanish language that twists that stick with them long after unique perspectives on critical literary
evolved during twelve years of formal they have closed the book. and social issues deserve to be heard
language study and visits to Spain, Through translation, Lauer also and shared across the globe.
Mexico, and Chile. In the fall of 2011, further came to appreciate Barros’s use
she studied at the Universidad Adolfo of feminist and erotic themes to critique
Dong Li, 2020 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow
(CHINESE—MANDARIN)
translation , of language and of D. Wright was essential in giving him
cultural sensibility, is nothing new to a free sense of the language and how
Dong Li, as he moved to the United it can break boundaries, engage ethi-
States from P.R. China to study at cally, and form communities. In 2014
Deep Springs College, and eventually he participated in a Luce Residency
earned his BA in Comparative Litera- at Vermont Studio Center with the
ture as well as an MFA in Literary Arts Chinese poet Zhu Zhu, which resulted
at Brown University. Since then, he has in the full-length publication of The Wild
embarked on becoming a poet writing Great Wall by Deep Vellum/Phoneme
in English and translating from Chinese, Media in 2018. He also won an OMI
English, and German. Ledig House Translation Lab Residency
Dong Li started to translate contem- and a PEN/Heim Translation Grant to
porary Chinese poets during his under- translate the Chinese poet Song Lin.
graduate years. The encouragement of Increasingly, Dong Li is drawn to
Forrest Gander, Katie Peterson, Keith a group of more independent poets photo credit Michael Jordan,
and Rosmarie Waldrop, and the late C. from China, including Song Lin, Zhu Humboldt Foundation
Travel Fellows 6Zhu, Ye Hui, and Liu Ligan. They have tage. This nomad poet sticks his fingers use of narrated and narrative histories
never formed an official alliance nor into various soils and grows poems that to allude to current affairs is perhaps
produced a manifesto or developed take in different poetic traditions. With not dissimilar to the ancient masters
a school; what matters to them is an erotic streak and clinical control of speaking through the voice and veil of
how words mutely explode, and how language, Zhu Zhu’s paced poems set pining courtesans. These four indepen-
language rises and sinks in face of it readers adrift with a view of personal dent poets are entirely obsessed with
all. Even their more politically charged and biographical landscapes. His how language can redeem, politically or
poems are not meant to take sides, understated lines unroll like a water- otherwise.
but to reflect a layered and nuanced color and slowly accrue meaning. The Dong Li is grateful for all encoun-
aesthetic reading of history and poli- meditative Ye Hui weaves Chinese ters and in any form with poets, writers,
tics. The poems remain open and resist metaphysics into real-life snapshots and translators in different language
easily reductive interpretations. Song and creates compelling collages of environments, and hopes this life of a
Lin is an unusual poet who served his contemporary myths and myster- literary translator will be resilient and
sentence for political activism but has ies. A kind of newness seems more continue with greater possibilities.
never used this to his personal advan- pronounced in Liu Ligan’s work. His
Shoshana Akabas, 2020 ALTA Travel Fellow
(HEBREW)
in love with translation as an art form, Shoshana has always been drawn to
and she continued to pursue translation translation as a way of forging new
studies by taking courses with Monica connections, whether through commu-
de la Torre, Edith Grossman, and Lynn nity translation, providing English read-
Sharon Schwartz, among others. ers access to new authors, or helping
Shoshana first stumbled upon an students form a deeper relationship
excerpt of the novel Coffee & Cake by a with the languages they speak. Israeli
young Israeli writer named Inbar Livnat, writer Etgar Keret said in an interview,
and she was immediately drawn in by “When we read a book, we exercise the
Livnat’s dark humor and emotional clar- muscle of empathy, which is a muscle
ity. Shoshana has continued to translate that we usually, in everyday life, do our
Livnat’s writing for the last four years, best not to put into stress.” Shoshana
enjoying the challenge of preserving the has found that translation—in any
rich, ancient roots of modern Hebrew form—helps exercise that muscle of
while capturing the liminal space inhab- empathy, allowing us to continue learn-
shoshana akabas grew up in New York ited by Livnat’s characters, who exist ing, growing, and seeing the world from
City, where she learned Hebrew at between the worlds of mental illness new perspectives.
Beit Rabban, an innovative elementary and health, national belonging and exile.
school with an immersive approach Since earning her MFA in Fiction
to language learning. Her personal and Literary Translation, Shoshana
interest in languages developed has served as a teaching assistant to
when she attended Stuyvesant High Professor Peter Connor for his Intro-
School, which was a microcosm of the duction to Translation Theory course
city’s linguistic diversity, and she was at Barnard College. In addition to her
inspired to start studying Spanish and own writing and translation work, she
American Sign Language. has volunteered with refugees in vari-
She majored in English and Organic ous capacities for the past eight years.
Chemistry at Penn, where she contin- This work has involved translating and
ued taking ASL courses. While this advocating for translation access for
was an entry point into the world of migrant populations in educational
translating and interpreting, her first and medical settings. Working specif-
formal introduction to translation ically with the Afghan refugee popu-
was in an MFA workshop taught by lation in Queens has led Shoshana to
Alyson Waters at Columbia Univer- begin studying Pashto in order to better
sity. Shoshana initially signed up for the serve and connect with newly arrived
course hoping that the detail-oriented refugees from the southeast region of
work of translation would make her a Afghanistan.
sharper editor. But in that class she fell
Travel Fellows 7Laura Nagle, 2020 ALTA Travel Fellow
(FRENCH, SPANISH, IRISH)
born and raised in New York’s Hudson languages and cultures. A humorous
Valley, Laura Nagle is a freelance trans- and entertaining read, La Guzla estab-
lator and writer now based in India- lishes the penchant for satire-tinged
napolis. She first took an interest in exoticism that characterized Mérimée’s
translation as an undergraduate French later, better-known work.
major at Hamilton College, where she In addition to various virtual readings
wrote her senior thesis on Samuel this summer and fall, Laura is present-
Beckett’s practice of self-translation. ing a session at the September 2020
While pursuing graduate studies in virtual conference of the Oregon
Romance Languages at the Univer- Society of Translators and Interpreters
sity of Pennsylvania, and throughout on research methods for literary
her years as a high school language translators working with pre-20th-
teacher, she continued developing century texts.
her translation skills. Laura’s language Alongside her translation work, Laura
studies have taken her to several is a fiction writer working to complete
regions of France; Trois-Rivières and her first novel, which follows a group of
Montréal, Canada; Santander, Spain; teachers and high school students trav-
and Gleann Cholm Cille, Ireland. eling from the United States to France
Laura translates prose fiction. In in the summer of 2019. She is also
addition to working with contempo- an active choral musician and enjoys
rary authors, she seeks to bring previ- translating and writing about classical
ously untranslated works from the 19th music.
and 20th centuries to English-speak- Laura is grateful to ALTA for its
ing readers. To that end, Laura is commitment to the Travel Fellows
currently translating La Guzla, ou Choix program at this year’s virtual confer-
de poésies illyriques recueillies dans ence and for the opportunity to share
la Dalmatie, la Bosnie, la Croatie et an excerpt from her translation of
l’Herzégowine. This collection of short Mérimée’s La Guzla with the ALTA
stories and prose poems, ostensibly community.
based on Illyrian folk tales and ballads,
was published in French in 1827 as the
work of an anonymous “translator,” who
peppered the collection with his decid-
edly amateurish cultural insights and
travel anecdotes. The book was well
received by readers and scholars all
over Europe before being revealed as
a hoax; these tales were the invention
of a young Prosper Mérimée, who had
never visited the Balkans and had only
a passing familiarity with the region’s
Travel Fellows 8You can also read
