English's Kercheval wins NEA translation grant

August 17th 2015 Simon Kuran
Arts & Humanities, Awards
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Jesse Lee Kercheval, the Zona Gale Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is one of 20 recipients of prestigious grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to support translation.

Kercheval Kercheval

The awards, which will fund the new translation of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry from 11 different languages into English, are designed to bring the work of writers around the globe to a larger audience.

Kercheval is an award-winning author of 13 books and an NEA Creative Writing Fellow. She will use her NEA grant to translate Things by Their Names: the Collected Poems by Uruguayan poet Circe Maia from Spanish to English. Maia has written nine books of poetry and won the 2013 Delmira Agustini Medal of Art and Culture from the president of Uruguay. To date, no collection of her poetry has been published in the United States.

Kercheval's translations of Maia's work — as well as the work of other Uruguayan poets — have appeared in numerous journals. She is the editor of America invertida: A Bilingual Anthology of Younger Uruguayan Poets, forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press.

Since 1981, the NEA has awarded 410 fellowships to 363 translators, with translations representing 66 languages and 77 countries.

"The NEA is committed to providing Americans with diverse art experiences," says NEA Chairman Jane Chu. "Our support of literary translation provides opportunities for readers to expand their knowledge of other cultures and traditions while also experiencing some of the world's most talented writers."