Eleanor Goodman (Poetry ’03) has been named a 2022 Translation Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts! The fellowship has been awarded in support of her translation of Chinese writer Zang Di’s poetry collection Elegies for My Son. Di has dedicated himself to writing one poem a day for decades, and the poems in Elegies for My Son were written in the aftermath of his seven-year-old son’s accidental drowning.
Of the opportunities presented by this fellowship, Eleanor has said that “translation itself is a kind of fellowship: a meeting of minds and artistic sensibilities and cultural baggage. It is a deep kind of empathy, a practice of temporarily inhabiting another language, another sensory perspective, even another life. To be able to engage in all this within the larger fellowship of the NEA is an incredible honor, and I’m deeply grateful for these gifts of time and of community.”
Congratulations, Eleanor!
You can read more about Eleanor and her project on the NEA’s website.
