David Burnett
Photo © Dan Zula
Bio
David Burnett is a native of Northeast Ohio and now lives in Leipzig, Germany, where he works as a freelance translator with a focus on history and literature. His first book-length literary translation was the East German novel New Glory by Günter de Bruyn, published in 2009 by Northwestern University Press. His translation of Daniel Siemen's The Making of a Nazi Hero: The Murder and Myth of Horst Wessel was chosen as a BBC History Magazine Book of the Year in 2013. In 2014, he received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for the stories of Bohemian-born Johannes Urzidil, a selection of which were published by Pushkin Press in 2017 under the title The Last Bell.
The one word answer to what this award meansis recognition. I’m a relative outsider in an outsider’s profession, meaning I don’t live in New York or London, nor in Vienna or Berlin, and I work as a full-time translator with no institutional affiliation. My daily bread is translating history, but my passion has always been for literature. In other words, it’s a huge honor for me to get this kind of acknowledgment for a literary translation project that’s literally been in my desk drawer for a decade. Becoming an NEA Fellow is a career milestone for me, and I’m humbled to be in such illustrious company.
Excerpt from Angelic Tongues by Dimitré Dine
[translated from the German]
Miro grew up without a home. His relatives were the sky, a courtyard overgrown with grass, and the rusty fence of an orphanage. His siblings were snotty orphans, his mother six feet under, his father the state. At least that’s what his teachers told him. Miro didn’t know him, this father totally out of reach. But his teachers were close enough. They reached out and caught his ears and pulled them. On behalf of the father, naturally. People he didn’t even know could catch him whenever they wanted, and there was nowhere in the world he could hide. Miro caught on that he had no home. A life as a permanent guest lay ahead of him.
“We are all guests on this earth,” Dragan the stoker consoled him. Miro would go to see him in the basement, would sit on his sagging bed, share his blood sausage, smell roasted quince, and watch him drink slivovitz from an inexhaustible bottle. It didn’t seem like slivovitz at all, but liquid diamonds that Dragan drank; it possessed his insides and sparkled from his eyes. A human being like a gemstone. Miro’s only treasure, hidden in the cellar of an orphanage. Miro heard the hum of the furnace and the stoker’s burning voice in his throat, all of which made him feel warmer and warmer. Only with Dragan did he have some peace. A peace that tasted like blood sausage, and smelled like roasted quince, was soft and yielding like a sagging bed, and burned and warmed like Dragan’s voice.
“We are all guests on this earth,” said Dragan once more.
“Yeah, guests,” Miro agreed, and fled from the orphanage that very same night, a sack of roasted quince on his back, a fifteen-year-old heart in his breast, a quiet song on his lips. “My mother’s six feet under, my father’s the state. Wherever I go I’m at home. Wherever I land I’m a guest and a stranger,” he sang or crooned. Because Miro had something to tell the world.
About Dimitré Dinev
Dimitré Dine (b. 1968 in Plovdiv) fled Bulgaria after the collapse of communism in the winter of 1990, entering Austria illegally via Czechoslovakia. In 1992, he began writing plays, screenplays, and prose in German. In 2005, he was awarded the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize for non-native German speakers writing literary works in German. First published in 2003 to unanimous critical praise, his novel Angelic Tongues tells the tale of the rise and fall of two families in communist Bulgaria, a kind of Balkan blues by turns comic and tragic. Set mostly in 1960s and 1970s Plovdiv, it begins and ends in modern-day Vienna, where the scions of these ruined families—two 30-something Bulgarians both stranded in the Austrian capital and desperate for a miracle—meet by chance in the Central Cemetery, at the graveside of a Serbian gangster now rumored to be a guardian angel and protector of struggling immigrants. This fast-paced, playful, lyrical work brings to life a magical world from the darkness of recent history.