Deborah Helen Garfinkle
Photo by Robert Sorensen
Bio
Deborah Helen Garfinkle is a poet, writer, literary critic, and award-winning translator of Czech literature whose work has appeared in publications in the U.S. and abroad. Dr. Garfinkle was awarded a 2013 NEA Translation Fellowship and PEN Translation Grant for her translation of Czech poet Pavel Šrut’s works written after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Worm-Eaten Time, published by Phoneme Media in 2016. Her first book-length translation, The Old Man’s Verses, selected works from Ivan Diviš’s collection of poetry of the same name, was nominated for a Northern California Book Award in 2009. Dr. Garfinkle wrote her doctoral dissertation, Bridging East and West: Czech Surrealism’s Interwar Experiment 1934-38, on the Czech Surrealists’ relationship with André Breton, the French Surrealists, and the Soviet Avant-Garde. In addition to her literary efforts, Dr. Garfinkle is an experimental filmmaker and screenwriter.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Czech of Thousands of Plateaus by Sylva Fischerová (b. 1963), the author of ten collections of poems, three volumes of short stories, two novels, and two children's books. Thousands of Plateaus is Fischerová's most recent collection, comprising 14 loosely interconnected short stories. One story, "It’s the Grub, Dude," is a philosophical argument about sauerkraut, Czech history, and the complications of love.
I cannot express enough gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts for the support they’ve given me through my career as a literary translator of Czech. As we in the business opine—literary translation makes up only three percent of all publications in English. This small number represents the many brilliant and influential works by foreign writers that never find English readership. The number, in effect, represents a loss of potential connections, of worlds and imagination. For Czech writers, it means the potential to land on English shores.
I have always felt blessed to have the gift of language. My love of writing and foreign language has informed my personal life and professional career. But writing can be such a solitary profession. As a translator, I’m not alone staring at a blank page; I’m sitting in a creative dialog with that other writer whose work I wish to share with readers who love literature as much as I do.
This grant comes at such an important time in my creative life. After I published my last book-length translation in 2016, Worm-Eaten Time, also supported with a grant from the NEA, I struggled for several years to find a worthy book project before I found Sylva Fischerová and her brilliant short story collection. This generous grant affords me valuable time to complete the translation and the finances to travel to Prague to finally meet Sylva in person. It will also allow me time for my own creative writing as I translate, since each art informs the other. The NEA’s belief in my ability and that of the writers I’ve translated makes me so very grateful that art, in this day and age, still matters. I’m honored to have been given this wonderful fellowship for a second time.