Elizabeth Lowe
Photo by Andrea Sollenberger Photography
Bio
Elizabeth Lowe is a translator, scholar, teacher, and writer. She is the author of foundational books on Latin American literature and translation, including The City in Brazilian Literature (1982), Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature (2007), and many articles and reviews. Her work was recognized by the Brazilian Academy of Letters for her translation of the iconic epic Os Sertões by Euclides da Cunha (Backlands: The Canudos Campaign 2010). Lowe was a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia (1979) and has translated writers from Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Venezuela, and Colombia. Currently, she is professor in the online MS program at New York University; she was the founding director of the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Illinois (2008-2015) and also spent part of her career at the University of Florida. She is translation editor for Kenyon Review and teaches in their summer workshop in generative literary translation.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Brazilian Portuguese of the short story collection Her Husband's Shirt and the novella The House of Passion by Nélida Piñon. One of Brazil's leading women writers, Piñon (b. 1937) is the author of several novels and short story collections and served as the first woman president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1996-97. The works in this project—never before translated into English—consist of her most recent short story collection that delves into the shadows and crevices of family relationships to reveal tortured souls and complex emotions, and a novella that explores an unconventional path to personal liberation. Like her other works, these stories offer the author’s keen psychological insights with rich, often peculiar characters.
This fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts brings me back full circle to the beginning of my career as a translator, when as a graduate student on an OAS Fellowship in Brazil in 1978, I met Nélida Piñon for the first time. I was on a mission to meet the Brazilian writers I was studying for my PhD dissertation under Gregory Rabassa, and also to seek permission to translate their work. At the time, Nélida (as she is known in Brazil) was read outside of Brazil by European audiences and a small circle of literary scholars in the United States. Today, she is recognized as one of Brazil’s greatest living writers, on a par with the canonical Clarice Lispector, João Guimarães Rosa, and Machado de Assis. Through the years, I have translated stories and essays by Nélida and written about her work. When in 2018 she asked me to translate her latest works into English, along with her early untranslated novella A Casa da Paixão, I was moved to apply to the NEA since the grant would afford me the luxury of time to give her work the focused attention it requires, as well as the visibility to bring the translations to a larger audience in English. The NEA fellowship is a capstone to my career in translation, and I am very grateful for the validation and support that it brings. Thanks to the NEA, Nélida Piñon will now reach the English-language audience on a scale that she has long deserved.