Jacob Rogers
Photo courtesy of Jacob Rogers
Bio
Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician and Spanish. He was a winner of a 2020 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, as well as one of the winners of the inaugural Words Without Borders + Poets.org Poems in Translation Contest. His work has appeared in Arkansas International, Epiphany, Kenyon Review Online, Best European Fiction, Asymptote, Nashville Review, and Your Impossible Voice, among others. His translation of The Last Days of Terranova, by the Galician-language writer Manuel Rivas, is forthcoming from Archipelago Books. He lives in New York, New York, where he also works as a bookseller.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Spanish of Travels with My Father by Luisa Castro (b. 1966), an award-winning author of nine volumes of poetry, five novels, one short story collection, and one collection of crónicas, mini-articles originally written for newspapers. Travels with My Father is a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical exploration of growing up poor in a rural-coastal town in northern Galicia.
Aside from the mere sense of accomplishment (I’ve been applying for the National Endowment for the Arts translation grants for nearly as long as I’ve been seriously translating—never give up!), I can’t begin to describe how rewarding it is to finally be awarded one for a work I’m so passionate about. Luisa Castro’s novel, Travels with My Father (2003), was the first book of hers I ever read, or rather stumbled upon, and though I’ve gone on to read just about everything else she’s written, it has never lost a certain aura of grandeur in my mind.
But beyond that, there’s the simple fact that I’m overjoyed to think that through this grant I might be able to bring her work notoriety in English; she’s a towering figure in Spain as much for her fiction as for her poetry, but has yet to have a single full-length work translated into English.
Not to mention the honor I feel at being able to spend more time translating a writer whose work I so admire on a personal level. Luisa Castro’s writing has always fascinated me with its prose being stylistically unadorned (though not minimalist) yet carrying so much underlying meaning in every sentence. This is also, I think, how she can convey humor and fear at the same time, and how she can complicate simple ideas of gender, class, or Galicia’s place in Spain without ever diverting from the story at hand. When I think of Literature, hers is the kind of work that immediately springs to mind, and I can think of no better starting place to bring her work into English than Travels With My Father. It’s where I began, and it made me hungry for me more. I only hope my translation will have the same effect.