Matt Reeck
Photo by Dan Wonderly
Bio
Matt Reeck is a translator, scholar, and poet. He is a winner of the 2021 Albertine Prize and the 2022 Northwestern University Global Humanities Translation Prize. He served as the Princeton translator in residence in Spring 2021. Currently, he is a Guggenheim and American Council of Learned Societies fellow. This is his third National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.
Project Description
To support the translation from the French of the novel One-world by Martinican poet Édouard Glissant. The author of more than 30 books, Glissant (1928-2011) was a writer, poet, philosopher, critic, and two-time Nobel Prize in Literature finalist. Published in 1993, One-world is his longest novel and stands out among his other works for its global, kaleidoscopic, and multicultural design and narrative. Unlike his earlier works that explored the legacies of colonialism, One-world looks to the future and imagines a world of free-flowing migration and cultural affiliation.
It’s very difficult to express how important the National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellowship is to a translator; in my case, they have been the most important and consistent sources of funding, and, by extension, encouragement for me to pursue literary translation.
My first two NEA grants were for Urdu translation, and they were essential, due to the lack of other governmental or institutional support for the translation of South Asian vernacular languages. This grant, for French translation, is just as important. That it supports this particular translation is crucial, as well: not only have I been in pursue of funding for Glissant’s Tout-monde (One-world) for several years, but I also believe this work to be potentially the most important in his oeuvre. The NEA’s support is essential in providing the necessary resources to translate a book of such immense size, cultural breadth, and geographic and historical scope.
About Édouard Glissant
Édouard Glissant is a two-time Nobel Prize in Literature finalist and widely reputed to be one of the most important French-language intellectuals and writers in the postcolonial era. His work across multiple genres re-narrates a Caribbean, and particularly Martinican, history, inclusive of all levels of colonial contact but representing first and foremost the previously unrepresented—the black slave immigrants, marrons, and peoples of the native cultures of Martinique. Tout-monde (One-world) (1993) serves as a vade mecum of the author’s thinking and artistry, providing throughlines that link his reconstructive fictional histories, his poetics of relation, and his cultural theories of the One-world.