Bio

Natasha Wimmer is the translator of nine books by Roberto Bolaño, including The Savage Detectives and 2666. Her most recent translations are The Twilight Zone (National Book Award Finalist for Translated Literature)and Voyager by Nona Fernández, and You Dreamed of Empires, by Álvaro Enrigue. She has an undergraduate degree in Romance Languages from Harvard University. She began her career in publishing, at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her reviews have appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. She teaches at Princeton University and Columbia University, and she is the recipient of a PEN Translation Award and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

Project Description

To support the translation of Tavern and Other Places and A Slightly Odious Book by Salvadoran writer Roque Dalton from Spanish. Dalton (1935-75), a poet, journalist, and Communist activist, was born in El Salvador, the illegitimate son of a Salvadoran nurse and a wealthy American landowner who did not legally recognize him until Dalton was 17. For his political views and activism, Dalton was sentenced to be executed and narrowly escaped by luck (the dictatorship of Colonel José María Lemus was overthrown the day before his sentence was to be carried out), spent years in exile in Mexico and Cuba, and returned to El Salvador to join the People's Revolutionary Army (the ERP), all while writing and publishing collections of poetry with biting wit, linguistic inventiveness, and rooted in social justice. On May 10, 1975, four days before his 40th birthday, he was assassinated by his fellow ERP commandos, who accused him of being a spy for the CIA.