Sean Cotter
Photo courtesy of Sean Cotter
Bio
An award-winning translator and scholar of translation, Sean Cotter has translated many works of Romanian literature, including Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding: the Left Wing (Archipelago Books, 2013) and, most recently, Magda Cârneci’s FEM (Deep Vellum Books, 2021). His selection of Nichta Stănescu’s poetry, Wheel with a Single Spoke (Archipelago Books, 2012), won the Best Translated Book Award and was supported by a previous National Endowment for the Arts grant. He first lived in Romania as a Peace Corps volunteer. His monograph, Literary Translation and the Idea of a Minor Romania (University of Rochester Press, 2014), won the Society for Romanian Studies Biennial Book Prize. He is professor of literature and translation studies at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Romanian of the novel Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu. In Romania, Cărtărescu (b. 1956) is a celebrity and arguably the most famous poet, essayist, and prose writer of his generation. This project will translate his monumental 847-page novel, which ranges in scope from dust mites to the cosmos. Originally published in 2015 and a bestseller in Romania, translations of Solenoid have won the Prix Transfuge in French and the Thomas Mann Preis in German. Partly autobiographical, the novel is a first-person account of a high school teacher with literary ambitions who experiences rejection after presenting at an important literary workshop, leading him on a diverging path from Cărtărescu’s actual life. Grounded in the realities of the late 1970s to '80s Communist Romania, this novel is interspersed with elements of surrealism—the narrator's house, for example, resembles a boat on the outside, but on the inside contains numberless rooms and an enormous solenoid that is a portal to other dimensions. Solenoid has never been translated into English.
Support from the National Endowment for the Arts means translators can be ambitious, can reach for works that might otherwise seem too foreign to readers in the United States, too challenging for publishers’ resources, or too demanding on the translators’ time and energy. The bare fact that there is public support for translation is itself a boost, because it signals an appreciation of this “art of empathy,” as an NEA publication calls it. I would have been much more hesitant to consider a novel like Solenoid, as expansive and as pyrotechnic as it is, if I hadn’t hoped for grant support. Now, English-language readers will have a monumental work available to them, one which I hope will transform not only their image of Romanian literature but also their sense of what is possible for the novel.