Tess Lewis
Photo by Sarah Shatz
Bio
Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Philippe Jaccottet, and Christine Angot. Her awards include the 2017 PEN Translation Award for her translation of Maja Haderlap’s novel Angel of Oblivion and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her essays and reviews have appeared in a number of publications, including Granta, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books, World Literature Today, the Wall Street Journal, andthe American Scholar. She is an advisory editor for the Hudson Review and co-curator of the Festival Neue Literature, New York City’s annual festival of German language literature in English. In 2022, she will be a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Project Description
To support the translation from the German of the essay collection In the Forest of the Metropoles by Karl-Markus Gauß (b. 1954), who has written more than two dozen books and numerous articles and essays for German, Swiss, and Austrian newspapers and magazines. In the Forest of the Metropoles chronicles the diversity and wealth of languages, cultures, and individuals, predominantly from Eastern Europe, that have played a formative role in shaping contemporary Europe but now risk being forgotten.
With its translation fellowships, the National Endowment for the Arts provides the necessary lifeblood not only to keep translators’ bodies and souls together but to keep a vibrant and rich literary culture alive in the United States. I am grateful to the NEA’s recognition of so many talented translators and the many insightful, idiosyncratic, inspiring, and unsettling works to which they are ready to devote years of their lives for everyone’s benefit. If, as Wittgenstein said, the limits of our language are the limits of our world, translation can push the limits out and broaden our horizons.