Brian Sneeden
Photo by Jennifer Sneeden
Bio
Brian Sneeden is a poet, literary translator, and editor. His translations have received the World Literature Today Translation Award for Poetry, the Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and an American Literary Translators Association Travel Fellowship. His translation of Phoebe Giannisi’s Homerica (2017) was selected by Anne Carson as a favorite book of 2017, and his translation of Giannisi’s collection Cicada (2022)is forthcoming from New Directions. His collection of poems, Last City, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2018. His poetry has received the Iowa Review Award in Poetry, the Indiana Review 1/2K Prize, and has appeared in Harvard Review Online, Poetry Daily, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. He is a visiting assistant professor and program coordinator of translation studies at the University of Connecticut, where he serves as managing and senior editor of World Poetry Books.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Greek of the poetry collection Chimera by Phoebe Giannisi. Giannisi (b. 1964) is the author of seven poetry books and is a professor of architecture. This project is to translate her most recent collection, Chimera, which incorporates lyric poetry, field recordings, and dialogue, and is a product of the poet's three-year field research project on the goat herding practices of the Vlachs, a nomadic people who speak their own Indigenous language, and whose seasonal route spans the mountains of northern Greece to the sea town of Volos, where Giannisi lives. The poems cover day-to-day activities like shearing and lambing and are mixed with snippets of conversations, oral traditions, and song. This collection has not yet appeared in English.
In my experience, translators often rely on fortuitous accidents: which writers and works we happen to find and fall in love with, the sometimes indirect ways in which we come to our languages. It is the same with how we arrive at the first desire to carry an image or phrase across the borders of a language. Looking back at my own development as a translator, the moments which seem the most pivotal—my introduction to Modern Greek poetry in a tattered copy of Rex Warner’s translations, the decision to pursue the language, my first meeting with the award-winning poet Phoebe Giannisi—were rare moments where there happened to be time. Time for immersion and following hunches. Yet so often the work of translating and writing happens in margins of quiet bordering what we’re ordinarily obligated to do with time: jobs, children, unending commitments. Translating Giannisi’s nuanced poetry is as much a process of listening as writing, one that requires giving and sharing extensive time with the voice of the poet. What this generous fellowship offers, for myself and so many literary artists, is time to expand our work beyond our margins, and the chance to facilitate perhaps the next discovery of lucky accidents.