Paula Bohince
Photo by Patrick Mullen
Bio
Paula Bohince received the 2021 Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for her translations of Corrado Govoni’s poetry, along with the Jules Chametzky Translation Prize from the Massachusetts Review and the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award from Southwest Review. The author of three poetry collections, her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Best American Poetry, and internationally. She has received a fellowship in creative writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, the John Montague International Poetry Fellowship in Ireland, the Dartmouth Poet in Residence appointment at the Frost Place, the Amy Clampitt House Residency, and a “Discovery”/The Nation Award. She lives in Pennsylvania.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Italian of selected poems by Corrado Govoni (1884-1965), who wrote poetry, novels, stories, and plays, served in World War I, and worked in agriculture, which is reflected in his poems' imagery of the natural world. This selected poetry will draw from 13 collections.
In 2015, I began translating Corrado Govoni’s poems for the pure pleasure of spending time in his company, with his radiant images and arresting associative leaps, his twilit contemplations and unhesitating joys. A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts will allow me to complete the first [collection of] selected poems of his in English, and I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to do so. The gifts of time and freedom, of encouragement and energy, will be immeasurable as I work. I thank the NEA for enabling me to deepen my practice, to broaden my literary citizenship, to be creative, and to bring Govoni’s beautiful, influential poems to a wider audience. Thank you, truly.