Robyn Creswell
Photo by Annette Hornischer, courtesy of the American Academy in Berlin
Bio
Robyn Creswell is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Yale University and the author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton). He was poetry editor of the Paris Review for eight years and is now an editor-at-large for poetry at Farrar, Straus and Giroux book publishers. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, Critical Inquiry, and elsewhere. He is the translator of Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Clash of Images and The Tongue of Adam, as well as Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell and Notes from Prison. He is a former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Arabic of the poetry collection Giving Up on the Idea of Houses by Egyptian poet Iman Mersal. A female voice in a canon of Arabic-language verse mostly written by men, Mersal's poetry is rooted in the everyday world of work, family, and friends ("the ones who pay taxes and walk on the earth," as she writes). Born in 1966 in Mit Adlan, a small town in the Egyptian delta, she currently lives in Canada and her fifth collection of poetry, Giving Up on the Idea of Houses, explores the melancholic comedy of working and raising a family in a foreign country.
I’ve been translating Iman Mersal’s exhilarating poems for many years, always wishing that I weren’t so slow, that I had more time and—let’s be honest—more financial incentive to finish a manuscript of her work. In other words, I needed a helpful push in the right direction. The money and recognition that go along with a National Endowment for the Arts translation grant are one-of-a-kind. Translators are famously underpaid and underrecognized—as we never tire of pointing out! To receive support of this kind is therefore invaluable; it provides reassurance that all your worrying over word choice and punctuation and line breaks have been worth it, and also that your peers are interested in what you’re doing and want to read more of it. Additionally, the grant suggests to me, as a translator from the Arabic, that the appetite for and appreciation of literary writing beyond European languages is growing. In otherwise very dark times, this seems like a good sign for the future.