Amalia Gladhart Awarded NEA Literature Translation Fellowship

The National Endowment for the Arts recently announced that Amalia Gladhart, a professor of Spanish and Head of the UO Department of Romance Languages, will receive a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, one of 22 literature translation fellowships for fiscal year 2018. Gladhart will translate Jaguars’ Tomb, a work of Angélica Gorodischer.

The author of 30 novels, short story collections, and essays, Angélica Gorodischer (b. 1928) is known for her science fiction, fantasy, crime, and feminist writing. She is the recipient of numerous national and international awards, including the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement previously won by such writers as Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Stephen King.

Published in 2005, Jaguars’ Tomb is a 218-page novel of three distinct parts that addresses the difficulty of representing absence, including those absences left by the abductions and disappearances that occurred during the military dictatorship in Argentina’s “Dirty War” of 1976-83. Each of the sections repeats images from the others and circles a central space that, though it serves different functions in each section, always has a sense of loss at its center.

Gladhart, a CSWS faculty affiliate, has written widely on contemporary Latin American literature and performance. Her translations include The Potbellied Virgin and Beyond the Islands, both by Alicia Yánez Cossío; and Trafalgar, also by Angélica Gorodischer. Her collection of prose poems, Detours, was published by Burnside Review Press. Her short fiction appears in Saranac ReviewThe FantasistAtticus ReviewEleven Eleven, and elsewhere.