Professor Christina E Kramer of the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures has been honoured with a translation fellowship from the US National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
The fellowship will allow Kramer to translate Grandma Non-Oui,by Macedonian writer Lidija Dimkovska. The author of eight books translated into more than 20 languages, Dimkovska has won numerous awards for her work, including the European Prize for Literature in 2013.
Grandma Non-Oui, tells the story of a Croatian woman who falls in love with an Italian soldier at the end of the Second World War and moves to Sicily to marry him.
Read an excerpt of the novel:
Grandma Non-Oui, by Lidija Dimkovska — translated by Christina Kramer.
Written in the form of an imagined conversation between a grandmother and granddaughter, the novel moves back and forth between time – 1938 to 2016 – and place – Sicily and Croatia. The personal – cross-cultural love, marriage and family, as well as the political – war, politics and migration – are woven through the novel.
“I am thrilled the US National Endowment for the Arts has awarded this grant for this particular novel,” said Kramer. “Dimkovska excels at telling stories filled with remarkable detail and attention to individual lives caught in the currents of large social change and conflict.
“Lidija is a generous reader and critic of my work. This collaboration with the author makes translation a complex process, but feeds my love of literature and language.”
Donna Orwin, chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, says that translation plays a vital role in education and research that is not always sufficiently appreciated.
“Christina Kramer’s translations build upon and continue her scholarly work as a linguist and a language pedagogue,” said Orwin. “All cultures have something to teach us about human society, and translators like Professor Kramer make particular cultures accessible to readers outside them.”
Kramer teaches Russian and Macedonian and has carried out field research in the Balkans for four decades. Her translations include (from the Macedonian) Freud’s Sister by Goce Smilevski (MLA-Roth Award, Honorable Mention, 2014), A Spare Life by Lidija Dimkovska (long list, Best Translated Book Award, 2017) and Luan Starova’s My Father’s Books, The Time of the Goats, and The Path of the Eels, for which she received an NEA translation grant in 2014.
In addition to numerous articles relating to Balkan linguistics, she is the author of the first textbook on Macedonian for English speakers.
Kramer is one of 25 2019 Literature Translation Fellows. In total, the NEA is recommending $325,000 in grants to support the new translation of poetry and prose from 17 countries into English. Since 1981, the NEA has awarded 480 fellowships to 425 literary translators, with translations representing 69 languages and 83 countries.