AKaiser
Photo courtesy of AKaiser
Bio
AKaiser, PhD, is a translator, scholar, and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet of glint, co-winner of the Milk & Cake Press Prize. More award-winning poems from the manuscript trace, and photos, are anthologized and in Broken Plate; Mudfish; New Square; Pen + Brush’s In Print (No 5), guest edited by Novella Ford; Sonora Review's edition on gender violence, Extinction; and the Rumpus. AKaiser was a 2020 French-English Translation Fellow at ATLAS Vice Versa Workshop for her project of a 100th year anniversary translation, with commentary, of the Surrealist work André Breton’s Nadja. She was a SAFTA resident and is a 2022 Resident at la Cité Internationale des Arts. From Catalan, she is translating the work of poet Anna Gual as well as transatlantic city-garden advocate Cebrià Montoliu; from Spanish, Mexican poets Javier Acosta and Bertha Inzunza Choza; and, from Georgian, collaborating with Irakli Kakabadze.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Catalan of Unnameable: Collected Poems of Anna Gual. Gual published her first book of poems, Implosions, at the age of 22 after a publisher discovered her through a blog she had been writing for two years called I'm Not Falling, I'm Throwing Myself. The collected poems, curated by the author and her editors, represent Gual's work from books spanning the years 2008-2020, and feature her modern yet age-old sensibility.
In my view, the work of the people at the National Endowment for the Arts provides first and foremost testimony to a society’s belief in the need of and joy to be found in the arts. I am happy that the NEA has persisted through good and less good times in its mission of promoting the arts as a foundation for expression and communication in a democratic society within an interconnected world of peoples, their cultures and languages. In my case, this translation fellowship offers me at least two of the necessities of a translator’s life: recognition, for its punctual as well as longer-term ripple effects, and financial support. Receiving the news of the award to bring the wild, pithy, macro, micro, and otherwise forceful poetry of Catalan poet Anna Gual to an anglophone audience, I was joyful, of course, but I also felt myself relax in relief. Instead of squeezing in this lyric work when I could, or hitting the pause button when I couldn’t, I can now enjoy the luxury of planning out the project: timeframes, budgeting, and sharing opportunities, on top of the pure pleasure of sinking into translating the poems themselves. In short, this NEA translation fellowship will allow for a flow and a constancy to my process for which I will be forever grateful.