David Lisenby
Photo by Jon Danderand
Bio
David Lisenby is a translator and associate professor of Spanish at William Jewell College. His translations of work by Abilio Estévez, Gerardo Fulleda, Anna Lidia Vega Serova, Juan Villoro, and others appear in Two Lines, Words Without Borders, the Mercurian, Exchanges, and Latin American Literature Today. His academic articles on Latin American literature and culture have been published in A Contracorriente, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Afro-Hispanic Review, Chasqui, and elsewhere. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri, with his husband and two sons.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Spanish of the short story collection How I Met the Sower of Trees by Cuban author Abilio Estévez. Estévez (b. 1954) is the author of seven novels, two short story collections, two books of poetry, one collection of essays, and seven works of theater. Many of the 19 stories in How I Met the Sower of Trees explore the nostalgia of globe-wandering Cuban characters. Among the interwoven themes in this collection are issues of rootedness, displacement, and reorientation; the pain and beauty of loss, death, and aging; familial fault lines; memory as constructed and contested; and human connections to the natural world. Narrated frequently from spaces of queer desire and the separation from home and homeland, How I Met the Sower of Trees will add to the range of Cuban voices in literature available in English.
In November 2015, with no literary translation experience or training, I ignorantly offered to translate a full-length play. I had written about other work by the playwright, Gerardo Fulleda, and had always admired his one play for children, Rwandi (1977), which celebrates the human spirit through an enslaved protagonist’s Odyssean journey to freedom. When Fulleda mentioned that this, his most beloved and widely performed work, filled with playful language and intercalated poetry, had been translated to German and French but never to English, I blithely threw in my hat. So began my relative late coming to the art of translation.
This NEA Translation Fellowship supports my first book-length project at a formative moment in my career. During the period bookended by my offer to translate Rwandi and its spring 2020 publication, I gained a critical learn-as-you-go education in translation theory and practice, publishing several pieces of short fiction by various authors, participating in the American Literary Translator’s Association, and developing a translation studies course at William Jewell College, where I teach. This award affirms my shift toward translation as creative scholarship and spurs forward my most significant project to date.
The globe-wandering stories in How I Met the Sower of Trees, narrated frequently from spaces of queer desire, present the conflicted nostalgia of Cuban characters negotiating new modes of belonging while separated from home and homeland. I read “The Lagoon” in a 2016 anthology of LGBTQ+ Cuban fiction, and it transported me—to rural Cuba and to the recesses of my own Texas youth. It made me see the world a bit differently, the way good literature does. “The Lagoon” turned out to be the seed of this collection. And now, with NEA support, new readers will gain an expanded and beautiful view of Cuban/human experience.