Bio

Hilary Kaplan is the translator of Marília Garcia's The Territory Is Not the Map and Angélica Freitas’s Rilke Shake, which won the National Translation Award and Best Translated Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, all in 2016. She has contributed to Granta, Modern Poetry in Translation, BBC Radio 4, and other venues. Kaplan’s additional translations include Paloma Vidal's short story collection, Ghosts, and poems by Ricardo Domeneck and Claudia Roquette-Pinto. She received a PEN Translation Fund award for Rilke Shake, a Rumos Literatura fellowship from Itaú Cultural, and a Banff Centre for Arts residency (cancelled due to Covid-19). Kaplan holds an MA in comparative literature and an MFA in creative writing: poetry. She speaks regularly on translation and teaches at the Bishop’s School in La Jolla and in the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College.

Project Description

To support the translation from the Brazilian Portuguese of the poetry collection Slow Motion by Marília Garcia. Garcia's (b. 1979) fifth book of poetry, Slow Motion, won the prestigious Oceanos Prize, a leading award for global Portuguese-language literature, making her not only the first Brazilian woman, but also the second woman ever, to win the award. A central question in the book is how displacement and dislocation—achieved, for example, through travel, walking, or the action of words in poetry—can create different ways of seeing and thinking. Filled with everyday life and philosophical musings, these poems narrate and enact the speaker traversing through physical space and her subsequent transformation of viewpoints and ways of thinking. This collection has not yet been translated into English.