Julia Powers
Bio
Julia Powers is a translator based in New Haven, Connecticut. She was born and raised in Lolo, Montana, and has lived in New York City, Argentina, Italy, and Brazil. She recently earned her PhD in comparative literature from Yale University, where her academic research focused on Brazilian writing and culture during the 1960s. Her translations from the Portuguese have appeared in the Paris Review, A Public Space, Triple Canopy, Lapham’s Quarterly, and Harper’s. She is the recipient of a Fulbright research grant, the Susan Sontag Translation Prize, and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. She is currently translating the poetry of Hilda Hilst.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Brazilian Portuguese of selected poetry by Hilda Hilst. Hilst (1930-2004) published her first collection of poetry at age 20 and lived an unconventional life. She eventually settled in a house she had built on a ranch in Campinas, Brazil, which she christened "The House of the Sun." During her life, she wrote drama, short fiction, and poetry and shared her home with a cast of friends, writers, artists, free spirits, and hundreds of stray dogs. She was recently an honoree at Brazil's most important literary festival and one of the country's largest publishers is reissuing her complete work. This project is a selection of 150 poems representative of Hilst's strongest work from 1967 to 1995. While five works of her fiction appear in English, only one other poetry collection has been translated into English.
Literary translation happens slowly, in my experience. It takes an indeterminate amount of time to understand complex works of literature in their fullness, to reverse engineer them in another language, and to polish and refine them until they gleam with as much brilliance in English—ideally, improbably—as they did in their original form. That, at least, is my goal when I set out to translate something I love and want to share as much as the poetry of Hilda Hilst. But the work is also slow because it’s unpaid or barely paid. I’ve been “starting” my career as a translator for more than a decade. I’ve been piecing it together stitch by stitch in between freelance jobs, teaching, and graduate studies. It’s so rare to get the funding that buys the time to dedicate to a project that, admittedly, no one asked for and no one needs. This grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the validation of Hilst’s work and my own that it represents, gives me hope that some small community of readers might one day soon receive these poems as an unexpected gift, extravagant, impractical, and priceless, like all good literature.