Patricia Hartland
Photo courtesy of Patricia Hartland
Bio
Patricia [“trish”] Hartland is a poet, translator (from French, Haitian + Martinican Creole, Hindi, Urdu), and soundmaker. Currently a PhD student of comparative literature at UMass Amherst, Hartland has received MFAs from the Iowa Translation Workshop—where she served as editor for Exchanges Literary Journal and was the Provost’s Outreach & Engagement Fellow—and the University of Notre Dame’s Creative Writing Program, where she facilitated creative writing courses. With a particular interest in hybrid/multilingual texts, their poetry, videopoems, and translations have appeared in an array of journals; these most recently include Vestiges, Deluge, Black Warrior Review, and World Literature Today. With Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg, Hartland co-translated Raphaël Confiant’s Madam St. Clair, Queen of Harlem. Translations of Monchoachi’s poetry collections are forthcoming with Ugly Duckling Presse and The Operating System.
Project Description
To support the translation from the French and Martinican Creole of the poetry collection LIBERAMERICA by Monchoachi. Monchoachi (b. 1946), the pen name of André Pierre-Louis, is considered a trailblazer of Martinican literature and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe, the Prix Max Jacob, and the Prix du Conseil International d'Études Francophones. LIBERAMERICA is the first volume of an ongoing volume, ‘MISTRY. This volume is a reimagining of the history of the Americas, evoking myth, magic, and ritual. While considered one of the most pre-eminent Martinican writers of his generation, a book-length collection of his work has not yet appeared in English.
Receiving a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literary Translation is a profound honor, one that will have an absolutely transformational impact on my work with Monchoachi and beyond. I am exceedingly grateful, most of all for the gift of time and focus afforded by this fellowship, but also for the valorizing gesture of this gift; that this project has been acknowledged as deserving of time and effort vivifies the sometimes-lonely moments. To be a translator is to be at once a poet, editor, publicity agent, spokesperson, and researcher—a seemingly indomitable and overwhelming task. It is for the love of becoming, for what can become, at the meeting waters of language invoked by translation that we persevere in this task, that we seek to touch our words to those of others until, together, they generate spaces that extend beyond what might have once been limitation, or border, or cliff edge. Thank you for the opportunity to inch ever-closer to the abyssal sublime!