Over the thirty years since I was first introduced to Roger Lewinter’s work, I have had the privilege of forming a close collaboration with Lewinter, and I am honored today to call him my friend. Through many letters and conversations, and a week spent working with him in Geneva in 2012, I have gained, I believe, considerable insight into his particular concerns—formal and intellectual but above all spiritual, and neither formal nor intellectual in isolation from the spiritual. This insight has been essential to my work as his translator, allowing me to bring the translations as close as possible, not only to the words of the original, but to the thoughts behind them.

Lewinter has used the phrase “mystical meditation” to describe his recent work, and I could almost say the same of the act of translating his texts. In Lewinter’s writing, everything is significant: the placement of the punctuation and the form that it takes, the order of the words and phrases, and the spaces—the silences—between them, through which we can hear the unspoken at the heart of all his work. Lewinter’s texts cannot be simplified; their difficulty is inherent. Translating these syntactically and intellectually complex texts requires that I, like the author in the process of creating them, enter into that meditative interior space—a state of concentration that to the greatest degree possible must be undivided.

For me, the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship is an inestimable gift—a gift of time, free from distraction, in which I will be able to listen to the silence in these texts and through it understand what they have to say. For this gift I am immensely grateful to the NEA and to the panelists who believed in Lewinter’s work and in my ability to carry it into English.