Quite a few things have happened since I last posted, so much that I am having trouble remembering what happened when, what I wrote down and what I didn’t, where I traveled, and how many people’s names I’ve forgotten since I spoke with them. Apologies for my tardy replies and general slowness.
We got a four-year, one million dollar grant from the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine to work with a partner university in Kyiv/Kiev to help train communications specialists in Ukrainian civil service. We got a two-year $700,000 grant to establish a Russian Flagship Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. I helped to organize, then took part in a conference on Siberian Infrastructure and Environment at the Indiana University Gateway in Berlin, Germany (my paper “Tree and Bird,” focuses on the spruce and the jay, especially the Norway Spruce and Steller’s Jay, markers of sorts at the confines of an imagined geography of Siberia that starts with my front yard and ends in Alaska).
AHB published three books! First was Christopher Merrill and Won-Chung Kim’s translation of Sunwoo Kim’s If My Tongue Refuses to Remain in My Mouth; then Anna Rosenwong’s translation of a compilation of poems by Jose Eugenio Sanchez as Here the Sun’s For Real (just reviewed by Anthony Seidman at the LA Review of Books); and third the 91st Meridian Books title The Same Gate: A Collection of Writings in the Spirit of Rumi, which is complemented by an entire series of events and films at the International Writing Program over the past several years.
In October, the American Literary Translators Association‘s annual conference came back to Bloomington, the second time in six years we have hosted it. The first was when I had just moved there (here), in 2013, and was in my first year as chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. On the eve of the conference in 2013, I learned I would be president, not VP, as I had assumed (the president-elect had a heart arrhythmia that needed to be treated….)
As I look back on this, I am a bit surprised I did not collapse at the time. It is sometimes surprising how much adrenaline can accomplish. This is worth taking a step back to remember, at least for myself, so I’m going to write it down here, in the spirit of Predrag Matvejević, to remember and record, lest it fall into the nothingness of oblivion. We all have time enough for that.
I started my term as ALTA president in something of an emergency. I was slated to take on the vice president’s role, but on the eve of the 2013 conference, our president-elect at the time, Elizabeth Lowe, contacted me to say that she’d been diagnosed with a serious health problem and would not be able to take on her duties as president. Thankfully, she is doing quite well again now (I was quite happy to see her at the opening reception of the 2018 conference enjoying a beverage), but at the time the board turned to me and asked me to serve. There wasn’t anyone else do it, so I agreed. I was then in my first year of chairing a department at a new institution—I had come to Indiana just nine months before. This meant that I didn’t have the usual preparatory period before assuming the presidency and that I had many other things on my mind. It was also at this moment that ALTA was transitioning from its long sojourn at UT-Dallas to something new, which meant we were heading into completely uncharted waters.
I found local support at Indiana University through graduate assistants and the Executive Dean’s Office in the College of Arts and Sciences, which provided financial support for travel. I reached out to colleagues in ALTA whom I knew were committed and knowledgeable for advice and counsel. These individuals included Aron Aji, Susan Harris, Sean Cotter, Olivia Sears, Susan Bernofsky, and Esther Allen. Several agreed to become board members, and some of these individuals are serving in the current leadership still. Some months later I turned to my former student from the University of Iowa, Erica Mena-Landry, with whom I had collaborated on several projects at Autumn Hill Books and The Iowa Review, and whom I knew to be a tech-savvy, artistically sensitive, and extremely dynamic person. Erica and I worked for many months essentially as partners on a host of ALTA initiatives, feeding off each other’s energy and enthusiasm. This was both good and bad. It propelled ALTA forward in profound ways—we added new awards programs, re-established our NEA collaboration, begin receiving regular NEA funding for the annual conference, and became a literary partner of the AWP. But it also wore us both out and made it clear that what we were trying to do in the way that we were trying to do it was not really sustainable in the long term.
This realization came close to the end of my three-year term as president, and the executive committee (Aron Aji, Sean Cotter, Paul Daw and myself) was by then seriously considering the potential benefits of a new affiliation with an institution of higher learning. The process of partnering with the University of Arizona, ALTA’s newly established home base, has been skillfully shepherded by current president Aron Aji and vice president Ellen Elias-Bursac, while ALTA’s new executive director, Elisabeth Jaquette, its communications and awards manager, Rachael Daum, and program manager, Kelsi Vanada, have launched themselves into the many new prospects and opportunities that this affiliation affords. My last of six years on the board ends in October of 2019.
A few weeks ago, Jill Schoolman at Archipelago wrote to let me know she’s almost finished reading my translation of Jergović’s Kin. I had been waiting patiently, somewhat nervously (what if she didn’t like it after all?). In her note she wrote, “You’ve done a wonderful job with it. I love the book.” Yes, so do I. Excerpts coming soon.
Russell Scott Valentino 