In an announcement made today by the National Endowment for the Arts, Prof. Kaiama Glover was awarded a $12,500 grant for the translation of Hadriana in All My Dreams, a prize-winning work of social satire by Haitian writer and revolutionary René Depestre. NEA grants are offered to exceptional translators for works of particular importance to English-speaking audiences, including authors and languages that are often underrepresented.
In addition to the NEA award, Prof. Glover was also chosen as a recipient of the 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for Hadriana in All My Dreams and received $3,670 for the project. The PEN/Heim Translation Fund promotes the publication of international literature translated to English.
Hadriana in All My Dreams was written in French in 1988 and has been translated into several languages, but it has never appeared in English. The story, set in Haiti during Carnival in 1938, is about a young French girl who collapses at the altar in the middle of her wedding to a Haitian boy. Her wedding day becomes her funeral. She is buried by the town and revived as a zombie by a sorcerer.
Kaiama L. Glover is an associate professor of French at Barnard College. She has been a student, scholar, and professor of French and francophone literature for 20 years, and has spent many of those years in France and Haiti. She is currently at work on a project about literary representations of self-care in Caribbean prose fiction. In addition to the NEA and PEN/Heim grants, Prof. Glover has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, The New York Public Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
