Associate Professor of English Piotr Gwiazda has been awarded a 2010 PEN American Center Translation Fund grant. The PEN American Center’s goal is “to support the translation of book-length works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry or drama that have not previously appeared in English or have appeared only in an egregiously flawed translation.”
Gwiazda will use the grant to embark on a translation of “Kopenhaga,” the “little masterpiece” of Polish poet Grzegorz Wróblewski. By translating this work and placing it with an American publisher, Gwiazda hopes to make the work of one of the major contemporary Polish poets available to a wider audience.
“The fact that the depiction of migrant sensibility in ‘Kopenhaga’ parallels, to some extent, my own experiences as an immigrant in the United States, makes me, I believe, an ideal person to convey the volume’s intellectual and emotional content,” he said. Gwiazda is fluent in Polish and has the support of the book’s author.
Gwiazda has also been awarded a summer faculty fellowship by UMBC’s Dresher Center for the Humanities to begin work on this project.
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