Copper Canyon, Chinese Poetry, and the NEA

As announced on the NEA site yesterday, Copper Canyon will receive $117,000 to support the translation, publication, and promotion, of a bilingual anthology of Chinese poets born after 1945.

This publication is part of the International Literary Exchanges, which started in 2006 and are a joint partnership between the NEA and a foreign government. In addition to this volume (which is due out in spring 2011), the General Administration of Press and Publication in China will publish a companion volume featuring contemporary U.S. poets.

In terms of Copper Canyon’s anthology:

[It] will be edited by award-winning poet and editor Qingping Wang, who also will write the introduction to the volume. The anthology will be co-translated by noted Chinese literature scholars and translators Howard Goldblatt and his wife, Sylvia Li-chun Lin, who jointly received the American Translators Association Translation of the Year award in 1999 for their translation of Notes of a Desolate Man by Taiwanese novelist Chu T’ienwen.

Congrats to Copper Canyon, and this should be an interesting publication. It’s a nice chunk of change, which ensures that the contributors and translators will be properly compensated, and that there will be plenty of money for marketing and promoting the anthology. I dream of getting something like this someday so that we can do all that we want to do for one of our books, without having to cut corners because of costs and budgets and whatever.