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Professor Sean Cotter Receives National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship

Sean Cotter

Fellowship will support the translation into English of the Romanian novel Solenoid, by Mircea Cărtărescu

Today, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that Sean Cotter will receive a Literature Translation Fellowship of $25,000 to translate Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu into English. Cotter is one of 24 Literature Translation Fellows selected for fiscal year 2021. In total, the Arts Endowment will award $325,000 in grants to support the translation of works written in 16 different languages into English.

“Supporting literary translation not only means that many of the world’s talented writers reach a new audience, but also new and different perspectives and experiences are made available to readers in this country,” said Amy Stolls, director of literary arts at the National Endowment for the Arts. “The Arts Endowment is proud to continue its long history of supporting the art of translation through these 24 fellowships.”

Mircea Cărtărescu (b. 1956) is a celebrity and arguably the most famous poet, essayist, and prose writer of his generation. This project will translate his monumental 847-page novel, which ranges in scope from dust mites to the cosmos. Originally published in 2015 and a bestseller in Romania, translations of Solenoid have won the Prix Transfuge in French and the Thomas Mann Preis in German. Partly autobiographical, the novel is a first-person account of a high school teacher with literary ambitions who experiences rejection after presenting at an important literary workshop, leading him on a diverging path from Cărtărescu’s actual life. Grounded in the realities of the late 1970s to ’80s Communist Romania, this novel is interspersed with elements of surrealism—the narrator’s house, for example, resembles a boat on the outside, but on the inside contains numberless rooms and an enormous solenoid that is a portal to other dimensions. Solenoid has never been translated into English.

Sean Cotter is a translator and professor of literature and translation at the University of Texas at Dallas. A previous National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Cotter is the translator of 11 books, including T.O. Bobe’s Curl and Nichita Stănescu’s Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems, which was awarded the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry.

Since 1981, the NEA has awarded 528 fellowships to 467 literary translators, with translations representing 74 languages and 88 countries. Click here for the full list of fiscal year 2021 Literature Translation Fellowships.

Visit arts.gov to browse bios, artist statements, and writing excerpts from a sample of past Literature Fellows in Translation.