Thanks to initiatives like Tulsa Artist Fellowship and World Literature Today, Oklahoma—and Tulsa in particular—has risen to prominence, perhaps unpredictably, as a global hub for international literature in translation. In the summer 2022 issue of Latin American Literature Today, we celebrated this fact with a special feature dedicated to the work of four world-class translators of Latin American literature based in Tulsa: Jennifer Croft, George Henson, Steve Bellin-Oka, and Rhett McNeil.
Jennifer Croft, born and raised in Tulsa, contributed a preview of her translation of beloved Argentine writer Sylvia Molloy’s Dislocations, coming soon from Charco Press. George Henson, also a local with deep family roots in northeast Oklahoma, contributed an excerpt from his forthcoming translation of A Long Day in Venice by Argentine author Abel Posse (Betimes Books). Steve Bellin-Oka presented a moving short story from Mexican writer Andrea Candia’s collection An Abundance of Innocence, titled “Winter Postcard.” And last but not least, Rhett McNeil offered his translation from the Portuguese of a chapter of Man Made of Paper by acclaimed Brazilian novelist João Almino, along with a translator’s note reflecting on place. Please find links to all four translations, along with an introductory note, below:
Introduction by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/.../cognate.../
Sylvia Molloy translated by Jennifer Croft
https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/.../translation.../
Abel Posse translated by George Henson
https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/.../an-excerpt.../
Andrea Candia translated by Steve Bellin-Oka
https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/.../winter.../
João Almino translated by Rhett McNeil
https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/.../chapter-man.../
At this event—introduced and moderated by Tulsa Artist Fellow and LALT Managing Editor Arthur Malcolm Dixon—Jennifer, George, Steve, and Rhett will read excerpts from their work, followed by a discussion and Q&A between the invited translators and audience members. This reading, presented at the TAF Flagship space on Wednesday, October 5 at 7pm, will serve to celebrate Tulsa as a home for translators and as a “cognate territory,” “related by derivation, borrowing, or descent” and by shared roots, shared troubles, and shared unrecognized brilliance to neighboring lands in what we now know as Latin America.
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Jennifer Croft won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is also the author of Serpientes y escaleras and Notes on Postcards, as well as numerous pieces in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Paris Review Daily, the New York Review Daily, and elsewhere. Her other translations include Romina Paula’s August, Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University. While in Tulsa, she'll be working on her novel Amadou, the story of eight translators in search of their author in the primeval forest on the border between Poland and Belarus, as well as completing her book-length essay Notes on Postcards, translating Federico Falco's novel The Plains, and creating her first podcast.
Literary translator George Henson’s Oklahoma roots run deep. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma with a B.A. in Spanish, George went on to study in Spain, receiving an M.A. in Spanish from Middlebury College. He would later earn a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from the University of Texas at Dallas. It was there that George took his first steps in literary translation, which led to the publication of “Canaries,” a short story by Elena Poniatowska, Mexico’s grande dame of letters, in the University of Tulsa’s literary journal Nimrod. Today, George is considered one of the foremost translators of contemporary Latin American prose. His eight book-length translations include Cervantes laureate Elena Poniatowska’s The Heart of the Artichoke, Luis Jorge Boone’s Cannibal Night, Alberto Chimal’s The Most Fragile Objects, in addition to five books by Cervantes laureate Sergio Pitol. Writing in the L.A. Review of Books, Ignacio Sánchez Prado lauded George as “one of the most important literary translators at work in the United States today.” In addition to his book-length translations, George’s work has appeared in numerous venues, including World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today, The Paris Review, The New England Review, The Guardian, and Granta.
Steve Bellin-Oka’s first book of poems, Instructions for Seeing a Ghost, won the 2019 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and was published in 2020 by the University of North Texas Press. He is also the author of three chapbooks, the most recent of which is Out of the Frame (Walls Divide Press, 2019). He earned his MFA from the University of Virginia and his PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. His translations from Spanish appear in Latin American Literature Today and are forthcoming in 2021 from several other journals. His work has earned him fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the National Parks Arts Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Crosstown Arts Center. He has also been a translation scholar at the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. He is currently also a Research Fellow at the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities.
Rhett McNeil is a scholar, critic, and literary translator from Texas, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UT-Austin with degrees in English, Portuguese, and Art History. He has an MA in Comparative Literature from Penn State University and is currently finishing a PhD in the same department. He has taught courses at Penn State, the University of Illinois, Arizona State University, and the University of Tulsa. His published work includes translations of novels, short stories, poetry, and nonfiction from some of the most innovative and accomplished authors on the world literary scene. His translation of Gonçalo M. Tavares's Joseph Walser's Machine was longlisted for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award; his translation of Almino’s Enigmas of Spring won a Jabuti Prize in Brazil. Rhett’s work has been reviewed or appeared in Harper’s, World Literature Today, The New Yorker, Two Lines, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction, among many other outlets. Rhett is also the co-founder of the Tulsa Sandlot Society. He is currently at work on an exhaustive archival history of the Tulsa Sandlot Society, a compendium of metaphors for the translator’s art, and numerous translation projects. McNeil is a 2018, 2019 & 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow.