THE BISHOP’S SCHOOL (LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA) -- Ms. Kaplan’s award will “support the translation from the Brazilian Portuguese of the poetry collection “Slow Motion” by Marília Garcia.”
The impetus for this work came during her work in the creative writing MFA program at San Francisco State University. She explains, “I took classes with two inspiring teachers and translators, the poet Stacy Doris and her husband, Chet Wiener. Being in a group of people writing so much poetry, I became interested in what poets were writing at the same time in Brazil, since I knew Portuguese. I’d also studied Brazilian literature and knew how many wonderful writers there were who were virtually unknown in the U.S. because they’d never been translated into English. (This was before the Clarice Lispector boom.) I went to Brazil to learn about recent poetry and began translating.”