Henry Sapoznik, founding director of the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been awarded a 2015 Translation Fellowship from the National Yiddish Book Center.
The Translation Fellowship program was founded to train, support, and encourage a new generation of Yiddish literary translators and scholars.
Sapoznik's project will focus on the works of Dadaist Victor Packer (1897-1958), one of the forgotten "radio poets" of the mid-20th century. Packer's poems — which were never published — were heard by thousands of listeners over Brooklyn, New York Yiddish radio station WLTH during the late 1930s.
Among his most influential pieces is the massive 15-page "Coney Island," a work that, according to Poetry Magazine executive editor Don Share, "energetically complements and complicates Lawrence Ferlinghetti's better known 'A Coney Island of the Mind.'"
As per the terms of the fellowship, a publishing outlet will be sought for the completed translations.