NER contributors in translation, Ross Benjamin (Friedrich Holderlin, 28.4) and Geoffrey Brock (Umberto Saba, 25.1 & 2), have won 2012 NEA Literature Fellowships for Translation Projects.

From Brock’s translation of Saba’s “A Winter Noon“:

Who in the moment of my happiness

(God forgive my using a word so grand,

so terrible) reduced my brief delight

nearly to tears? No doubt you’ll say: “A certain

beautiful creature who was walking by

and smiled at you.” But no: a child’s balloon,

a blue, meandering balloon against

the azure of the air, my native sky

never so clear and cold as it was then,

at high noon on a dazzling winter day.