Translating the world around us

One man's passion fuels opportunities for Mizzou students

Students at the University of Missouri will have the opportunity to experience how the literary world works from an international perspective thanks to an endowment in memory of the late director of literature at the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA). Leila Bakry-Becker, widow of Clifford W. Becker, has established The Cliff Becker Endowment for the Literary Arts in her husband's memory. The endowment will provide support to the creative writing program in the Department of English.

"Cliff Becker had no direct ties to the University of Missouri," says Pat Okker, chair of the Department of English, "so it is a great honor for the university that his family selected MU because of the strength of the Creative Writing Program."

Becker's passion for supporting infrastructure of the literary arts fuels the endowment‘s initial project. The Cliff Becker Book Prize will be awarded to a winning manuscript discovered in a worldwide competition for a single-author literary text. This competition will be managed by the Department of English, and the winning manuscript will be printed by an affiliated press. Initially, the competition will focus on works of translation. This decision stems from the trend of university presses, and publishing in general, to print less translated literature because of the difficulty in enticing Americans to read these books. This issue concerned Becker, who was quoted in an interview in Transcript - European Internet Review of Books and Writing, "It is not an exaggeration to refer to this as a national crisis. If I'm not able to experience other cultures, not even from a place that is as easy to reach as the printed page, that is outright dangerous."

The United States is far behind other countries in the number of translated books published; fewer than 3 percent of all books compared to between 10 and 30 percent in other countries.

Okker says this kind of support complements the department's academic mission and will be a great education for writers. The students will be working with the international prize competition and will be exposed to different aspects of the literary process, including literary translation and publishing.

"I didn't know Cliff Becker personally, but I do know that he was passionate about supporting the literary arts, and he believed that literature allows us to learn about the world around us," says Okker. "This endowment supports literary translation, which has been quite limited in the United States, at the same time that it provides our students with a wonderful opportunity to learn more about creative writing in an international context."

Scott Cairns, professor of English and the director of the Creative Writing Program, says that the English department's already prominent creative writing program is in the midst of developing a more international character by bringing international writers to work with students and encouraging students to travel and to more deliberately place their own literary productions in the context of an ongoing international "conversation."

"The Cliff Becker translation series will further engage our students in screening translated works, and thereby increase their understanding of the state of the conversation today," says Cairns.

The endowment will broaden into poetry, short fiction and additional projects as it grows.

Becker, as NEA's literary director, oversaw NEA grants to literary organizations and individual writers and translators. He expanded support for individual translators at the agency and led the development of the NEA Literature Translation Initiative. Other national initiatives in which he played a leading role include the Favorite Poem Project, the Literary Journal Institute and the National Poetry Recitation Contest.

Laura Lindsey
Arts & Science Dean's Office

Links

Department of English
Creative Writing Program

Patricia Okker  
Scott Cairns

National Endowment for the Arts