Michael Bazzett NEA

Michael Bazzett, an acclaimed poet and translator, has been selected for a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Literature Translation Fellowship. The award, worth $15,000, supports his translation of a collection of Humberto Ak'abal’s selected poems called “If Today Were Tomorrow.” This year, the NEA is awarding a total of $325,000 in grants to 22 translators to support the translation into English of works written in 17 different languages from 21 countries.

Ak’abal, who died in 2019 at age 66, was a world-renowned K’iche’ Maya poet from Guatemala. He wrote in his native language of Kʼicheʼ and translated his poetry into Spanish. “If Today Were Tomorrow” features both Ak’abal’s Spanish translations of his poems and Bazzett’s English translations.

“When I first came across Humberto Ak'abal's work, I was entranced, in both senses of the word, and knew that I wanted to inhabit his poems and let them inhabit me and find a way for them to sing through another tongue,” Bazzett says. “I've long believed our current impoverished relationship with the natural world stems from our inability to imagine that things could be otherwise—and that listening to Indigenous voices such as Ak'abal can help fuel such imaginative work, acting as both a necessary reparative and a catapult toward new ways of knowing. I am beyond grateful for this opportunity to help his words and vision find new readers, and I view this National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Translation as a blessing and a spur to action: toward more deep listening, reading and building connection.

Bazzett says it can be helpful for students to remember that all writing is a form of translation. “We have an impulse or an inkling we'd like to share, and then we have to find the words to carry that spark to another heart and mind, another pair of eyes,” he explains. “In my 12th grade Latin American Literature class, I sometimes do little translation exercises, giving small groups of students a brief poem in Spanish which they then create a rough translation of, in English, and we write out the four or five different versions of the work on the white boards in my room, discussing connotation and choice, while we reside in the space between. I sometimes think that’s where the ‘real poem’ lives.”

Bazzett is the author of “You Must Remember This,” which received the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, “The Interrogation,” and most recently “The Echo Chamber.” He is also the translator of “The Popol Vuh,” the first English verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, which was named a New York Times Best Book of 2018. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Ploughshares, The Sun and Best New Poets. He also received a 2017 NEA fellowship.

Read more in “Translating Humberto Ak’abal: An Interview with Michael Bazzett” (Asymptote)