Not found in translation

Globe Editorial - The Boston Globe: "AS THE world gets smaller, there's more to read: literature by authors from all over the world. To be widely read by Americans, these works requires skilled translators. And the work of translation needs more support.

Debates rake the field, arguments about what gets lost in pushing prose and poetry out of their original tongue and into other languages. Sounds can't survive. Metaphors can be mutilated. Cultural context is lost. The energy that binds words can be drained away.

Still, translation has shining successes, writing that belongs to many lands and languages -- the ''Odyssey," ''Don Quixote," ''Anna Karenina," the Bible. Such classics are permanent features in American bookstores. But the pipelines are too small to handle the volume of international literature.

Some channels do exist. Earlier this month the National Endowment for the Arts announced 13 translation grants of $10,000 or $20,000 to recipients translating works from other languages into English. Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA, stresses the importance of creating ''a dialogue between cultures," saying, ''The voices of other lands and other ages have been available to enrich and enlighten the American character."

Among the recipients is Patrick Barron, a recently hired English professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. He is translating the work of the contemporary Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto. Barron is also a co-editor and translator of ''Italian Environmental Literature," an anthology of poetry and prose. The book includes Zanzotto's ''Per La Finestra Nuova," or ''Through the New Window," which begins:

''The window shines with lengthening green long shaped, dream by dream,orchards or meadows I don't know: but how much frost before it convinces me, how much snow." Because he has also won the Rome Prize, awarded by the American Academy of Letters in Rome, Barron won't start teaching at UMass until the 2006-07 academic year.

Awards, small presses, and websites also contribute to the flow of literary translations, but there's more to do. An NEA study found that in 1999, only 3 percent of the works of fiction and poetry published in the United States were translations. In 2002 the literary organization PEN asked its members for great books written in other languages that are not available in the United States in English. The organization keeps a running list on its website, pointing to books written in Swedish, Turkish, Danish, and other languages. There are also rich streams of children's literature.

In a literary global world, one is what one reads. And in the United States, foreign fare is too scarce."