J. Kates

James George "Jim" Kates (born 1945 in White Plains, New York) is an American poet and literary translator.

Career

Since 1997, with Leora Zeitlin, he has co-directed Zephyr Press, a non-profit literary publishing house that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia.^[1] He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. He was the president of the American Literary Translators Association.

Life

Kates grew up in Elmsford and White Plains, New York. He attended Hackley School in Tarrytown and graduated from White Plains High School in 1963. He volunteered for the Mississippi Summer project after his freshman year at Wesleyan University in 1964, helping to implement a special court order encouraging voter registration in Panola County. In the fall of 1964, he organized a Friends of the SNCC/COFO in Paris, France, to support the work of the American civil-rights movement. He returned to America in 1965 to work in Natchez, Mississippi. He later became a public school teacher, a non-violence trainer for interpersonal and political movements, and a poet and literary translator.

He is married to Helen Safronsky Kates. They have two children, Stanislav (1986) and Paula (1994).

Awards

• 1984 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry^[2]
• 1995 Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts^[3]
• 2006 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Project Fellowship^[4]

Published Works

• Mappemonde (Oyster River Press) ^[5]
• Metes and Bounds (Accents Publishing)
• The Old Testament (Cold Hub Press)
• The Briar Patch (Hobblebush Books) ^[6]

Translations

• The Score of the Game by Tatiana Shcherbina
• An Offshoot of Sense by Tatiana Shcherbina
• Say Thank You by Mikhail Aizenberg
• Level with Us by Mikhail Aizenberg
• When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree by fr:Jean-Pierre Rosnay
• Secret Wars by fr:Jean-Pierre Rosnay
• Corinthian Copper by Regina Derieva
• Live by Fire by Aleksey Porvin
• Genrikh Sapgir’s Psalms
• Co-Translator with Stephen A. Sadow of four books on Latin American Poetry

References

1. ↑ "Zephyr Press". 
2. ↑ "National Endowment for the Arts Announces 13 Literature Translation Fellowships" (Press release). National Endowment for the Arts. 4 August 2005. Retrieved 6 May 2013. 
3. ↑ "New Hampshire Arts News" (PDF). New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. Winter 2005–2006. Retrieved 6 May 2013. 
4. ↑ "National Endowment for the Arts Supports Russian Translation" (Press release). National Endowment for the Arts. 12 April 2007. Retrieved 6 May 2013. 
5. ↑ "Oyster River Press". 
6. ↑ "Hobblebush Books".