Glorimarie Peña Alicea has won the Aetna Translation Award from UConn’s English department for her translation of Claudia Hernandez’s short story “El hijo muerto” as “Dead Child’s Manual.” Glorimarie’s translation will appear in the 2023 edition of the Long River Review. Congratulations, Glorimarie, on this signal achievement.
Glorimarie writes that Hernandez’s story, “published in the book titled De fronteras changed my perspective on undocumented migration. After reading Hernandez’s work, I decided to include the cultural production of the Salvadoran undocumented migration in my research, jumping into an unknown world for me.” Glorimarie worked on her award-winning piece during the first course she took to complete the Literary Translation Certificate under the guidance of professor Peter Constantine and with the help of colleagues Sandra Ruiz Lopez (a former LCL Graduate Student) and Angela Pitassi. Receiving this award, she writes, “reiterates the importance of collaboration in the literary translation practice.”
Professor Peter Constantine, head of LCL’s Translation Studies Program, writes of Glorimarie’s work, “In her brilliant and sensitive translation… Glorimarie shows a particular awareness of Hernández idiosyncratic use of the page, where image and word complement one another in very significant ways. It is a tour de force of translation.”
Glorimarie is currently working on her doctoral dissertation, focused on the literary and cultural production of the undocumented Dominican and Salvadorian migrations in the late 20th and 21st century. She is also currently translating the poetry volume Lo arrugado del eco by Yomarilly Meléndez Meléndez, a young Puerto Rican writer. Last year Glorimarie also won the National Dominican Day Parade Scholarship, and she has recently collaborated with the podcast La Brega in an episode about the tension between salsa and merengue music, undocumented migration, and racism in Puerto Rico.
