Past Award Winners Database
“Vvedensky is a marvel: a poet too little known in Russia, and not known at all in the English-speaking world, is revealed as a major 20th-century world poet—wonderful, wonderfully strange, and haunting. The alchemical translation, with its shifty rhymes and non-rhymes, intense images and absent logic, knits and unknits reality before the reader’s eyes, walking not a line so much as a live wire.” Wrote the judges of this year’s award, renowned...
“The reader will quickly find himself or herself entranced by the personal yearnings in these characters’ small lives, which are made achingly palpable in the beautifully translated and deceptively simple prose, with the peaceful, fictional kibbutz grounds and its austere houses depicted as vividly and lovingly as the turbulent landscapes of the characters’ minds.”
“The work is daring and experimental in style—a multidimensional kaleidoscope where the lines between fiction and memoir are intentionally blurred, as are the borders between author and protagonist(s). Past, present and future curve endlessly in on themselves, weaving in and out of first- and third-person narration to tell one man’s story, and the story of a generation of Turks who lived during Hikmet’s time. This is a landmark work for Hikmet, ...
“A masterful work of storytelling, in the most expansive and exhilarating sense of the word! The translation achieves and maintains a brilliantly seamless conversational tone, engaging and full of colloquial charm as the stories emerge from our garrulous narrator, one after another, as layer upon layer of memories coalesce into a tender, homespun, epic retelling of one man’s life spanning the horrors and tragedies of World War II and its aftermath....
“A startling coexistence of vitality and death, beauty and darkness, love and anger animates these elegiac poems by one of Italy’s foremost contemporary poets, appearing for the first time in a bilingual edition. The poet’s anguish and helplessness in the face of his wife’s illness and death permeate each line as he probes the capacity of language to convey such loss, and all but brings his beloved back to life through recollected snapshots of t...
“William M. Hutchins’ translation of New Waw: Saharan Oasis masterfully channels the poetic rhythms of Ibrahim al-Koni’s tale of a group of Tuareg, struggling with their evolution from a nomadic tribe to a settled community and the tensions that inevitably arise. Legends, fables, prophecies and tribal laws, expressed in lyrical, metaphorical language, give a glimpse into the group’s traditions and the Tuareg mythical paradise oasis, Waw,” said...
“More than a monumental work of scholarship, Pierre Joris’s 40-year project in translation of the later poetry of one of the twentieth century’s most original and “untranslatable” poets is an extraordinary work of poetry in contemporary English. With seeming ease, Joris conveys the complexity and inventiveness of the original German without oversimplifying or domesticating its difficulty, its dark beauty, or the depth of its ideas. His comment...
In his generous selection from the entire career of this important contemporary Swedish poet, Roger Greenwald makes a major contribution to English-language (and specifically American) poetry. Harding’s jazzy vernacular and its evolution through variations on a lyrical colloquialism that grows increasingly burdened with grief over the course of a lifetime are caught so convincingly in Greenwald’s versions that it’s hard to believe these poems were...
In Ernst Meister’s last collection of poetry, vivid language animates the fabric of daily life, and even the simplest image becomes startling. In Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick’s vibrant, elegant translation of this remarkable German poet each word holds weight and motion, so that we, too, experience the “clamor of consciousness” that emerges poignantly in these poems. At turns big-hearted and humorous, the collection is also steeped in refle...
This truly impressive and comprehensive bilingual selection spans seven decades of poetry by Tuvia Ruebner, giving a valuable insight into the evolving career of this Slovakian Jewish poet. Ruebner’s poems, gorgeously translated over the last decade by Rachel Tzvia Back, bristle and shimmer; at times they are brutally, heartbreakingly clear (“the morning songs of the humming-birds sound as though their throats are tied”) and at times hushed and me...
The very first lines of Sheds draw the reader into a world of exquisitely arresting imagery and musicality: “The fresh water / of your voice flows / into my thirsty throat / and the windy morning enters / the smoothly combed sky /…/ atop the highest branches / where the magpies hop about /…/ Luminous scissors cut through the darkness,” making the ordinary appear as precious as it is “wobbly” and puzzling. With his skillful translation, John ...
In a dreamlike series of five “books,” The End of Days addresses the question of what if a baby who died in the early twentieth century had lived longer, only to die during later decades in the midst of world wars and cultural upheaval. How could it all have gone differently had that baby grown up and had a family through those historical times? Susan Bernofsky’s translation artfully captures the haunting yet exhilarating possibilities of the impa...
Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella have brought Tove Jansson’s stories from The Woman who Borrowed Memories into a richly modulated English that suits her compact tales of the small pleasures and terrors that inflect both young and old, artist and outsider. Jansson’s attention to the small shifts in light and darkness are rendered with correspondingly nuanced prose that helps the reader see both in and out of the windows of her tiny, marvelous tal...
Karen Emmerich’s sensitive and deft translation from the of Amanda Michalopoulou’s Why I Killed My Best Friend brings to life a coming-of-age tale of two young women from distant lands finding their way together in Athens amid the political and social upheavals of the ’70s and ’80s in a tale that is startlingly relevant to the present moment. Emmerich’s surefooted dialogue, seamless weaving of context, and caring attention to detail allow the ...
Marian Schwartz deftly departs from Constance Garnett’s 1901 English translation of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece. In her translation, Garnett tended to smooth out Tolstoy’s unconventional use of language. Instead, Schwartz underscores and celebrates Tolstoy’s unorthodox choices grounded in aesthetic and ethical motives through her insightful and inspiring new translation.
Eric Abrahamsen beautifully renders Duanhuang’s chaotic marathon through Beijing’s unglamorous quarters. This refreshing social critique features a wide array of colorful hustlers dealing in pirated DVDs, fake IDs, and prostitution. Through Duanhuang, we follow the characters’ struggles to rise above their economic conditions as they develop a sense of loyalty and community within a deeply corrupt society. The narrator’s colloquial voice and aut...
