Past Award Winners Database
“I rush down the stairs,/ pull open the door,/ dash about in the spring sunlight…” So begins this exquisite collection of translations by Eleanor Goodman of poems composed over the past several decades by Wang Xiaoni. In what follows we are taken out into the streets and on cross-country trains, into villages, cities and markets; we peep out through the windows of the poet’s home and sense the nostalgia invoked by a simple potato. Here is a poet...
Cat Town offers a priceless introduction to perhaps the most influential poet of early twentieth century Japan. Hiroaki Sato has translated in full Hagiwara’s enormously popular first two volumes of poetry, described by the poet himself in a not merely self-aggrandizing manner as epoch-making and hailed by critics for their experiments with symbolism. With the addition of a judicious selection of later works, Sato gives the reader a sense of the poet...
“Inviting as well as formidable/Like the ocean/with gems and monsters both”— tropes for an ancient king but a fair description of Mani Rao’s Kālidāsa for the 21st Century Reader. Verse plays and epics by the greatest poet and dramatist in Sanskrit are available here for the first time in accessible, lyrical translations that erase the distance of time and previous scholarly renderings and evoke the majesty, humanity, and sheer beauty of image ...
The poems in Salsa feature titles like “Fusion Kitsch,” “The Ripest Rankest Juiciest Summer Ever,” and “She sleeps as deep as a pair of sabot,” and allude to Che Guevara and Jack Kerouac or narrate flash histories of post-impressionist painting. A best-selling 1999 volume by Taiwanese avant-garde poet and pop songwriter Hsia Yü (the edition in Chinese is now in its tenth printing), Salsa is finally available in English by the poet’s longt...
Experimental Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s work is shocking, liberating, brutal, grotesque, burlesque, gurlesque. Published by the aptly-named Action Books, Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream has Kim’s longtime translator Don Mee Choi bringing this into an English that will not only jolt readers, but hopefully jolt them out of a stagnant vision of what Korean and Asian poetry represents: “We return as hot pigs / We return for our final act / The act in whic...
“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...
