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PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000)
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The PEN Award for Poetry in Translation recognizes book-length translations of poetry from any language into English published in the previous calendar year and is judged by a single translator of poetry appointed by the PEN Translation Committee. Past honorees include Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld for their co-translation of Open Closed Open by Yehuda Amichai; Anne Twitty for her translation of Maria Negroní's Islandia; Pierre Joris for his translation of Lightduress by Paul Celan; and Wilson Baldridge for his translation of Recumbents by Michel Deguy.
2007 judge: Peter Cole
The PEN Award for Poetry in Translation award was made possible originally by a bequest from the late translator and PEN member Rae Dalven, and has currently receives support from The Kaplen Foundation. The award complements the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, which was founded in 1963 through the efforts of the PEN Translation Committee, and was the first American award to honor the art of the literary translator.
The 2007 PEN Literary Awards will presented in New York on the evening
of Monday, May 21 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.
For more information contact Nick Burd: (212) 334-1660, ext. 108, nick@pen.org
Please click here for more information on this award.
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2007 Awardee
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This year the fellowship goes to David Hinton for his translation from the Chinese of The Selected Poems of Wang Wei (New Directions) by Wang Wei.
In his citation, Peter Cole writes: “Though some of the 20th century’s finest translator poets have gone before him, David Hinton has managed to find his own way through the rivers and mountains of medieval Chinese verse, re-imagining the poems themselves as subtle soundscapes suspended in us. Hinton’s accomplishment is quiet but clear: His translations of Wang Wei yield the gentlest pleasure in the mouth when read aloud, echoing that fusion of essence and sense, being and nonbeing that lies at the heart of the understanding from which these poems emerge. It is as though his prosody were modeled on the visual analogue of the period’s painting, where men hover in tenuous balance between presence and absence in nature." |
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Finalists
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James Reidel
for his translation from the German of In Hora Mortis/Under the Iron of the Moon: Poems by Thomas Bernhard (Princeton University Press)
Paul Schmidt
for his translation from the Russian of The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems by Various Authors (NYRB Classics)
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