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The PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000)
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The PEN Award for Poetry in Translation is given for a book-length
translation of poetry. The award was created by a bequest from Rae
Dalven and is now sustained through a grant from The Kaplen Foundation.
2005 Judge: Robert Kelly
Please click here for more information on the award. |
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2005 Awardees
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Presented by Robert Kelly
Winner:
Pierre Joris: Lightduress by Paul Celan (Green Integer)
translated from the German
Joris brings thirty-five years of concern with Celan's poetry and
poetics to a culmination with this latest volume of his mapping of
Celan's oeuvre in English. The translations are consistently
alert to the subtle and often bewildering thought-turns of the
original, his lyric sense of pause, suspension and onrush can keep pace
with the German, and his vast knowledge of Celan's life and world allow
vital commentary and annotations. In every respect then:
inclusion of original text, stalwart and intelligent literalism,
accuracy of annotation, comprehensive introduction, this volume is
everything a poetic translation should be.
Finalists:
Susanna Nied: Butterfly Valley: A Requiem by Inger Christensen (New Directions)
translated from the Danish
This is a magnificent reading in English, and although the Danish text
is not given for comparison, the English text generates a motive force
of formal presence. The reader doesn't merely acquire the ideas and
the statements of the original, but does so by hearing a sustained and
recognizable breath.
Jerome Rothenberg: Writing Through: Translations & Variations (Wesleyan University Press)
translated from many languages and poetic genres.
This volume summarizes a lifetime of explorations and experiments in
the radical translation of poetry--strict translation, adaptation,
re/visioning, "total" translation: so many ways, so many devotions.
Rothenberg lived the life of the poems, among Seneca Indians, Navaho,
East European Jews, Germans. He has been our scout through the
forests of the possible.
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