2010 PEN Translation Fund Grant Recipients

Voting members of the 2010 Advisory Board: Esther Allen, David Bellos, Susan Bernofsky, Edwin Frank, Michael Moore, and Jeffrey Yang. For the second year in a row, the Fund gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Amazon.com, which has assisted the Fund’s work this year with a gift of $25,000.

Daniel Brunet for The Last Fire, a play by Dea Loher that examines the devastation wrought on a small community by the accidental death of a child. Following its premiere in Hamburg in 2008, it won both the 2008 Play of the Year award from Theater Heute and the 2008 Mülheim Drama Prize. (No publisher)

Alexander Dawe for a collection of short stories by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962), “the most surprising writer of 20th-century Turkish literature.” Opulent and lyrical in tone, Tanpmar’s stories orchestrate Western and Eastern influences to speak of ordinary people torn by their allegiances to the past. (No publisher)

Peter Golub for a collection of flash fiction by Linor Goralik, an underground Russian author beginning to make a name for herself in the literary mainstream. These very short stories catch their characters in midflight, like strangers on an airplane, combining the mythic with the banal to startling effect, as when the wolf, disobeying doctor’s orders, steps out for one last visit to the three little pigs. (No publisher)

Piotr Gwiazda for Kopenhaga by Grzegorz Wroblewski, a Polish poet who has lived in Copenhagen since 1985, “far from Poland and far from Denmark.” Intimate, sarcastic, lucid, and uncompromising, Kopenhaga addresses the immigrant experience in post-Cold War Europe with documentary evidence and intellectual rigor. (No publisher)

David Hull for Waverings, a novel by Mao Dun (1896–1981), who joined the nascent Chinese Communist Party in 1921. A depiction of the failed revolution of 1927 set among workers, peasants, and Communist Party officials in an unnamed county seat in Hubei Province, Waverings won its author great acclaim, but its pessimism drew criticism from doctrinaire communists. Hull’s translation is based on both the 1928 edition, published immediately after the events the novel describes, and the 1958 edition, significantly altered by the author. (No publisher)

Akinloye A. Ojo for Afaimo and other Poems (1972) the only poetry collection by Akinwumi Isola, a novelist, playwright, and one of the foremost figures in Yorùbá literature. Moving between exhortatory matter-of-factness and ecstatic incantation, these poems are a love song to the language in which they were written. “Is it really my fault? / The bug that ate the vegetable isn’t guilty. / There is a limit to a plant’s beauty. Whoever pursues Àsúnlé is guiltless.” (No U.S. publisher)

Angela Rodel for Holy Light, stories by Georgi Tenev, a Bulgarian playwright, novelist, film/TV screenwriter, and talk show host. Alloying political sci-fi with striking eroticism, the stories in Holy Light depict a world of endless, wearying revolution and apocalypse, where bodies have succumbed to a sinister bio-politics of relentless cruelty and perversion. “In first class they offered easy emancipation, perhaps even electrocution, but he was traveling economy class where they wouldn’t even serve him food.” (No publisher)

Margo Rosen for Poetry and Untruth, a novel by Anatoly Naiman. Juxtaposing the fates of four Russian poets of the early 20th century (Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva) with those of the generation that came of age during Khrushchev’s thaw, this is part novel, part historical document. It draws from the writings of Russia’s greatest poets and the author’s own experience (he was Akhmatova’s literary secretary from 1962-1966) to convey a century of creative life that transcends the direness of Soviet history. (No publisher)

Chip Rossetti for Animals in Our Days, short stories by Mohamad Makhzangi, an Egyptian psychiatrist, journalist and fiction writer who was studying alternative medicine in Kiev during the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Drawing on Arabic traditions of animal fables, these stories, written with “translucent poetic sensibility,” use animals to comment on political oppression and the human capacity for encountering the magical and the inexplicable. (To be published by the American University in Cairo Press.)

Bilal Tanweer for Love in Chikiwara (And Other Such Adventures), a 1964 novel by Muhammad Khalid Akhtar (1920–2002) that haslong been considered a masterpiece of Urdu humor. Our narrator, a genial, gullible bakery owner, makes the serious mistake of befriending Qurban Ali Kattar, the “Thomas Hardy of Urdu Literature,” who shamelessly exploits his hero-worship of all writers. A supporting cast of religious scam artists, bookbinders, restaurant owners, butchers, and minor deities make this novel something new and strange and warmly welcoming. (No publisher)

Diane Thiel for The Great Green, a 1987 novel by Eugenia Fakinou. Hugely popular in Greece (where it is now in its 43rd reprint), The Great Green portrays a woman escaping the constrictions of family and societal expectations. It interweaves the whole span of Greek history, from the Minoans and Homer’s Achaeans to the late Byzantine and early 19th-century periods, into the story of a single day in our own time, when an unknown woman mysteriously appears in a Greek village.


2009 PEN Translation Fund Grant Recipients

Voting members of the 2009 Advisory Board: Sara Bershtel, Edwin Frank, Michael Henry Heim, Michael Moore, Richard Sieburth and Jeffrey Yang. Esther Allen guided the Board’s deliberations without a vote.

Eric Abrahamsen for My Spiritual Homeland by Wang Xiaobo (1952–1997), a collection of penetrating, funny, and breathtakingly frank essays written 15 years after the Cultural Revolution by one of China’s most insightful and controversial writers. (No publisher)

Mee Chang for Garden of Youth (1981) by Oh Junghee, a series of powerful stories that center on the struggles of domestic life during the Korean War, by a writer widely recognized as the master of the Korean short story. (No publisher)

Robyn Creswell for The Clash of Images (1995) by Abdelfattah Kilito, a hybrid bildungsroman, written in French, set in the medina of an unnamed Moroccan city. Growing up in a traditional world where the image is taboo, the protagonist is seduced by new American technologies of the image. (Forthcoming from New Directions in fall 2010)

Brett Foster for Elemental Rebel: The Rime of Cecco Angiolieri (1260–1310[?]), a selection of impudent sonnets by a Sienese rival of Dante with a penchant for parodic wordplay. Individual sonnets have appeared in Green Mountains Review, Italian Poetry Review, Metamorphoses, RHINO, and other journals. (No publisher)

G.M. Goshgarian for The Remnants by Hagop Oshagan (1883-1948), a historic novel widely considered one of the greatest masterpieces of Armenian literature, written in the early 1930s “to save what remained of our people.” (No publisher)

Tess Lewis for Maybe This Time (2006) by Alois Hotschnig, a collection of disquieting stories about the mystery, fluidity, and perils of intimacy, by a prize-winning Austrian writer renowned for his stylistic virtuosity. Winner of a 2010 Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. (Forthcoming in the U.K. from Peirene Press in 2011)

Fayre Makeig for Mourning (2006), a selection of free verse poems by H.E. Sayeh, an eminent contemporary Iranian poet whose life and work span many of Iran’s political, cultural, and literary upheavals. “Tell us, heaven, why the rain / pours from your eyes …” (No publisher)

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra for Poems of Kabir, a selection of 60 Hindi padas (songs) by India’s legendary mystic poet saint (1398[?]–1448[?]) who opposed all religious and social orthodoxies and oppositions. “But I’m wasting my time, / Says Kabir, / Even death’s bludgeon / About to crush your head / Won’t wake you up.” (No publisher)

Frederika Randall for Deliver Us from Evil by Luigi Meneghello (1922–2007), a darkly original memoir, ordered by theme rather than chronology, set in rural Italy when the Church and Il Duce ruled. The savage immediacy of childhood perception combines with amused and astutely ironic insights in an unsentimental human comedy. (Forthcoming in 2011 from Northwestern University Press)

Daniel Shapiro for Missing Persons, Animals and Artists (1999) by Roberto Ransom, a short story collection by an acclaimed young Mexican writer which explores the enigmas of art and the creative process with gentle irony and whimsical, at times fantastical, premises. Winner of a 2010 Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. (No publisher)

Chantal Wright for A Handful of Water (2008), poems written in Germanby Tzveta Sofronieva, a young Bulgarian-born poet, trained as a physicist and science historian, who also writes in Bulgarian and English. Joseph Brodsky said of her, “Listen carefully … She has something to say.” (No publisher)


2008 PEN Translation Fund Grant Recipients

Voting members of the 2008 Advisory Board: Sara Bershtel, Edwin Frank, Michael Henry Heim, Michael Moore, Richard Sieburth and Jeffrey Yang. Esther Allen guided the Board’s deliberations without a vote.

Bernard Adams for his translation from the Hungarian of Dezsó Kosztolányi’s 1933 interlinking sequence of stories Kornél Esti, which takes its title from the name of the central character, who is the embodiment of senseless revolt, irresponsibility and latent cruelty. A leading Hungarian critic summed up the work in a phrase: “Lack of restraint restrained …” (Forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2011)

Jeffrey Angles for his translation from the Japanese of Twelve Perspectives, the 1970 memoir of Mutsuo Takahashi, in which the prominent poet describes his youth and sexual coming of age against the backdrop of the rise of the Japanese empire and World War II. Yukio Mishima wrote glowingly of this book’s “firm prose that shines with a dark luster much like a set of drawers crafted by a master of old,” and praised it for its “marvelous sense of perception.” (No publisher)

Andrea Lingenfelter for her translation from the Chinese of Annie Baobei’s novel Padma, the story of two disaffected city-dwellers who set out on a quest-like trek in a rugged and remote area of Tibet. Baobei (pen name of Li Jie) first came to prominence as an Internet writer in 1998 and since then has become one of China’s most popular writers, noted for her candid portrayal of alienated urban youth. (No publisher)

Jessica Moore for her translation from the French of Jean-François Beauchemin’s 2004 novel Turkana Boy. Written in poetic prose fragments veined with rich and often startling language and surreal imagery, Turkana Boy depicts a father’s grief after the unexplained disappearance of his 12-year-old son. Its author has been called “one of the best-kept secrets of Québécois literature.” Selections from Turkana Boy were published in the Fall 2008 issue of The Literary Review. (Forthcoming from Talon Books in 2011)

Sean Redmond for his translation from the medieval Latin of Felix Fabri’s 1483 travel memoir Another Holy Land: Felix Fabri’s Voyage to Medieval Egypt. Never before translated into English, Books 8 and 9 of Fabri’s celebrated Wanderings in the Holy Land contain a fascinating description of Egypt and especially Cairo, “the largest city of the entire world”: “There was … such a clamor and crowding of men that I cannot describe it. So many lights and torches, so much dancing about, as if it were the joy of all the world and not just in this one place but in every quarter.” (Forthcoming from the American University Press of Cairo in 2010)

Mira Rosenthal for her translation of Colonies, 77 sonnets by the young Polish poet Tomasz Rózycki, including “Her Majesty’s Fleet”: “I played alone against the computer. I was / king of a poor country in Central Europe / that became a superpower thanks to my sound / politics and trade.…” Rózycki’s poem “Scorched Maps,” translated by Rosenthal and published in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, won the “Top Quark” prize for 2010, judged by Robert Pinsky and awarded by 3quarksdaily.com. (No publisher)

Damion Searls for his translation of The Freeloader and other stories by the classic Dutch writer Nescio. Latin for “I don’t know,” Nescio was the pen name of J.H.F. Grönloh, (1882–1961), co-director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company. He is one of the world’s great portrayers of enthusiasm, optimism and the sheer joy of artists in their youth. Long recognized as one of the most important writers in the Dutch language, Nescio has never before been translated into English. (Forthcoming from New York Review of Books Classics)

Simon Wickham-Smith for his translation from the Mongolian of The Battle for Our Land Has Begun, poems and political writings by Ochirbatyn Dashbalbar (1957–1999). Already a popular literary figure when he was elected to the Great State Khural in Mongolia’s first democratic elections (1992), Dashbalbar’s passionate concern for the preservation of Mongolia’s culture and heritage led to a dovetailing of the poetic and the political in his life and work. A few months before his death, he began to fear he was being poisoned by agents of the state; the cause of his death remains unknown. Some of these poems were published in the Fall 2008 issue of The Literary Review. (Ulaanbatar, Mongolia: Dashbalbar Foundation, 2008)


2007 PEN Translation Fund Grant Recipients

2007 Advisory Board: Esther Allen, Sara Bershtel, Barbara Epler, Michael Henry Heim, Michael Moore, Richard Sieburth, and Eliot Weinberger

Susan Bernofsky for her translation from the German of Robert Walser ’s 1908 novel The Assistant, the melancholy and mischievously ironic story of a penniless young man who works for and lives with a spendthrift family in a lavish villa on the shores of Lake Zurich. (New Directions, 2007)

Jennifer Hayashida for her translation from the Swedish of Clockwork and Flowers: Explanations and Poems by Fredrik Nyberg. Fine, delicate and exact renderings of poems that simultaneously invoke Carl Linnaeus, the “Father of Taxonomy,” and the anarchic spirit of punk rock. (Ugly Duckling Press, 2008)

Wen Huang for his translation from the Chinese of The Woman from Shanghai, a collection of short stories by Yang Xianhui. Combining the passionate realism of fiction with the political outrage of journalism, these stories recount in devastating detail the experiences of intellectuals and former government officials shipped to Jiabiangou, a gulag in the desert region of northwestern China. (Pantheon, 2009)

Ha-yun Jung for her translation from the Korean of A Lone Room, a 1995 novel by Shin Kyong-sook which was awarded Korea’s prestigious Manhae Literary Prize. A Lone Room vividly evokes the life of an intellectually ambitious young girl struggling to survive as a sweatshop worker in the 1970s. (No publisher)

Sara Khalili for her translation from the Farsi of Seasons of Purgatory, a selection of short stories by contemporary Iranian writer Shahriar Mandanipour. As if the ghosts from the Arabian Nights had come to life among freeways, high-rises and fiber-optic networks, these stories embody the fierce clash of modernity and traditionalism in Iran today. While Seasons of Purgatory has not yet been published, Mandanipour’s Censoring an Iranian Love Story, translated by Sara Khalili, was published by Knopf in 2009.

Paul Olchváry for his translation from the Hungarian of The Ninth, a 2005 novel by Ferenc Barnás. The story of the 9-year-old 9th child of a poor Catholic family in the Communist Hungary of the 1960s, the novel was hailed by critics as portraying “the unmistakable, throat- and gut-wrenching quality of distress that everyone remembers from his or her own childhood ….” (Northwestern University Press, 2009)

Bill Porter (a.k.a. Red Pine) for his translation from the classical Chinese of In Such Hard Times, an anthology of the poems of Wei Ying-wu, one of the greatest of the T’ang dynasty poets, whose work is singularly underrepresented in English. (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)

Katherine Silver for her translation from the Spanish of Senselessness, a gripping and mordantly audacious novel by contemporary Salvadoran/Honduran Horacio Castellanos Moya, whose work was been praised for being politically and morally engaged without being predictably testimonial or politically correct. Published by New Directions in 2008, Senselessness received the 2009 Northern California Book Award for Translation.

Christopher Southward for his translation from the Japanese of Acacia, short stories by Hitonari Tsuji, who also makes films under the name Jinsei Tsuji. Tsuji has been awarded the Prix Femina Etranger (1999) and the Akutagawa Prize (1997) for his writing, and the International Critics Prize at the 56th Venice International Film Festival for one of his films. This is the first English translation of any portion of his extensive body of work. (No publisher)

Alyson Waters for her translation from the French of A Splendid Conspiracy, a novel by Egyptian writer Albert Cossery (b. 1913), whose work was championed by Henry Miller in the 1950s. This short, densely baroque novel echoes the meandering streets and wild variety of Cairo itself, and has been praised for its “characteristic blend of Olympian detachment and fine-grained moral inspection.” (New Directions, 2010)


2006 PEN Translation Fund Grant Recipients

2006 Advisory Board: Esther Allen, Sara Bershtel, Barbara Epler, Michael Henry Heim, Michael Moore, Richard Sieburth, and Eliot Weinberger

Johannes Goransson for his translation from the Finland-Swedish of The Collected Poems of Henry Parland, by Henry Parland (1908–1930), intriguing and highly influential poems by a modernist prodigy who died at the age of 22. (Ugly Duckling Press, 2007)

Victoria Haggblom for her translation from the Swedish of To Mervas, a heartbreaking novel by the renowned Elizabeth Rynell which resonates with melancholy beauty as it unflinchingly describes the complications and brutality of human relationships. (Archipelago Books, 2009)

Nicky Harman for her translation from the Chinese of Banished! by Han Dong, a novel about Chinese city folk banished to the remote countryside in 1969, which manages to be simultaneously subtle, funny, tragic, and earthy. Limpidly written (Han Dong is best-known as a poet) it is also a meditation on the meaning of family and roots. (University of Hawaii Press, 2009)

Ann L. Huss for her translation from the Chinese of Beauty (Renmian taohua) by Ge Fei, the first novel in 10 years by an extremely important writer, and the first volume in a trilogy. Full of allusions to the traditional utopian tale of the Peach Blossom Spring, Beauty is a parable, an analysis of revolution, and the story of modern China told by the young girl Xiumi. (No publisher)

Sawako Nakayasu for her translation from the Japanese of For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide, a book-length prose poem in 111 sections. The book is an integration of Hiraide’s radiantly strange sense of prose, pseudo-scientific observation, fragmented narrative, poetics, autobiography, and rhetorical experiments, and is the beginning of his lifelong investigation of prose poetry in Japan. (New Directions, 2008)

Tegan Raleigh for her translation from the French of The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry: Algerian Stories, by Assia Djebar, who in 2005 was inducted into the Academie Française. The stories describe the politically driven violence that wracked Algeria during the 1990s, and its effects on intellectuals, teachers, and women in particular. (Seven Stories Press, 2006)

Constantine Rusanov for his translation from the Lithuanian of The Junction, poems by Tomas Venclova, Lithuania’s foremost living poet. Venclova belongs to the generation of Milosz and Brodsky, and many of his new poems respond to those late poets’ works. His poems explore borderland spaces: between consciousness and the unconscious, between historical epochs, and finally, between existence and non-being. In a series of formally intricate texts, Venclova paints a bleak landscape of frailty and loss, drowning despair in a steely tone of stoic resignation. (Bloodaxe Books, 2008)

Stepan S. Simek for his translation from the Czech of two contemporary plays: Theremin by Petr Zelenka and Three Sisters 2002.CZ by Iva Volankova. Theremin is an account of the 10 years that the Russian inventor, musician and agent for the Soviet Secret Service Leon Sergeievich Theremin spent in the United States in the 1920s and ’30s. In May, 2006, a staged reading of Theremin was performed at the Public Theater in New York, and in 2009 it was published in Czech Plays: Seven New Works (Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications, CUNY Press).

Alan Trei and Inna Feldbach for their translation from the Estonian of Robber’s Rise (Book 1 of the Truth and Justice pentalogy), a novel by Anton Hansen Tammsaare. This is the first English translation of an Estonian classic already translated into many other languages, a sprawling, rambunctious tale of farm life in the late 19th century, full of memorable characters, events and stories. It delves deeply into nature, childbirth, jealousy, young love, the private worlds of children, adultery, suicide, the Bible, and the Church, with a thread of mysticism running through. (No publisher)


2005 PEN Translation Fund Grant Recipients

2005 Advisory Board: Esther Allen, Sara Bershtel, Barbara Epler, Michael Henry Heim, and Eliot Weinberger

Chris Andrews for his translation from the Spanish of Last Evenings on Earth, a selection of short stories by Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003). The collection was published by New Directions (U.S.) and Harvill (U.K.) in 2006; two of the short stories included in it appeared in The New Yorker in 2005.

Rachel Tzvia Back for her translation from the Hebrew of Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama. Goldberg (1911–1970) was awarded the Israel Prize for her lifetime’s achievement and is a pre-eminent figure in modern Hebrew letters. This selection, the most extensive of Goldberg’s poetry published to date in English, was published in the Toby Press’s Hebrew Classics series in the fall of 2005.

Susan Bernofsky for her translation from the German of The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck, which brings together Erpenbeck’s acclaimed novella “The Story of the Old Child” and five shorter stories from her collection Tand (Sand ). The Old Child was published by New Directions in 2005; in 2006 it was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, administered by the Goethe-Institut Chicago.

Heather Cleary for her translation from the Spanish of The Persuasion of Days, a selection of work by Argentine avant-garde poet Olivero Girondo, a contemporary of Borges whose wry, cosmopolitan eroticism expressed the sensibility of his age and retains great appeal in ours. Some of the poems appeared in the spring 2006 issue of The Literary Review.

Karen Emmerich for her translation from the Greek of Poems (1945-1971) by Miltos Sachtouris, one of the most influential Greek poets of the 20th century. His work, deeply emotional as well as formally experimental, is intimately tied to the violent history of his native Greece. Published by Archipelago Press in 2006, the book was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2007.

Jason Grunebaum for his translation from the Hindi of The Girl with the Golden Parasol, a novel by Uday Prakash. This wildly postmodern narrative tells, among others, the uproarious tale of a young man’s all-consuming passion for the Bollywood starlet featured in the poster on his bedroom wall. (Penguin India, 2008)

Deborah Hoffman for her translation from the Russian of Children of the Gulag, ed. Semen Samuilovich Vilenskii, a volume of memoirs, diaries, and letters by the children of Soviet enemies of the people. Some were written at the time of the events recounted, and some from a perspective of many years later. Excerpts from the project have appeared in the Toronto Slavic Quarterly.

Elizabeth Macklin for her translation from the Basque of Meanwhile Take My Hand: Poems by Kirmen Uribe. In these lyrics and narratives are the paved-over rivers of newly urbanized medieval cities, the remains of loving relationships, whether entirely uprooted or making do with a companionable silence. The Basque phrase Bitartean heldu eskutik, which became the book’s title, is, Uribe has said, “what you say when there’s nothing at all you can say.” (Graywolf Press, 2007)

Susanna Nied for her translation from the Danish of Butterfly Valley by Inger Christensen, a collection of four medium-length works by one of Europe’s most revered poets, describing butterflies in the Bracjino Valley, piazzas in Rome, immortality in the whiteness of the page, and the “coming together” of a couple and their failure to connect. (New Directions, 2005)

Laima Sruoginis for her translation from the Lithuanian of My Voice Betrays Me, oral narratives of Lithuanian street children collected by Vanda Juknaite. (East European Monographs, 2007)

George Szirtes for his translation from the Hungarian of War and War by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. The second of the legendary Krasznahorkai’s novels to appear in English, this is the visionary, dark, obsessive, funny, and finally terrifying story of a man who discovers a mysterious document in the archives. (New Directions, 2006)

Paul Vincent for his translation from the Dutch of Summer in Termuren by Louis Paul Boon, widely considered the greatest Belgian novelist of the 20th century. This saga follows the lives of a young married couple adrift in a Belgian landscape that, as the story begins, is darkening under the looming specter of World War I. (Dalkey Archive Press, 2006)

Susan Wilf for her translation from the Chinese of Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, a memoir by dissident Kang Zhengguo which traces his life from Mao’s China in the 1940s to the present. Branded a thought criminal as a youth, he was assigned to forced labor, served time in the Chinese gulag, and was driven into exile in the countryside until his eventual exoneration. Then came Tiananmen Square. (W.W. Norton, 2007)


2004 PEN Translation Fund Grant Recipients

2004 Advisory Board: Esther Allen, Sara Bershtel, Barbara Epler, Michael Henry Heim, and Eliot Weinberger

Andrea Berger for her translation from the Hungarian of Bestiarium Transylvaniae, vol. I: The Birds of the Air, by Zsolt Lang. In this novel-in-stories, the first volume in a celebrated trilogy, Lang cunningly resurrects the medieval bestiary form with ingenious storytelling, exceptional knowledge of history and place, rich, mythical imagery, and a thoroughly contemporary wit. (No publisher)

Philip Boehm for his translation from the German of Settlement by Christoph Hein, a novel that uses the voices of five narrators spread over five decades to tell the story of the war refugee Bernhard Haber as he works his way up from shunned outsider to local kingpin. Settlement is a nuanced portrait of a man caught between the struggle for acceptance and the urge to reject all who once rejected him. Published by Metropolitan Books in 2008, Settlement was shortlisted for the 2010 Dublin IMPAC award.

Peter Cole for The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, c.950–1492, a comprehensive anthology containing nearly 400 poems, a detailed historical introduction, short biographical essays on each of the 54 writers in the volume, and extensive annotation. The book tells the story of the renaissance of a literary culture that, as it fused elements of sacred and profane, East and West, Arabic and Hebrew, gave rise to what is arguably the most powerful body of literature in the post-biblical Jewish canon. Published by Princeton University Press in 2007, The Dream of the Poem won five national awards, including the 2007 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, and the R.R. Hawkins Award from the Association of American Publishers.

Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander for their translation from the Spanish of the long poem “The Night,” the last work produced by Bolivia’s foremost 20th-century writer Jaime Saenz (1921–1986), a true poète maudit, whose lifelong struggle with alcoholism was wedded to a monastic dedication to writing. (Princeton University Press, 2007)

Idra Novey for her translation from the Portuguese of a selection of poems by Paulo Henriques Britto (b. 1951), one of the outstanding poets of his generation, particularly admired for his keen sense of the relationship between form and content. Her project, The Clean Shirt of It: Selected Poems of Paulo Henriques Britto, was published by BOA Editions in 2007 as part of the Lannan Translation Selections Series.

Joonseong (Jason) Park for his translation from the Korean of Diary of a Vagabond, a collection of contemporary short stories and novellas by Song Yong depicting a Kafkaesque world of ordinary people trapped in an authoritarian society. (Codhill Press, 2008; bilingual edition published in Seoul, Korea by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Press, 2008)

Kristin Prevallet for her translation from the French of The Other World: Unpublished Writings, a selection of beautiful, dense lyric prose pieces found among the papers of Congolese novelist, playwright and poet Sony Labou Tansi, who died of AIDS in 1995. (No publisher)

Timothy Sergay for his translation from the Russian of Aleksandr Pavlovich Chudakov ’s prize-winning “memoiristic novel” A Gloom Descends Upon the Ancient Steps (2000), set in northern Kazakhstan, which centers on the relationship between a Moscow historian and his grandfather, a titan of physical and intellectual rigor, and depicts many facets of daily life under Stalin in a new light. Chapters of the novel have been excerpted on WordsWithoutBorders.org. (No publisher)

Gerald Turner for his translation from the Czech of a prize-winning satirical jaunt through the last century by Patrik Ourednik, Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century. (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005)

Elizabeth Winslow for her translation from the Arabic of The War Works Hard, a collection of innovative, subversive poems by contemporary Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail, currently living in exile in the United States. Published in 2005 by New Directions, The War Works Hard was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the 25 Books To Remember of 2005. It was also one of four books short-listed for Canada’s prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize in 2006.