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)