Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize PRESS shortlist announced RELEASE
For28 immediate February 2014release Shortlist for prestigious translation prize shines a spotlight on poetry 16 October 2015 For immediate release to ‘transform your sense of what’s possible’
A shortlist of six titles has been announced by this year’s judges of the Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize. The biennial prize is run by The Poetry Society and generously supported this year by the British Council, seeks the best collection of poetry translated from a living European language into English.
Selecting the shortlist was a thrilling experience for judges Olivia McCannon and Clare Pollard that showed how translation can stretch the English language and get under the skin of a reader. Clare said of the process of whittling down the submitted titles to a shortlist:
Judging this prize with Olivia has been a privilege and an education. These are the kind of books that turn you into a crazed enthusiast, pressing them into people’s hands and jabbering about how they’ve transformed your sense of what's possible. I hope this shortlist honours what is special about this prize by both celebrating radically diverse poetic voices and the translators whose generosity and talent allows us to hear them in English.
Olivia McCannon added:
How wonderful that a prize exists to recognize what translators of poetry can and do achieve, individually, and as a community: the innovative spaces they open up in their writing, the oxygenating effect of their conversations and questions, the alternative map of human warmth, wit, resilience and ingenuity we may, thanks to their efforts, lay over the cold lines of official borders.
Faced with such a strong field, the judges selected a shortlist of six collections by seven translators, and have also awarded commendations for translators of a further five collections. Eligible titles were published between 1 July 2013 and 30 June 2015.
The winner of the Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize will be announced by The Poetry Society at an awards ceremony at Europe House in London on 23 November 2015. Poems from all of the shortlisted collections will be published in a pamphlet for free distribution in December.
You can find out more about the shortlist, and the Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize, on our website. www.poetrysociety.org.uk/popescu
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For further information The Poetry Society Page 1 of 4 Telephone Sophie Baker 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX on 020 7420 9880 or email Tel: 020 7420 9880 Fax: 020 7240 4818 [email protected] www.poetrysociety.org.uk PRESS RELEASE ctd
For immediate release 16 October 2015
The shortlisted translators David Constantine and Tom Kuhn for Love Poems by Bertolt Brecht, pub. by Liveright [from German] Iain Galbraith for Self-Portrait With A Swarm Of Bees by Jan Wagner, pub. by Arc Publications [from German] Anne Stokes for Ice Roses - Selected Poems by Sarah Kirsch, pub. by Carcanet [from German] Ellen Doré Watson for The Mystical Rose by Adélia Prado, pub. by Bloodaxe [from Portuguese] Susan Wicks for Talking Vrouz by Valérie Rouzeau, pub. by Arc Publications [from French] Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese for Nothing More by Krystyna Miłobędzka pub. by Arc Publications [from Polish]
Commendations Peter Daniels for Selected Poems of Vladislav Khodasevich by Vladislav Khodasevich, pub. by Angel Classics [from Russian] Michael Hofmann for Impromptus by Gottfried Benn, pub. by Faber & Faber [from German] Karen Leeder and David Constantine for Rubble Flora: Selected Poems by Volker Braun, pub. by Seagull Books [from German] David McDuff for One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake by Tua Forsström, pub. by Bloodaxe Books [from Swedish] David Paisey for Selected Poems and Prose by Gottfried Benn, pub. by Carcanet Press [from German]
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For further information please contact Sophie Baker Tel: 020 7420 9880 Email: [email protected]
Notes to Editors
The Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize The Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize is run by The Poetry Society. It was originally named the European Poetry Translation Prize, and the first winner of the prize, in 1983, was Tony Harrison for The Oresteia. The prize was relaunched in 2003, and renamed in honour of the Romanian translator Corneliu M Popescu, who died in an earthquake in 1977, at the age of 19. The prize was supported from 2003-2011 by The Ratiu Foundation, and is supported this year by the British Council.
Past winners of the Corneliu M Popescu Prize have been David Constantine for his translation of Lighter than Air by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in 2003; Adam Sorkin and Lidia Vianu for their translation of The Bridge by Marin Sorescu in 2005; Ilmar Lehtpere for his translation of The Drums of Silence by Kristiina Ehin in 2007; Randall Couch for his translation of Madwomen by Gabriela Mistral in 2009; Judith Wilkinson for her translation of Raptors by Toon Tellegen in 2011 and Alice Oswald for Memorial in 2013.
The Judges Clare Pollard was born in Bolton in 1978 and lives in London. Her first collection of poetry, The Heavy-Petting Zoo was written whilst she was still at school, and received an Eric Gregory Award. It was followed by Bedtime and Look, Clare! Look!, which was made a set text on the WJEC A-level syllabus. Her fourth collection Changeling is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Clare has co-translated Poems by Caasha Lul Mohamud Yusuf, and her new version of Ovid’s Heroines, published by Bloodaxe, is currently touring as a one-woman show with Jaybird Live Literature. She blogs regularly about life as a poet at www.clarepollard.com
Olivia McCannon’s poetry collection Exactly My Own Length (Carcanet/Oxford Poets, 2011) was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and won the 2012 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. She read French/German at the Queen's College, Oxford, and lived for eight years in Belleville, Paris. Her translations include Balzac’s Old Man Goriot (Penguin Classics, 2011), modern French poetry in Poetry of Place: Paris (Eland, 2014), and contemporary plays (by Swiss, Lebanese and Cuban writers) for the Royal Court Theatre in London. She was commended in the 2014 Stephen Spender Prize, and her translations of the Burmese poet Nge Nge appears in the summer 2015 issue of MPT.
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For further information The Poetry Society Page 2 of 4 Telephone Sophie Baker 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX on 020 7420 9880 or email Tel: 020 7420 9880 Fax: 020 7240 4818 [email protected] www.poetrysociety.org.uk PRESS RELEASE ctd
For immediate release 16 October 2015
L-R: David Constantine; Tom Kuhn; Iain Galbraith © Karen Leeder; Anne Stokes; Ellen Doré Watson; Susan Wicks © Joanna Eldredge Morrissey; Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese The Shortlist David Constantine and Tom Kuhn for Love Poems by Bertolt Brecht, pub. by Liveright [from German] David Constantine is a freelance writer and translator. His most recent volume of poetry is Elder (2014); his fourth collection of short stories, Tea at the Midland, won the Frank O’ Connor International Short Story Award in 2013. Tom Kuhn teaches at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He works on twentieth-century drama and German exile literature and has been, since 1996, editor of the main English-language Brecht edition. Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was a German playwright, poet and theatre director. He wrote hundreds of poems through his life.
Iain Galbraith for Self-Portrait With A Swarm Of Bees by Jan Wagner, pub. by Arc Publications [from German] Iain Galbraith's poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, PN Review, Edinburgh Review, Times Literary Supplement, Irish Pages, New Writing and many other journals and books. He is the editor of five poetry anthologies and translates poetry, fiction and drama. A winner of the John Dryden Translation Prize and the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation, his recent translated books include W.G. Sebald's poetry and John Burnside's selected poems in German. He is an occasional lecturer, and in 2014-15 taught Poetics of Translation at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He was born and grew up in the west of Scotland and now lives in Wiesbaden, Germany. (Photo: Karen Leeder) Jan Wagner (b. 1971) is a German poet, essayist and translator of British and American poetry. He has published six volumes of poetry.
Anne Stokes for Ice Roses - Selected Poems by Sarah Kirsch, pub. by Carcanet [from German] Anne Stokes holds a PhD in German Literature from Ohio State University. She teaches Translation at the University of Stirling and translates from German. Sarah Kirsch (1935-2013) was a German poet who lived and worked in East Germany, and then, after political persecution, the West. She published ten collections of poetry.
Ellen Doré Watson for The Mystical Rose by Adélia Prado, pub. by Bloodaxe [from Portuguese] Poet & translator Ellen Doré Watson directs the Poetry Center at Smith College and has translated over a dozen books from the Brazilian Portuguese, most notably poetry by Brazilian Adélia Prado, including The Mystical Rose (Bloodaxe, 2014). She has also translated from the Arabic with co- translator Saadi Simawi. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, Watson serves on the faculty of the Drew University Graduate Program in Poetry and Translation and as Poetry & Translation editor of The Masschusetts Review. Adélia Prado (b. 1935) is a Brazilian poet and teacher. She has published more than eight volumes of poetry.
Susan Wicks for Talking Vrouz by Valérie Rouzeau, pub. by Arc Publications [from French] Susan Wicks, poet and novelist, was born in Kent, England, in 1947. She read French at the universities of Hull and Sussex, and wrote a D. Phil. thesis on André Gide. She has lived and worked in France, Ireland and America and has taught at the University of Dijon, University College Dublin and the University of Kent. She is the author of six collections of poetry including House of Tongues (2011), Singing Underwater (1992), which won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, and The Clever Daughter (1996), which was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. She was one of The Poetry Society’s ‘New Generation Poets’ in 1994. She is also the author of a short experimental memoir, Driving My Father (1995), and three novels, the most recent of which, A Place to Stop, came out in 2012. Cold Spring in Winter (2010), her translation of Valérie Rouzeau’s first major collection, Pas revoir, was shortlisted both for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for Literary Translation and the International Griffin Prize for Poetry, and won that year’s Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation from French. Her translation of Rouzeau’s second collection in English, Talking Vrouz, won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for Literary Translation in 2014. (Photo: Joanna Eldredge Morrisey) Valérie Rouzeau (b. 1967) is a French poet and translator, and has published fourteen poetry titles. Continues over
For further information The Poetry Society Page 3 of 4 Telephone Sophie Baker 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX on 020 7420 9880 or email Tel: 020 7420 9880 Fax: 020 7240 4818 [email protected] www.poetrysociety.org.uk PRESS RELEASE ctd
16 October 2015 For immediate release
Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese for Nothing More by Krystyna Miłobędzka pub. by Arc Publications [from Polish] Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese writes between English, Polish and Danish; her multilingual texts have appeared in such journals as Shearsman, Cordite Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and in anthologies (including Other Countries: Contemporary Poets Rewiring History, 2014). She has co-written Metropoetica. Poetry and Urban Space: Women Writing Cities (Seren, 2013), where English spans Polish, Latvian, Slovenian, Icelandic and Finnish. Her English translations of contemporary Polish poetry have featured in various anthologies, journals, and on the London Underground. Nothing More (Arc, 2013) is her selection from Krystyna Miłobędzka; Salt Monody (Zephyr Press, 2006) presents Marzanna Kielar. She has co-edited Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird: Poetry from Poland (Zephyr Press, 2004) and guest-edited Polish issues of Poetry Wales and Modern Poetry in Translation. As a Fulbright scholar, she has examined the archives of Elizabeth Bishop (Cognitive Poetic Readings in Elizabeth Bishop: Portrait of a Mind Thinking, 2010). She is a contributing editor at Poetry Wales, where she regularly reviews translated books. She teaches poetry-in-translation courses for the Poetry School in London. She works at the Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use, University of Copenhagen. (Photo: Peter Leese) Krystyna Miłobędzka (b. 1932) is a Polish poet, and a scholar and author of children’s plays. She has published twelve collections of poetry.
The Poetry Society The Poetry Society was founded in 1909 to promote a “more general recognition and appreciation of poetry”. Since then, it has grown into one of Britain’s most dynamic arts organisations, representing British poetry both nationally and internationally. With innovative education and commissioning programmes and a packed calendar of performances, readings and competitions, the Poetry Society champions poetry for all ages. It publishes the magazine The Poetry Review, runs the National Poetry Competition, the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award and the youth performance poetry championship SLAMbassadors UK. www.poetrysociety.org.uk
The British Council The British Council is the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations. We work in more than 100 countries to create international opportunities for the people of the United Kingdom and other countries, and build trust between them worldwide, connecting millions of people with the UK through programmes and services in English language, the Arts, Education and Society.
In our arts work we engage with writers, publishers, producers, translators and other sector professionals across literature, publishing and education. We collaborate with our offices overseas to broker relationships with international writers and literature organisations. Our partners and platforms include literature houses and festivals, book fairs, conferences, literature development agencies, schools and universities. Together we develop innovative, high quality, long-term programmes and collaborations that provide opportunities for cultural exchange with the UK and offer creative artists, participants and audiences around the world life-changing and life-enhancing experiences.
For further information The Poetry Society Page 4 of 4 Telephone Sophie Baker 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX on 020 7420 9880 or email Tel: 020 7420 9880 Fax: 020 7240 4818 [email protected] www.poetrysociety.org.uk