Winner
Simon Armitage for Pearl: A New Verse Translation (Liveright/W.W. Norton & Company)
The $3,000 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation recognizes book-length translations of poetry from any language into English published during the current calendar year.
From the Judges’ Citation
Simon Armitage, in his new verse translation of Pearl, gives the contemporary reader unrivaled access to a haunting poem of love, mourning, beauty, and religious mystery. Combining elegance and erudition with graceful ease, Armitage recreates the original poem’s alliterative and intricate formal structure, illuminating why Pearl is such a foundational lyrical poem in English literature. Like all great poetry, and like the original Pearl itself, this marvelous feat of translation is a gift back to our own language and a gift toward its future.
Finalists
Pearl: A New Verse Translation by The Pearl Poet
Liveright/W. W. Norton &Company
translated from the Middle English by Simon Armitage
Amazon | Indie Bound
Abyss by Ya Hsien
Zephyr Press
translated from the Chinese by John Balcom
Amazon | Indie Bound
Preludes and Fugues by Emmanuel Moses
Oberlin College Press
translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker
Amazon | Indie Bound
In Praise of Defeat: Poems by Abdellatif Laâbi
Archipelago Books
translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Amazon | Indie Bound
Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems by Dulce Maria Loynaz
Archipelago Books
translated from the Spanish by James O’Connor
Amazon | Indie Bound
Longlist
Pearl: A New Verse Translation by The Pearl Poet
Liveright/W. W. Norton &Company
translated from the Middle English by Simon Armitage
Amazon | Indie Bound
Abyss by Ya Hsien
Zephyr Press
translated from the Chinese by John Balcom
Amazon | Indie Bound
Voronezh Notebooks by Osip Mandelstam
New York Review of Books
translated from the Russian by Andrew Davis
Amazon | Indie Bound
Building the Barricade by Anna Swir
Tavern Books
translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk
Amazon | Indie Bound
Algaravias by Waly Salomao
Ugly Duckling Presse
translated from the Portuguese by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
Amazon | Indie Bound
Preludes and Fugues by Emmanuel Moses
Oberlin College Press
translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker
Amazon | Indie Bound
Tales of Ise
Penguin Classics
translated from the Japanese by Peter MacMillan
Amazon | Indie Bound
In Praise of Defeat: Poems by Abdellatif Laâbi
Archipelago Books
translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Amazon | Indie Bound
Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems by Dulce Maria Loynaz
Archipelago Books
translated from the Spanish by James O’Connor
Amazon | Indie Bound
Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems from Orit Gidali
University of Texas Press
translated from the Hebrew by Marcela Sulak
Amazon | Indie Bound
Judges
Jennifer Grotz is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Window Left Open. Also a translator from the French and Polish, her most recent translation is Rochester Knockings, a novel by Tunisian-born writer Hubert Haddad. Her poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, New England Review, and in four volumes of the Best American Poetry anthology. Director of the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference and assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, she teaches at the University of Rochester.
Kyoo Lee, Professor of Philosophy at The City University of New York, author of Writing Entanglish: Come in Englysshing With Gertrude Stein, Zhuangzi … (2015, Belladonna Chapbook) and Reading Descartes Otherwise: Blind, Mad, Dreamy, and Bad (2012, Fordham UP), is a theorist and writer working widely in the intersecting fields of the Arts & the Humanities. A longtime member of Poetry Translation Center, London, UK, she also occasionally summer-teaches at Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, seminaring on philopoetics. Currently, she serves on the editorial boards of Derrida Today, Hypatia, and Open Humanities Press.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of The Ground and Heaven, both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is the recipient of the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, a 2013 Whiting Award, a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry. He has translated widely from the Catalan; his English-language version of Salvador Espriu’s short-story collection, Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth, was published by Dalkey Achive in 2012.
Past Winners
Guy Davenport, Edward Snow, Eamonn Grennan, Richard Zenith, James Brasfield, Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, Ian Fairley, Khaled Mattawa, Peter Cole, Pierre Joris, Wilson Baldridge, David Hinton, Rosmarie Waldrop, Marilyn Hacker, Anne Carson, Jen Hofer, Molly Weigel, Karen Emmerich and Edmund Keeley, Eliza Griswold, and Sawako Nakayasu.
Click here for additional information, including submission guidelines, for the award.
