Stephen Mitchell Prize for Poetry in Translation — Winner Announced!

It has been a pleasure spending time with the manuscripts submitted for the inaugural Stephen Mitchell Prize for Poetry in Translation. A heartfelt thank you to all who entrusted us with their work and for their dedication to the arts of poetry and translation.

We are excited to announce that Philip Metres is the winner of the inaugural Stephen Mitchell Prize for his translation of Ochre and Rust: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky. Philip was awarded $1000, and the book will be published in the fall of 2023.

We are also delighted to be publishing Cole Swensen's translation of Pierre Alferi's And the Street, an Editor's Selection in the Green Linden Poetry in Translation Series.

Congratulations to Philip and Cole! We look forward to working with them and the poets to bring these wonderful books into the world! Their translation work embodies Stephen Mitchell's maxim that in translating "there's a deeper faithfulness than simple accuracy. There's a place where, as in marriage, faithfulness and freedom are the same things." Read more about the translators and poets below.

There were many wonderful manuscripts submitted, which made for pleasurable reading and difficult decisions. I would like to honorably mention several translators and poets whose work captivated our attention:

· Rachael Daum's translation of A Regata of Paper Boats by Marko Tomaš

· Jennifer R. Kellogg's translation of Book of Exercises II by George Seferis

· Margaree Little's translation of The Voronezh Notebooks by Osip Mandelstam

· Siavash Saadlou's translation of ...And the Poet is a War Correspondent: Selected Poetry of Mohammad-Ali Sepanlou

· Roger Sedarat's translation of Caught in His Presence: Selected Poems of Hafez

***

Sergey Gandlevsky is one of the most celebrated contemporary Russian poets. Born in 1952, Gandlevsky opted out of the Soviet system, working odd jobs and sharing poetry with a small coterie of friends in the 1970s and 1980s. His work did not appear in Russian literary journals until the late 1980s, during glasnost and perestroika. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Gandlevsky’s poetry and prose have received nearly every major Russian literary prize: the Little Booker Prize (1996), the Anti-Booker Prize (1996), the Moscow Score prize (2009), and the Poet Prize (2010). A Russian critics’ poll in the 2000s named him the country’s most important living poet. His writing—poetry, fiction, and essays—has been translated into numerous languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Georgian, Hungarian, Finnish, Polish, Lithuanian, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Chinese, and Japanese. In English, Gandlevsky’s poetry also appears in A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (Zephyr Press, 2003). Gandlevsky’s two novels also appear in English translation by Suzanne Fusso: Trepanation of the Skull (Northern Illinois University Press, 2014) and Illegible (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019). Since 1993, Gandlevsky has worked at the journal Foreign Literature. A lifelong Muscovite, Gandlevsky has relocated to the Republic of Georgia since the war in Ukraine began.

photo: Heidi Rolf

Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018), Sand Opera (2015), and four volumes of poetry in translation; the most recent, I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (2015), won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant and was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Award, the Read Russia Prize, and was longlisted for the National Translation Award. His work has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Watson Foundation. He has been awarded the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and the Hunt Prize. Metres has been called “one of the essential poets of our time,” whose work is “beautiful, powerful, and magnetically original." He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Pierre Alferi is a French poet, novelist, essayist, and one of the pioneers of the cinépoème, a fusion of short film and poetry. He has published some fifteen collections of poetry and four novels and has collaborated with various visual artists and musicians on a variety of hybrid projects and performances. A translator himself, he has translated works by John Donne, Giorgio Agamben, Meyer Schapiro, and others. He has been awarded residencies at the Fondation Royaumont and the French Academy in Rome. He currently teaches at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Cole Swensen is an American poet and translator. The author of twenty volumes of poetry and one volume of critical essays, she is also the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid. Her poetry has been selected for the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award. She has translated over twenty volumes of French poetry and fiction and regularly translates articles and catalogue essays in the field of visual arts. She won the PEN USA Award in Translation for her translation of Jean Frémon’s novel Island of the Dead. She teaches in the Literary Arts Department at Brown University.