On behalf of Green Linden Press, I congratulate Cole Swensen, recipient of the Stephen Mitchell Prize for her translation of Pascalle Monnier’s Touché. Cole has been awarded $1000, and the book will be published in the fall of 2025.
Self-sardonic and often tongue-in-cheek, Touché, which is composed entirely of aspirations, captures something both crucial and insightful about quotidian struggle and the human spirit—to wit, its refusal to give in, even when wracked by regret, grief, and a tendency to brood. It is a portrait of a person saving herself through wry humor and complex literary allusion. In addition to its darkly uplifting attitude, Touché approaches the personal in a refreshingly impersonal way and models the art of not taking oneself too seriously.
I also congratulate Margaree Little, whose manuscript At the Edge: Selected Political Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva will also be published as an Editor’s Selection in the fall of 2025.
Marina Tsvetaeva’s political poems, a crucial part of her sensibility and life’s work, have largely been neglected in English-language translation. Emphasized instead are poems she wrote about her tumultuous personal and romantic relationships, an emphasis that suggests a gendered reading of the poet as an extreme personality, rather than a poet responding to the extremity of her time. In fact, Tsvetaeva was deeply attuned to the political circumstances in which she lived, and she wrote extensively and incisively about them. To erase this part of the poet and her work domesticates and exotifies her and ignores her reality. At the Edge seeks to correct this misreading of Tsvetaeva’s work by bringing together a selection of her political poems—many of them never before translated into English—at a moment in our own culture when they are acutely relevant.
Their 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.”
Pascalle Monnier is the author of several books of ambiguous genre—poetic in their sound and imagery, they are, by turns, aphoristic, essayistic, and generally hybrid in form. A former fellow of the Villa Medicis in Rome, she frequently collaborates with visual artists and musicians. She is published by P.O.L, the leading publisher of experimental literature in France.
Cole Swensen has translated more than 25 books of poetry and literary prose from French and has won the PEN USA Award in Translation and, in 2024, the ALTA National Translation Award. Also a poet, her books have won the Iowa Poetry Prize and the S.F. State Poetry Center Book Award and have been finalists for the National Book Award, the L.A. Times Book Award, and the Griffin Prize.
Marina Tsvetaeva was one of the foremost Russian poets of the twentieth century. Born in 1892 to a family of wealth, she lived most of her life in poverty and exile, following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow Famine. Tsvetaeva left the Soviet Union in 1922, living in Berlin and what was then Czechoslovakia before moving to Paris in 1925. In 1939 she returned to the Soviet Union, where she died in 1941. Despite isolation, political disaster, and personal tragedy, Tsvetaeva wrote extensively throughout her lifetime, including short lyrics, long narrative poems, plays in verse, and literary criticism.
Margaree Little’s translations from the Russian of Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam have appeared in American Poetry Review, Asymptote, InTranslation (The Brooklyn Rail), and The Michigan Quarterly Review. Her first poetry collection, Rest (Four Way Books, 2018), won the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Audre Lorde Award. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Kenyon Review, Bread Loaf, the Camargo Foundation, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts, among others.
I would like to acknowledge several translators whose work captivated our attention; first, this year’s finalist:
Monika Cassel for her brilliant translation of Wilderness by Daniela Danz
And I honorably mention…
Cyrus Cassells for his translation of The Man with the Oar on His Shoulder: Poems of Francesc Parcerisas
Wim Coleman for his translation of Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Cyrus and Paula Console-Soican for their translation of The Rope in Bloom by Radu Vancu
Yana Kane for her translation of my fish will stay alive by Dmitry Blizniuk
Jeannine Marie Pitas for her translation of La flor de lis by Marosa di Giorgio
Jonathan Simkins for his translation of Feral Cathedral: Selected Poetry of César Dávila Andrade
Wally Swist for his translation of Wild Rose Bush: The Life of Mary and Other Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke