Robert Fagles Translation Prize Winner Announced

Yesterday they announced the winner of the National Poetry Series’s Robert Fagles Translation Prize, which carries with it publication by Graywolf Press. This year’s winner is The Rest of the Voyage by Bernard Noël, translated by Eléna Rivera. Here’s the press release:

The National Poetry Series is pleased to announce that Eléna Rivera has been awarded the 2010 Robert Fagles Translation Prize. Ms. Rivera’s project, The Rest of the Voyage, is a translation of the French poet Bernard Noёl, and will be published in November 2011 by Graywolf Press. Acclaimed poet and translator Susan Stewart served as judge for this year’s award, responding with this comment: “Eléna Rivera’s translation of Bernard Noёl’s Le Reste du voyage/The Rest of the Voyage is at once original and remarkably faithful… The succession of poems has a fluency that becomes as mesmerizing as any mode of transport, for Rivera is remarkably adept at varying the lines, landing with emphasis or muting the effect as she follows the speed and light of Noёl’s themes.”

Eléna Rivera is a recipient of a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation, a Fundacíon Valparaíso 2009 residency in Mojácar, Spain, and was awarded the 2007 Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico. Her translation of Isabelle Baladine Howald’s Secret of Breath was published by Burning Deck Press 2009. Other translations also can be found in the Chicago Review, Tuesday: An Art Project, Circumference: Poetry in Translation, and Tarpaulin Sky. She is a poet and the author of _Mistakes, Accidents and the Want of Liberty_ (Barque Press, 2006), _Suggestions at Every Turn_ (Seeing Eye Books, 2005), and most recently Remembrance of Things Plastic (LRL e-editions, 2010). She lives in New York City.

Poet, novelist, essayist, historian and art critic Bernard Noël received the Prix National de Poésie in 1992. He was given the poet laureateship as well as the Grand Prix International Guillevic-Ville de Saint-Malo for his oeuvre in 2005. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, novels and essays, among others: Les Plumes d’Éros, Œuvres I (P.O.L., 2010—the first volume of a collected works which P.O.L. is editing and publishing), L’espace du poème, interviews with D. Sampiero  (P.O.L., 2004), Les yeux dans la couleur (P.O.L., 2004), Un trajet en hiver (POL, 2004), Romans d’un regard (P.O.L, 2003), La Peau et les Mots (P.O.L, 2002), Le roman d’Adam et Eve_  (L’Atelier des Brisants, 2001), _La Face de silence (P.O.L, 2002), Le Syndrome de Gramsci (POL, 1994), La Chute des temps (Gallimard, 1993), La rumeur de l’air (Fata Morgana, 1986). In France, his poems are accessible in three pocketbook editions: La Chute des temps and Extraits du corps from Poésie/Gallimard and Le Reste du voyage : Et Autres Poèmes from Points/poésie Seuil.

The National Poetry Series established the Robert Fagles Translation Prize in 2007. This award is given every other year to a translator who has shown exceptional skill in the translation of contemporary international poetry into English. Previous winners are Marilyn Hacker for King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), and Lawrence Venuti for Edward Hopper (Graywolf Press, 2009).

Before his death in 2008, Mr. Fagles told National Poetry Series Director, Daniel Halpern, “When you honor the act of translation, you stand to make the act of reading what it is:  an enterprise of interaction among different times and different regions of the world itself.”

The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of poetry books annually through participating publishers. Publication is funded by the Lannan Foundation, Stephen Graham, Joyce & Seward Johnson Foundation, Glenn & Renee Schaeffer, Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds, and, the Edward T. Cone Foundation.

Graywolf Press is an independent, not-for-profit publisher dedicated to the creation and promotion of thoughtful and imaginative contemporary literature essential to a vital and diverse culture. For more information, please visit www.graywolfpress.org.

For more information, please contact The Coordinator, The National Poetry Series, 57 Mountain Avenue, Princeton, NJ, 08540, Phone: 609.430.0999 Fax: 609.430.9933 www.nationalpoetryseries.org