Rosmarie Waldrop Wins Translation Award

From the judge’s (Marylin Hacker)citation: “The first test of a book of poems in translation is, of course, how convincingly the poems exist as poems in the receptor language. Waldrop has succeeded in re-creating, and thus creating, a poetry in English that is at once exuberantly postmodern and in lively dialogue with such unabashedly lyrical, often satirical English language innovators as Hopkins, e. e. cummings, Dylan Thomas, Ashbery (imagine mentioning them in the same sentence!), and younger poets like Karen Volkman and Dan Beachy-Quick. Waldrop’s rendering and concise explanation of Stolterfoht’s wide-ranging cultural and literary references is discreet and magisterial. There is wit, cultural and political satire; there are barbed non sequiturs, but all playing against a metrical/lexical virtuosity that obviously attracted and delighted the poet-translator in the original, which she has transposed with dazzling sleight-of-mind into English.”

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