Popescu Prize for Poetry in Translation

The UK Poetry Society has announced their shortlist for the 2011 Popescu Prize for Poetry Translation, six titles decided on by judges Sasha Dugdale and Jane Draycott. An interesting mix of less familiar languages - Romanian, Swedish, Turkish and two titles translated from Dutch!


The Popescu Prize is awarded by the Poetry Society in collaboration with the Ratiu Foundation every two years for the best volume of poetry translated into English from a European language.

Popescu Prize for Poetry in Translation

The longlist for the 2011 Corneliu M Popescu Prize for poetry translated from a European language into English has just been announced. This prize, administered by the UK Poetry Society and sponsored by the Ratiu Foundation, is awarded every two years and is the only UK translation prize devoted solely to poetry.

The longlist is always mouth-watering! Translations from Spanish top the list with 13 titles, followed by French and Italian with nine. Romanian comes in fourth place with six submissions, followed by German, Latin and Turkish with four.

There is then a smattering of European languages with one or two submissions, including major languages such as Russian and non-national languages such as Galician.

The longlist can be seen here. The judges are Jane Draycott and Sasha Dugdale. The shortlist will be announced later in the year.

Popescu Prize winner announced

The winner of this year’s Popescu Prize for Poetry Translation is Randall Couch for his translation of Madwomen by Gabriela Mistral, published by University of Chicago Press.

The prize is administered by the UK’s Poetry Society. On their website they call it a “prize for poetry translation” and, further down, a “prize for European poetry translation” featuring “poetry translated from another European language into English”. This is, we are told, “a wonderful opportunity to travel through Europe’s amazing landscapes and cultures”. The longlist invites us to “explore the poetry of Europe” and gives a list of “countries represented”, which is actually a list of languages. Alan Brownjohn, in a history of the prize, describes this as “a European Translation Prize for a book that rendered the work of a European poet into English”.

The Poetry Society seems to be guilty of mixing the concepts of language and statehood. Is English a European language? Is Raymond Carver, because he wrote in English, a European poet? The only American poet we “English” are in the habit of claiming as our own is a certain T. S. Eliot.

Gabriela Mistral also spent time in Europe, and boasted Basque heritage, but to my knowledge this doesn’t make her a European poet. Certainly the Chileans might disagree with such an appellation.

If the Poetry Society is going to call this a prize for European poetry in translation, it needs to tidy up its website and remove the equation language:country. The alternative would be to open the prize up to include all poetry a translator and publisher agree is worth translating.

European Poetry Translation Prize shortlist announced

The shortlist for the 2009 Popescu Prize has been announced! The Popescu Prize is awarded every two years for the best volume of European poetry translated into English.

Eight titles have made it on to this year's shortlist out of 86 submissions. These include translations of poetry from Spanish, French, Turkish, Irish, Italian and Greek!

See the shortlist here. This year's judges are Stephen Romer and Elaine Feinstein. The winner will be announced in November.

Popescu Prize 2009 Submissions

The Popescu Prize is awarded every two years for the best volume of European poetry translated into English. It is administered by the UK’s Poetry Society and sponsored by the Ratiu Family Foundation, established by former Romanian politician Ion Ratiu to promote Romanian culture abroad. It is named after Corneliu Popescu, a young translator from Romanian into English who was killed in an earthquake in March 1977.

86 titles of poetry have been submitted for this year’s prize from all around Europe, from Austria to Wales. Top of the list for translated poetry are France, Italy, Romania, Russia and Spain, but there’s also poetry translated from Basque and Galician (two of the four co-official languages of Spain), from Estonia, Ireland, Luxembourg and Turkey. A rich and enticing list!

Most of the time we complain about how little literature is translated and published in English, but seeing a list of 86 titles of translated poetry published in the last two years makes one feel like celebrating for once what does get published.

This year’s prize is judged by Elaine Feinstein and Stephen Romer and the shortlist will be announced in September.