Tag Archives: Lucien Stryk

ALTA’s Something Crosses My Mind Blurb for the Stryk Shortlist

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The ALTA blog is featuring the shortlisted titles for the Lucien Stryk Prize, and they’ve uploaded the blurb for Eleanor Goodman’s translation of Something Crosses My Mind 有什么在我心里一过 by Wang Xiaoni 王小妮.

“I rush down the stairs,/ pull open the door,/ dash about in the spring sunlight…” So begins this exquisite collection of translations by Eleanor Goodman of poems composed over the past several decades by Wang Xiaoni. In what follows we are taken out into the streets and on cross-country trains, into villages, cities and markets; we peep out through the windows of the poet’s home and sense the nostalgia invoked by a simple potato. Here is a poetry of the everyday, written in delicate yet deceptively simple language, and translated beautifully into its like in this first collection of Wang’s work to appear in English. Something Crosses My Mind offers up the refreshing voice of a poet forging her own path, neither shunning the political nor dwelling in the lyrical but gently and resolutely exploring her world in her writing.

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ALTA’s Salsa Blurb for the Stryk Shortlist

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The ALTA blog is featuring the shortlisted titles for the Lucien Stryk Prize, and they’ve uploaded the blurb for Steve Bradbury’s translation of Salsa by Hsia Yü 夏宇:

The poems in Salsa feature titles like “Fusion Kitsch,” “The Ripest Rankest Juiciest Summer Ever,” and “She sleeps as deep as a pair of sabot,” and allude to Che Guevara and Jack Kerouac or narrate flash histories of post-impressionist painting. A best-selling 1999 volume by Taiwanese avant-garde poet and pop songwriter Hsia Yü (the edition in Chinese is now in its tenth printing), Salsa is finally available in English by the poet’s longtime translator Steve Bradbury. With the translator’s afterword and notes, the poems of Salsa record a networked island’s end-of-millennium dance.

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Lucien Stryk Award Shortlist

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Stryk CollageALTA has posted the shortlist for this year’s Lucien Stryk Award, which honors book-length translations into English of poetry or Zen Buddhist texts from Hindi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean into English.

The shortlisted titles are:

  • Cat Town by Sakutarō Hagiwara 萩原朔太郎, translated from the Japanese by Hiroaki Sato (New York Review Books)
  • Kalidasa for the 21st Century Reader, translated from the Sanskrit by Mani Rao (Aleph Book Company)
  • Salsa by Hsia Yu 夏宇, translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury (Zephyr Press)
  • Something Crosses My Mind by Wang Xiaoni 王小妮, translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman (Zephyr Press)
  • Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream by Kim Hyesoon, translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi (Action Books)

This year’s judges were Janet Poole, Stephen Snyder, and Lucas Klein.

Chaves’s Wang Hongdu wins Stryk Prize

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every-rock chavesAt last week’s ALTA conference, Jonathan Chaves was announced as the winner of this year’s Lucien Stryk Prize for his translation of Wang Hongdu 汪洪度, Every Rock a Universe—The Yellow Mountains and Chinese Travel Writing (Floating World Editions, 2013). The judges were Jonathan Stalling, Janet Kim Ha, and Rainer Schulte.

Here’s a description of the work:

The Yellow Mountains (Huangshan) of China’s Anhui Province have been famous for centuries as a place of scenic beauty and inspiration, and remain a hugely popular tourist destination today. A “golden age” of Yellow Mountains travel came in the seventeenth century, when they became a refuge for loyalists protesting the new Qing Dynasty, among them poet and artist Wang Hongdu (1646–1721/1722), who dedicated himself to traveling to each and every peak and site and recording his impressions. Unfortunately, his resulting masterpiece of Chinese travel writing was not printed until 1775 and has since remained obscure and available only in Chinese.

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Lucien Stryk Prize Acceptance Speech

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Someone was impressed enough by my acceptance speech for the Lucien Stryk prize to suggest I share it here. So I am!

It’s a wonderful honor, both for me and for Xi Chuan, to be awarded the Lucien Stryk Prize for Asian poetry in translation. Any prize awarded by ALTA would be an honor, because ALTA is one of my favorite organizations to belong to—I’ve often said that literary translators are by definition interesting people, because by definition we’re interested in more than one thing. ALTA as a group and many of its members as individuals were very helpful in offering their time, patience, insight, and scolds as I worked on translating Xi Chuan, and much of my success as a translator is owed to the wisdom I gained from them.

The Lucien Stryk prize, in particular, is also a special one for me and for Xi Chuan, because of its dedication to honoring Asian poetry in translation, and the tradition of Asian poetry in translation—in addition to Asian poetry in general—was very much in my mind when translating the pieces in Notes on the Mosquito, as it was in Xi Chuan’s over the three decades in which he wrote the poems. As an undergrad English major, Xi Chuan wrote his senior thesis on Ezra Pound’s translations from Chinese, he recently published a translation of Gary Snyder’s poetry, and in many ways Xi Chuan was reintroduced to the literary history of his own culture from the attention and presentation he encountered in Pound, Snyder, and others, including Jorge Luis Borges.

I’m also especially honored to be part of the group of previous Lucien Stryk honorees—a group that already features some of my favorite translators! I find inclusion in such a group both humbling and inspiring, as the best Asian poetry in translation has always been.

I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to New Directions, to my editor Jeffrey Yang, and most of all to Xi Chuan, whose cooperation and friendship were essential to the success of this book. Until three years ago there were no single-author collections of poetry by Chinese-language poets currently living in mainland China published in the US, but now we are living in what appears to be a golden age of contemporary Chinese poetry in English translation, to match what may be a golden age of poetry in China itself. Thanks to New Directions for contributing to that golden age, and thanks to Xi Chuan for helping make that golden age in the first place!

Thank you very, very much!

Notes on the Mosquito awarded Lucien Stryk Prize

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The 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize went to Lucas Klein for his translation of the Chinese poetry collection Notes on the Mosquito by Xi Chuan. The $5,000 prize, which was established by an anonymous donor, recognizes the best book-length translation into English of Asian poetry or of source texts from Zen Buddhism.

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“Klein’s volume is the most deserving of the prize by virtue of the quality of many of the translations and the caliber of the poems they represent,” said the Stryk Prize committee. “Judging from this collection, Xi Chuan is clearly a major poetic voice whose formal versatility and relentlessly unswerving insights into the often grim but fascinating here and now of China’s comédie humaine represent a significant contribution to Chinese letters and are well-deserving of a Western readership.”

Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize

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The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) invites publishers and translators to nominate book-length translations into English of Asian poetry or source texts from (but not commentaries on) Zen Buddhism. Languages eligible are Hindi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The winning translator will be announced in the fall of each year and receive a $5,000 award.

The Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, which was inaugurated in 2009, recognizes the importance of Asian translation for international literature and promotes the translation of Asian works into English. Stryk is an internationally acclaimed translator of Japanese and Chinese Zen poetry, renowned Zen poet himself, and former professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

To be eligible for the prize in a given year, works must have been published in the previous calendar year. Submissions will be judged according to the literary significance of the original and the success of the translation in recreating the literary artistry of the original. While the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize is primarily intended to recognize the translation of contemporary works, retranslations or first-time translations of important older works will also be seriously considered. Publishers or translators should send with each entry a letter of nomination and three copies of the translated work to:

American Literary Translators Association
Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize
c/o The University of Texas at Dallas
School of Arts & Humanities JO51
800 West Campbell Road
Richardson, TX 75080-3021

The deadline for submissions is May 15 every year for works published in the previous calendar year.

For books chosen by the jury as finalists, publishers will be asked to provide the original-language text; any finalist for which no original-language text is provided will be excluded from further consideration.

To learn more about Lucien Stryk visit Poetry Poetry.

For more information, please contact Maria Suarez at maria.suarez@utdallas.edu.