Goodman’s Wang Xiaoni wins Lucien Styke Prize

At their annual convention in Tucson, ALTA announced that Eleanor Goodman has won the 2015 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize for Something Crosses My Mind, by Wang Xiaoni 王小妮 (Zephyr / Chinese University Press, 2014).

“‘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,” write the judges of the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, Lucas Klein, Janet Poole, and Stephen Snyder.

Click on the image of Goodman reading for further details.

Lucien Stryk Award Shortlist

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.