First prize went to Nawal Nasrallah for her informative and elegant translation of the fourteenth-century Egyptian cookbook “Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table,” author unknown.
Yesterday, PEN America announced the longlists for its 2019 literary awards.
Happily, there is no entry fee.
Orison Books is looking for full-length poetry manuscripts — a minimum of 60 pages — in English translation through the end of this month.
Moger described the distinctive approach they took to translating Ibn Arabi, attempting to treat each poem as an individual text without embedding it in a scholarly apparatus.
“Experienced translators know that for literary translations to be possible they must decide what they are prepared to leave out as much as what they have to retain…literary translation is thus more akin to trauma than it is to memory.”
According to Moger, the two poet-translators “will be presenting their correspondence-in-translations of poems from Ibn Arabi’s Tarjuman Al Ashwaq, as well as projects of their own, to discuss the process of translation in terms of communion and distance, frustration and aspiration, constraint and freedom, and of voices lost and made.”
This year’s final judge is Ilya Kaminsky, who, according to Gulf Coast, “has generously offered to read more than 50 finalists and respond to each of them with a sentence or two.”
On his website, Larsen describes the book as “A thesaurus. A word list. A bestiary with only one beast.”
