The National Poetry Series is pleased to announce that Lawrence Venuti has been awarded the 2008 Robert Fagles Translation Prize. Mr. Venuti’s project, Edward Hopper, is a translation of Catalan poet Ernest Farrés, and will be published in 2009 by Graywolf Press. Acclaimed poet Richard Howard served as judge for this year’s award.

 

 

Currently professor of English at Temple University, Lawrence Venuti is a prolific translator from Italian, French, and Catalan. His translations include Restless Nights: Selected Stories of Dino Buzzati (1983), I.U. Tarchetti’s Fantastic Tales (1992), Juan Rodolfo Wilcock’s collection of real and imaginary biographies, The Temple of Iconoclasts (2000), Antonia Pozzi’s Breath: Poems and Letters (2002), the anthology Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2003), and Massimo Carlotto’s crime novel The Goodbye Kiss (2006). He is also the author of The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (2nd ed., 2008) and the editor of The Translation Studies Reader (2nd ed., 2004). His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from such agencies as PEN American Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1999, he held a Fulbright Senior Lectureship in translation studies at the Universitat de Vic in Spain. In 2007, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Catalan poet Ernest Farrés, born in Igualada in 1967, lives in Barcelona. An editor for the cultural supplement of La Vanguardia, he has written three volumes of poems: Clavar-ne una al mall i l’altra a l’enclusa (1996), Mosquits (1998) and Edward Hopper (2006), which won the Englantina d’Or of the Jocs Florals of Barcelona. He also edited the anthology, 21 poetes del XXI (2001). In Spain Edward Hopper has been adapted to the stage in both Catalan and Spanish. English versions of Farrés’s poems have recently appeared in Calque, The Nation, PN Review, Two Lines, Words without Borders, World Literature Today, and Zoland Poetry.

The National Poetry Series established the Robert Fagles Translation Prize in 2007. This award will be given every other year to a translator who has shown exceptional skill in the translation of contemporary international poetry into English.

Before his death earlier this year, Mr. Fagles told National Poetry Series Director, Daniel Halpern, “When you honor the act of translation, you stand to make the act of reading what it is: an enterprise of interaction among different times and different regions of the world itself.”

The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of poetry books annually through participating publishers. Publication is funded by the Lannan Foundation; Stephen Graham; Joyce & Seward Johnson Foundation; Glenn and Renee Schaeffer, Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation; and, Charles B. Wright III.

For more information, please contact The Coordinator, The National Poetry Series,
57 Mountain Avenue, Princeton, NJ 08540
Phone: 609.430.0999 Fax: 609.430.9933

If you would like to place an advance order for Edward Hopper, please call Graywolf Press at 651-641-0077.