This year, remarkably, there was a large degree of immediate unanimity among the judges. In the 14-and-under category we were delighted to see a larger entry than ever before and arrived quickly at our winner: Johanna Reimann-Dubbers’ translation from French of ‘The Cricket and the Ant’ by La Fontaine. It is tricky to catch the playful tone of these fables, and in keeping the lines taut and the rhyme scheme buoyant, without being over obtrusive, Johanna arrived at some wonderfully poised solutions. Her concluding couplet, ‘I sang whenever I had the chance.’ / ‘You sang did you? That’s nice. Now dance.’ was one of my favorites in the competition as a whole. I was particularly struck by Robert Longman’s beautifully simple rendering from Spanish of ‘If My Voice Dies on Land’, and his modest commentary gave a good insight into the real work, as well as the enjoyment, involved in the process of translation.
In the 18-and-under category the judges wrestled with a more diverse long list of contenders from classical and modern languages. As in the 14-and-under category many had outstanding qualities but failed to sustain the tone across the poem as a whole or lost grammatical confidence here and there. In Naomi Ackerman’s translation from Ancient Greek of an extract from The Iliad, we found a worthy winner; but I was very taken by the discipline of Yick Kay Fung’s translation from Classical Chinese of ‘Phoenix Hairpin’ by Lu You and Jennifer Cearns’ rich translation of the German Expressionist classic ‘Dead in the Water’ by Georg Heym. Among the commended entries let me single out Saskia Volhard Dearman’s translation from Spanish of ‘Ode to Coastal Flowers’ by Pablo Neruda. Neruda is such a difficult poet to translate; the mixture of rhetorical pathos and simplicity sits uneasily in English but this version is a spirited attempt and has some beautiful lines. The lightning as ‘a citric spark’ will stay with me for a long time.
In the Open category all the judges were immediately impressed by Paul Batchelor’s translation from Italian of Dante’s ‘The Damned’. Last year in my report I wrote about the importance of finding some way to account for the metre and rhyme scheme of the original in a translation. However, English simply does not rhyme with the same facility and unobtrusiveness as many other languages, so it is not often that a translation can work with a one-to-one correspondence in this regard. Half rhymes are often a good solution (a glance at good contemporary poetry in English is instructive here) and blank verse is a possible option, though the muscularity and musicality of good blank verse is much harder to achieve than many entrants seemed to think. Paul Batchelor’s was a persuasive solution to this problem. In exchanging Dante’s terza rima for a form borrowed from George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ and often used in English by Derek Mahon he showed sympathy with the original and a good sense of what English can do well. I was also pleased to see two Rilke translations make it through to the final deliberations. Rilke is another poet who can too easily sound overblown or shrill in English on account of his intricate rhymes; and Michael Swan and Timothy Taylor demonstrated very well the different routes one can take. Once again I was delighted to discover new poets: the Belgian poet Herman de Coninck in Stefanie Van de Peer’s subtle translation from Flemish and the young Portuguese poet Daniel Jonas in Ana Hudson’s translations, though in the final whittling down I was unable to persuade my fellow judges. A voice to watch, however. There were also versions of old favorites including A. C. Clarke’s brilliantly audacious rendering of ‘The Double Room’ by Baudelaire into Scots (which missed out on a prize by a whisker) and John Turner’s moody version of Prudhomme’s ‘Sonnet for Autumn’, which demonstrated the richness and economy that can make English truly sing: ‘What the sap has willed, the sap achieves’.
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