[Chris Childers]

If you take a quick glance at the date in one or the other corner of your computer screen, you'll notice that August is almost here, and with it our 2009 Translation Bakeoff, featuring Rachel Hadas as the Main Act and yours truly as Acting Ringmaster. Last year's event with Charles Martin was a smashing success and I'm counting on your interest and participation to make this year's even better.

A Few Words on the Selection Process

While I did not receive so many submissions as one typically receives at for a Sonnet Bakeoff (the bar for translation being rather higher), it should be noted from the beginning that overall the standard of submissions was consistently excellent, and that there were 6-8 poems which on any given day or depending on my mood could have made it into the twelve in place of any number of those which are actually here. Faced with the task of winnowing such a pile of poems, so many of them accurate, accomplished, and derived from worthy originals, I had to fall back on some pretty subjective criteria, to wit: diversity of languages and forms represented; the (in my view) interest/importance/obscurity of the original author; and my personal fondness for the poem as a poem, regardless of its merit as a translation. Among other implications, this means that sonnets, because I received so many, had a harder time than poems in other forms; and that several utterly accomplished translations of originals which, for whatever reason, happened not to “twang my twanger,” as Kay Ryan would say, have not been included. Let this stand, then, as my apology to any of you who believe yourselves to have been unjustly excluded: you may be right. On the other hand, I hope that the poems that are here provide an engagingly varied reading experience, and expose Sphereans to the work of poets who run the gamut from ancient to modern, from widely celebrated to (to me anyway) deeply obscure.

Stay tuned for another post forthcoming introducing Rachel Hadas and offering a few samples of her work. (I just have to type out the poems.)

Chris