TRANSLATION BAKEOFF: Call for Entries!

Carissimi Eratosphericals,

As you may know, in August the Distinguished Guest forum will be hosting a reprise of last year's wildly successful Translation Bakeoff, headlined by Charles Martin. This year, Alex Pepple has done us the great service of procuring a similarly accomplished guest to comment on your poems, namely, Rachel Hadas (see biography below), who, if I'm not mistaken, is currently engaged with Edmund Keeley and others in editing (and translating for) a massive edition of Greek poetry from antiquity to the present.

Though dates and deadlines are not yet set in stone, I am anticipating an August 1 kickoff date, which will make the deadline Wednesday, July 15 at midnight. That gives you a little bit over a month to get me your submissions; if there are any changes in those deadlines I will keep all boards informed.

Please send One (1) translation only, WITH original text AND prose crib, to thechilders AT gmail DOT com. I will choose the twelve I think are the best and forward those on to Rachel for comment and posting. If you do not provide the original and the prose, your entry will not be considered. This event will be limited to translation of poetry, of any style or persuasion; I will be picking finalists based on the quality of the poem in English and, so far as I can determine it, its faithfulness to the original. Please address any questions to me either via email, pm, or on this thread, and I will do my best to answer them. As my students say, Get Psyched!

Chris

Bio of Rachel Hadas from Poets.org [1]:

Rachel Hadas is the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and translations, most recently The River of Forgetfulness (Wordtech Communications, 2006); Laws (2004); Indelible (2001); Halfway Down the Hall: New & Selected Poems (1998), which was a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Empty Bed (1995); The Double Legacy (1995); Mirrors of Astonishment (1992); and Living in Time (1990).

Hadas studied classics at Harvard University, poetry at Johns Hopkins, and comparative literature at Princeton University. She spent four years in Greece between college and graduate school, an experience that surfaces variously in much of her work.

Since 1981 she has taught in the English Department of the Newark, New Jersey campus of Rutgers University, and has taught occasional courses in literature and writing at both Columbia and Princeton. She has also served as faculty of the Sewanee Writers'Conference.

About Hadas's work, the poet Grace Schulman has written, "The poems are urgent, contemplative, and finely wrought. In them, antiquity illuminates the present as Rachel Hadas finds in ordinary human acts 'what never was and what is eternal.'"

Among her honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

She lives in New York City.