As a first-timer on the judges’ panel I was delighted to be taken on a roller-coaster through poetry from Japan to Mexico, Chile to the Caspian Sea, and metres from the classical elegiac to the most avant-garde free verse forms. In the fascinating commentaries, I learned about Chinese rhyme conventions, Polish portmanteau words, and Arabic sibilance. I was reminded of the intense melancholy of Rilke and the pungency of Jacques Prévert. I discovered, with astonishment, that Leo Tolstoy was beaten by Sully Prudhomme to the Nobel Prize for Literature.
A huge fan of the Aesopic tradition of animal fables, I loved several of the versions of La Fontaine found in the youngest age group, although the prize-winning ‘The Cricket and the Ant’ stood out for its excellent rhyming and intuitive sense of the sardonic and taut French original. In the adult category, I was in no doubt that my favourite translation, on every criterion, was ‘The Damned’ from Dante’s Inferno, Canto 5; what most impressed me was the interplay between the brilliantly chosen restraint of the six-line stanza and the accelerating emotional and physical contact between the couple suffering punishment for adultery. The week after the judges met, I visited Dante’s tomb in Ravenna, and found that the opening stanza of the prize-winning translation had stuck in my memory.
Despite the prize going this year to a translator of one of the world’s acknowledged greats, I would still encourage entrants to consider less well known works, and to use the required commentary in order to explain their significance to the judges. There were almost too many versions of works by some poets, especially in French (all that Baudelaire!), and it would be wonderful to see more attempts to translate from, for example, African-language poets or modern Greek: there was not a Cavafy in sight.
When it came to translations from Latin and Greek in the adult category, I was just a little disappointed. The suave, upwardly mobile Horace was an unlikely choice for someone wanting to write in the idiom of Eminem. The lyrics of Sappho and the theatre verse of Aeschylus are two of the most difficult types of poetry in literary history; a rather different challenge is posed by the often indigestible hexameters of Hesiod’s Works and Days and the mysterious archaic Battle of the Frogs and Mice. The less recherché authors Homer and Ovid, on the other hand, produced some fine work in the 15–18 age group. Teenagers hear the playfulness of Ovid loud and clear, although are less sensitive to his sorrowful undercurrents and the lapidary concision of his Amores. It was sensitivity to both tone and metre that won the day for the translation of the closing lines of The Iliad. Here the sombre content – the funeral of Hector – was beautifully conveyed in the ineluctable roll of the dactylic hexameters, one of the most difficult metres for young translators. The decision to separate the lines into groups successfully conveyed the sequential stages of the funeral. The selection of this passage could scarcely have been more ambitious, and yet the power and pathos of the original rings through the translation authentically.
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