ASF Seventeenth Annual Translation Prize, The

Scandinavian Review, Winter 1996

Since 1980 the Foundation has offered an annual prize to encourage translation of Scandinavian literary works into English. The prize now carries an honorarium of $2000 to accompany the winner's engraved bronze medallion, and the scope of the competition has been expanded to include writers born within the last two centuries. The winning entry for 1996 was chosen by a "blind" judging of 15 submissions. Three experts each read all the entries without knowledge of the translators' identities.

The Translator: Roger Greenwald

The judges reached a unanimous decision to award the prize to the English rendering from the Danish of lyric poems by Pia Tafdrup (b. 1952), submitted by Roger Greenwald, a poet and translator who is Director of the Writing Centre at Innis College in the University of Toronto. Mr. Greenwald won the ASF Translation Prize in 1990 for his translation of the New Norwegian poetry of Tarjei Vesaas. In 1995 he won the Inger Sjoberg Prize for his English versions of the work of another New Norwegian poet, Paal-Helge Haugen.

In the statement explaining their decision the three judges praised Mr. Greenwald's remarkable ability "to capture the tone and every linguistic detail of contemporary Danish verse in English renderings, which can easily stand as poems in their own right but simultaneously are altogether faithful to the original."

The Author: Pia Tafdrup

Pia Tafdrup (b. 1952) is regarded as one of Denmark's leading poets of her generation. Working quite steadily and with high artistic consistency, Ms. Tafdrup has produced a body of verse that-although it sometimes has a personal frankness that might shock, and a range of images that may seem mundane or disjointed at first reading-actually belongs to a great tradition of the western European lyric.

Mr. Greenwald's prizewinning selections were taken from the eight volumes of her poetry published between 1981 and 1994.