Poetry News

Pierre Joris Chooses Jen Hofer for 2012 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award

Originally Published: June 06, 2012

Jen Hofer has won the 2012 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, chosen by Pierre Joris, for translating Negro Marfil/Ivory Black by Myriam Moscona (Les Figues 2011). Joris says of his choice:

Myriam Moscona's book Negro Marfil is a superbly orchestrated rhizomatic array of poems or, to quote the book, "an echo of shares." This process of writing through the echoic first set up by the title's ivory/black dynamic leads to a quest for new ordering principles while proposing a breath-taking & -giving investigation of sounds, colors, rhythms and forms. Arising from a first "translation" into words of the author's india-ink images & collages, the book has now been impeccably translated into English as Ivory Black by Jen Hofer, who also provides an excellent essay on the book & the translation.

Congratulations to Jen and Myriam! You can watch Jen read from her translation of Negro Marfil/Ivory Black, recorded at the third-annual Les Figues Garden Party in Los Angeles in 2011, below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-3_YDycLjk