2015 PEN Literary Award Winners Announced

The 2015 PEN Literary Awards have been announced! Congratulations go out to Saeed Jones for winning the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry ($5,000) for Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press)! The winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation is Eliza Griswold, for I Am the Beggar of the World, a book of landays--"anonymous couplets by Afghani women shared sometimes at the price of their lives," as judge Ana Božičević has put it--translated from the Pashto (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). More from Božičević on this title below; and don't forget this shortlist:

Darwish wrote that “Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.” In I Am the Beggar of the World, poet and translator Eliza Griswold and photographer Seamus Murphy collect records of many such courageous acts by Afghani girls and women. Their landays – couplets passed on anonymously by ancient tradition, now shared through covert phone calls and social media – serve as testimony, snapshots of otherwise hidden subjectivities, and politically vivid, feminist texts:

My darling, you are just like America!

You are guilty; I apologize.

Their funny, moving, acerbic critique of a society that would deny their existence – and the agency of women writers – is matched in complexity by their commentary on the US presence in Afghanistan. Rahila Muska and other women who risk and give their lives for the chance to utter two lines of poetic truth have much to teach the men whose policies and drones deprive them of educations, livelihoods, loves. They deserve our highest praise, and their translators our thanks."

Shortlist

Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream by Kim Hyesoon (Action Books), translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi
I Am the Beggar of the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), translated from the Pashto by Eliza Griswold
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Juana Inés de la Cruz (W. W. Norton & Company), translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
Breathturn into Timestead by Paul Celan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), translated from the German by Pierre Joris
Guantanamo by Frank Smith (Les Figues Press), translated from the French by Vanessa Place

See more of the winners at PEN; and a great conversation with Griswold and Heather Hewett can be found at Boston Review. An excerpt:

Hewett: Were you listening to the landays in Pashto?

Griswold: Yes, they were in Pashto, which I don’t speak. I could recognize a few words because they were repeated, and I could figure out the subject of the poem. But I would need to sit down over time to translate them, because the really good ones have several layers of meaning in them at the same time.

Hewett: Did you record them as you listened?

Griswold: No. The first time I started to record, the women took my iPhone, and they put it under a pile of pillows in the corner of the room. It wasn’t fear, though. It was an indication to me of the preciousness of what they were sharing and it was also a very clear indication that they were in control of the exchange. Everybody has a cell phone, everybody texts; that’s not a big deal. But the Internet—they don’t have access to that. The publicness of recording made them nervous.

Over the course of two trips, I had two different translators. They were more comfortable writing down transliterated Pashto. Then we would go back to the house where we were staying and over weeks and months, we would get the correct Pashto translation, translate into Pashto characters, then translate word by word from the Pashto into English, which usually created nonsense versions: something like “moon arm darling her at.” The final would end up as, “Under the moon I hear the sound of bells.”

To learn more about Griswold's Landay's project, and to see Murphy's photographs from Afghanistan, head to this portfolio here.