Announcing the Recipient of the 2024 Stephen Mitchell Translation Prize!

It has been a pleasure spending time with the manuscripts submitted for the Stephen Mitchell Translation Prize. A heartfelt thank you to all who entrusted us with their work and for their dedication to the art of translation.

We are excited to announce that Rebecca Seiferle is the recipient for The Dream of Apples: Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca. Rebecca has been awarded $1000, and the book will be published in the fall of 2024. Congratulations to Rebecca! We look forward to working with her to bring these wonderful poems into the world! Her translation work embodies Stephen Mitchell’s maxim that in translating “there’s a deeper faithfulness than simple accuracy. There’s a place where, as in marriage, faithfulness and freedom are the same things.”

Of Federico García Lorca, she writes, “There are few Spanish poets who have so captured the English speaker’s imagination, and yet we continue to read Lorca as we have read him, which is to say through the filters of our own assumptions. Similarly, previous translations have gone in pursuit of surrealism or ‘music’ or romanticism at the expense of the sharp clarity and elemental intelligence of the original. … Breathtaking in its versatility, Lorca’s poetry conveys the sense that there are many Lorcas, but elusive, a play of presence and absence. For Lorca, fluidity and evasion are essential to the truth of poetry. His deep anguish, his performative masques, his sense of difference and his identification with those also marginalized, his sense of the interpenetration of absence and presence, all begin to interconnect if viewed from a queered center. These translations seek only the original, its deep intelligence, where a phrase can convey what Lorca called duende, an elusive ‘something else’ that evades all definition, ‘a mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained’ ... the spirit of the earth.”

There were many wonderful manuscripts submitted, which made for pleasurable reading and difficult decisions. I would like to honorably mention several translators, poets, and writers whose work captivated our attention:

— Kevin Carollo’s translation of The Law of the Trough by Patrice Nganang
— Bradley Harmon’s translation of ANIMA by Birgitta Trotzig
— Adriana X. Jacob’s translation of Yakantalisa and Other Poems by Hezy Leskly
— Margaree Little’s translation of The Voronezh Notebooks by Osip Mandelstam
— Carlo Massimo’s translation of Mario Scalesi: The Damned Poet of Tunis
— Robin Myers’ translation of The Beast of Being by Susana Villalba

Annually Green Linden Press awards $1000 and publication for a book-length manuscript in any genre translated from any language into English that honors Mitchell’s linguistic acumen. All finalists are considered for publication. The contest is open June 21 through November 30.

*********

Federico García Lorca is the preeminent Spanish poet and playwright of the 20th century. From the beginning, his work was remarkably versatile, as he published in a variety of genres. His first poetry collection, Libro de poemas (1921), was preceded by Impresiones y Paisajes (1919) a work of prose, recounting his travels as a college student throughout Spain, and his first play El Maleficio de la mariposa, was produced the following year. In his lifetime, Lorca published five poetry collections, but a number of celebrated works, including Diván del Tamarit and Poeta en Nueva York were to be published posthumously and in other countries, as the works were viewed as too controversial in Francoist Spain. Published in 1928, his Gypsy Ballads made him famous in Spain and lead to international acclaim. In 1936, Lorca was killed by Fascist forces, and, following his death, his books were publicly burned in Granada and further publication banned. In the decades following, his works have been translated into many languages where they have continued to influence subsequent generations of artists in many fields. At the Prince Asturias Awards in 2011, Leonard Cohen spoke of his “deep association and confraternity with the poet Federico García Lorca” and how “he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice; that is, to locate a self, a self that that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.”

Rebecca Seiferle has published four poetry collections. Wild Tongue won the Grub Street National Poetry Prize, and Bitters won the Western States Book Award. She is a noted translator from the Spanish, having published translations of César Vallejo’s Trilce and The Black Heralds. Her translations of various poets are included in The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry and Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry. Her essay “Black Cactus Open in Reeds,” on Federico García Lorca appeared in Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer. She has been awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, an Arizona Commission on the Arts Research and Development Grant, and was Tucson Poet Laureate for two terms from 2012–16.