THE JULES CHAMETZKY PRIZE
HISTORY AND INFORMATION
The Jules Chametzky Translation Prize, sponsored by the Massachusetts Review, is awarded annually to a translation published within our pages; the prize awards $500 for a work in translation, alternating between poetry and prose. Poetry translations published during a year in which the award is given to prose will be considered along with the publications of the following year, and v.v. All translations published by MR will be considered for the Chametzky prize, provided that -- as per our general guidelines for submissions -- a copy of the translated text is submitted along with the translation.
Judges for the award will be MR's Translation Editors, along with an additional third judge, chosen yearly from the local pool of translation experts. MR editors are not eligible for the prize.
In establishing the Chametzky prize, we hope to encourage the creativity of translations submitted to our journal, and to increase their number. We are particularly interested in publishing new literary voices from languages other than English. To put it simply, our goal is to publish great writing from across the globe, from writers we haven't yet heard.
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The winner of our twelfth annual Jules Chametzky Translation Prize Winner is Clare Richards, for her translation of Kang Hwagil’s “The Lake” from its original Korean. Clare's translation was published in our Winter 2022 issue, Disability Justice. We ran a #10Questions interview with Clare last March.
Our judges included Torsa Ghosal's translation of Shagufta Sharmeen Tania's "An Artist's Ego" as runner-up. We also did a #10Questions interview with Torsa.
CLARE RICHARDS is a neurodivergent literary translator based in London. She has a particular interest in feminist fiction, and her upcoming publications include Kang Hwagil’s gothic thriller Another Person (Pushkin Press) and Park Min-jung’s short story "Like a Barbie" (Strangers Press). In 2022 Clare founded the D/deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent Translators Network, and she also leads the UK Society of Authors Translators Association Committee Accessibility Working Group.
KANG HWAGIL is a multiple award-winning South Korean novelist. One of Korea’s new group of “young feminists,” she has consistently written about women since her debut in 2012. Her literary thrillers draw strong influences from the 19th- and 20th-century Gothic tradition, including writers such as the Brontë sisters, Mary Shelley, and Shirley Jackson. The English translation of her debut full-length novel, Another Person, will be published by Pushkin Press in the UK in 2023.
TORSA GHOSAL is the author of a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind (Ohio State University Press), and an experimental novella, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, India). Her fiction and essays have appeared in Necessary Fiction, Public Seminar, Literary Hub, Catapult, Michigan Quarterly Review Online, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English at California State University, Sacramento.
Born in Bangladesh, SHAGUFTA SHARMEEN TANIA initially trained as an architect. She has authored nine books and translated Susan Fletcher’s Eve Green and Antonio Skarmeta’s Burning Patience from English to Bengali. Her work has appeared in Wasafiri, Asia Literary Review, City Press and a Speaking Volumes Anthology. Shagufta was the youngest recipient of Bangla Academy Syed Waliullah Award (2018) for outstanding contribution to Bangla literature, and her short story “Sincerely Yours” was long listed for the BBC Short Story Award 2021.
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The winner of our eleventh annual Jules Chametzky Translation Prize Winner is Aga Gabor da Silva, for her translation of Ewa Lipska’s “Can Always Happen” from its original Polish. Published in our Spring 2021 issue, Gabor da Silva’s masterfully translates this poem about longing for one’s country of origin. You can read Gabor da Silva’s 10 Questions interview with The Massachusetts Review here.
Our judges included one honorable mention as well: Diana Senechal’s translation of Gyula Jenei’s poem “Scissors” (MR Vol. 61, Issue 2).
AGNIESZKA (AGA) GABOR DA SILVA graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she studied Lusophone Literatures and Cultures. Aga also holds a Master of Arts in English Literature and Linguistics from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her translations have appeared in Lunch Ticket, ANMLY, and Columbia Journal.
EWA LIPSKA is considered one of the most important Polish poets. She has won numerous award such as the Kościelski Prize (1973), the Polish PEN Club prize (1992), the Jurzykowski Foundation Prize (1993), and the Gdynia Literary Prize (2011). She has been nominated several times for the Nike Literary Award, one of the most prestigious awards for Polish literature, including for her 2017 volume of poetry Pamiȩć operacyjna [Internal Memory], where the poem “Can Always Happen” appeared. Collections of her verse have been translated into several languages, such as Czech, Danish, Dutch, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, and Swedish.
DIANA SENECHAL is the 2011 winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities and author of Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (2012) and Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies (2018). Her translations of Tomas Venclova’s poetry have appeared in Winter Dialogue (1997) and The Junction (2008); her translations of Hungarian literature have appeared in Literary Matters, Literary Imagination,The Satirist, Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, and The Continental Literary Magazine. "Scissors" is included in the collection Always Different: Poems of Memory (Deep Vellum, 2022), her translation of Gyula Jenei's Mindig más (2018). She teaches English and civilization at Varga Katalin Secondary School in Szolnok, Hungary.
GYULA JENEI (born in 1962 in Abádszalók, Hungary) is a poet, writer, editor, educator, and winner of several honors and awards. As founder and chief editor of the quarterly literary magazine ESO(translatable as Rain or Falling), he has brought literature and literary events to the Szolnok area for over twenty years. His writings include thirteen books; the original Hungarian text of his poem “Scissors” appears in his acclaimed 2018 collection Mindig más (Always Different).
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The winner of the tenth annual Jules Chametzky Translation Prize is Mike Day, for his translation of Lu Min's "Song of Parting" published in our Fall 2020 issue.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of this prize, our judges included two honorable mentions as well: Bruna Dantas Lobato's translation of Caoi Fernando Abreu's "Beyond the Point" (MR Vol. 60, Issue 1) and Mara Faye Lethem's translation of three stories by Pere Calders (MR Vol. 59, Issue 3).
MICHAEL DAY is a traveler, writer, and translator from Chinese and Japanese. He splits his time between California and Latin America. His work has previously appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, China Channel, Words Without Borders, Chicago Quarterly Review, Structo, and the anthology That We May Live from Two Lines Press, among other publications. He won the 2015 Bai Meigui Award for Chinese to English literary translation.
LU MIN's best-known works include Dinner for Six and This Love Could Not Be Delivered. She has received the People's Literature Award, the Chinese Writers Award, the Biennial Chinese Literary Award, the Zhuang Zhong Wen Literary Award, the Xiao Shuo Xuan Kan Readers' Choice Award, the Fiction Monthly Hundred Flowers Award, and the 2007 Young Chinese Writers Award. In 2009, she won China's foremost literary award, the Lu Xun Literary Prize. Her novel This Love Could Not Be Delivered has been published in English translation by Simon & Schuster, and her short stories have been translated into German, French, Japanese, Russian, English, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and Korean. She lives in Beijing.
BRUNA DANTAS LOBATO was born and raised in Natal, Brazil. A graduate of Bennington College, she received her MFA in fiction from New York University and is currently an Iowa Arts Fellow and MFA candidate in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa. Her stories, essays, and translations from the Portuguese have appeared in Harvard Review, Ploughshares online, BOMB, The Common, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 Public Space Fellow. maria joo medeiros is a writer, scriptwriter, and translator. She coauthored The Regicide Dossier and wrote Portuguese Oracles of the Twentieth Century. She translated Daniel Defoe’s The Political History of the Devil and Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince. She also republished an 1877 Portuguese gothic novel, Henriqueta —A Hero of the XIX Century, and is currently developing a documentary on the subject.
CAIO FERNANDO ABREU was one of the most influential and original Brazilian writers of short fiction of the 1980s and ’90s, and the author of twelve story collections set in and published during the military dictatorship and at the height of the AIDS epidemic in Brazil. He has been awarded major literary prizes, including the prestigious Jabuti Prize for Fiction three times. He died of AIDS in Porto Alegre in 1996, at forty-seven.
MARA FAYE LETHEM is a writer and translator whose work has been featured in Granta, Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, The Guardian, and El País, among others. Her translation of Patricio Pron’s Don’t Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets is forthcoming from Knopf.
PERE CALDERS(1912–1994) is one of the most beloved and widely read Catalan writers of the twentieth century. Also an editor, journalist, and cartoonist, he is best known for his short stories. The three featured in this issue are from the collection Chronicles of the Hidden Truth, written during his twenty-three-year exile in Mexico, and first published in 1955.
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The winner of the ninth annual Jules Chametzky Translation Prize is Kelsi Vanada, for her translation of Berta García Faet's "Thirteen Theories on the Better Understanding of Birds of Eligible Ag,e" published in our Fall 2017 issue,
Kelsi Vanada is from Colorado and holds MFAs in Poetry (Iowa Writers' Workshop, 2016) and Literary Translation (University of Iowa, 2017). She translates from Spanish and Swedish, and her poems and translations have been published most recently in Columbia Poetry Review, EuropeNow, Asymptote, and Prelude. She was a 2016 ALTA Travel Fellow and currently works for the International Writing Program. Her first translation, The Eligible Age by Berta García Faet, is forthcoming from Song Bridge Press.
Berta García Faet was born in Valencia , Spain. She lives in Providence, RI, where she is getting her PhD in Hispanic Studies at Brown University. She is the author of La edad de merecer, Fresa y herida, Introducción a todo, Night club para alumnas aplicadas, and Manojo de abominaciones.
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The winner of the eighth annual Jules Chametzky Translation Prize is Alice Guthrie, for her translation from Arabic of Atef Abu-Saif's "The Lottery," published in the Summer 2017 issue. Read her thoughts on translation here.
Alice Guthrie is a British translator, editor, journalist and event producer specializing in Arabic-English literary and media content. Since 2008, her work has appeared in a range of international publications, with an increasing focus on Syria, where she studied Arabic between 2001 and 2003. She is literary producer for Shubbak, London’s biennial festival of Arab arts and culture, and bilingually edits Arabic-English translations for various literary presses. A former Translator in Residence at London’s Free Word Centre and American Literary Translators Association Fellow, in 2015 she was a recipient—with Syrian writer Rasha Abbas—of the Omi International Translation Lab fellowship.
Atef Abu Saif is a Palestinian writer living in Gaza. He has published six novels His novel A Suspended Life was shortlisted for the 2015 Arab Booker Prize. He edited a collection of short stories from Gaza titled The Book of Gaza, which includes one of his own short stories. His account of the Israeli attacks against Gaza in 2014 was published in English under the title The Drone Eats with Me: Diaries from a City Under Fire. Abu Saif holds a PhD in political science and teaches at the University of Al-Azhar in Gaza.
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The winner of the seventh annual Jules Chametzky Translation Prize is Paula Bohince, for her translation from Italian of Corrado Govoni's poem "The Palace of the Soul," published in the Spring 2016 issue. Read an interview with her here.
Paula Bohince's most recent poetry collection is Swallows and Waves, published by Sarabande in 2016.
Corrado Govoni (1884–1965) was a leading figure in the Crepuscular movement in Italian poetry, and a contributor to Futurism.
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The winners of the sixth annual Jules Chametzky Translation Prize are Aleksandar Brezar and Enis Ćišić, for his translation from Bosnian of Karim Zaimović's short story, "The Secret of Nikola Tesla," published in the Fall 2014 issue.
Aleksandar Brezar was born and lives in Sarajevo. He has worked as a journalist at Radio 202 and a translator for several documentary films and other projects for PBS, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, AL Jazeera English, and the Sarajevo Film Festival. His translations have appeared in the Massacusetts Review, the Brooklyn Rail, Protest.ba, PešCanik, and Lupiga.
Enis Ćišić is an illustrator and comic book artist, working as a 3D animator at an advertising agency in Sarajevo. He is the creator of a number of music videos and album artworks for notable bosnian musicians and bands. His work, including large-scale drawings of famous film scenes as well as other illustrations, was exhibited throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, while his short comic books were published in various magazines throughout the former Yugoslavia.
Karim Zaimović was a Bosnian comic strip artist, journalist,r adio host, and writer for many publications, including Lica, Mladina, Oslobodjenje, The Phantom of Liberty, and BH Dani, in Sarajevo. He was killed by a shell in August of 1995, at the age of twenty-four, only months before the war’s end.
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The winner of the fifth annual Jules Chametzky Translation Prize is Peter Kahn, for his translation from Spanish of Márgara Russotto's poem "Of Useless Knowledge," published in the Fall 2013 issue.
Peter Kahn is a professional translator living in Vermont. He has translated works of fiction and nonfiction by numerous Latin American and Spanish writers. His fiction and poetry translations have appeared in various publications, including Grand Street, Gastronomia, Santa Barbara Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and several anthologies.
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The winner of the fourth annual Jules Chametzky Translation Prize are Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, for their translation of Kim T'ae-Yong's "Pig on Grass," published in the Summer 2013 issue.
Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton have translated numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction, most recently River of Fire: Stories by O Chonghan, from Columbia University Press. They have received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, the first awarded for Korean translation, among many other awards and residencies. Kim T'ae-Yong's work appeared in English for the first time with "Pig on Grass," which originally appeared in Korea in his 2007 short-story collection. He is also the author of the novel Nothing to Leave, Nothing to Hide.
In an interview with MR contributors Regina Galasso and Chang Young Park, Ju-Chan and Bruce discuss their work, their projects, and the art of translating from Korean.
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The winner of the third annual Jules Chametzky Translation Prize is Iza Wojciechowska, for her translation of Anna Piwkowska’s poem “A letter from Paul Éluard to his wife who is in Cadaqués with Salvador Dali,” published in the Winter 2012 Issue.
Iza Wojciechowska received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University with a concentration in literary translation. She has received grants and fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Kosciuszko Foundation, and the American Institute of Polish Culture. You can visit her
In an interview with MR, Wojciechowska discusses her translations of Piwkowska, her current project, and the intricacies of translating from Polish.
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The winner of the second annual Jules Chametzky Translation Prize is Michael F. Moore, for the excerpt from his translation of Erri De Luca's The Day Before Happiness, published in the journal’s Casualty Issue.
Michael F. Moore has also translated De Luca's Three Horses and God's Mountain. He has new translations coming out of Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed (Modern Library, 2013) as well as Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved (Norton, 2013). His other work includes translations of Sandro Veronesi, Franco Moretti, Guido Ceronetti, Umberto Eco, and Joseph Ratzinger. Moore received his Ph.D in Italian Studies from New York University, and has worked as translator and interpreter for the Italian Mission to the United Nations, as well as the Italian Cultural Institute, the Consul-General of Italy, and the Italian Trade Commission. He also chairs the Translation Fund for the PEN American Center.
In an MR2 podcast, Moore discusses his translations of De Luca, and much more, in conversation with Translation Editor Edwin Gentzler and Editor Jim Hicks.
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The winner of the inaugural Jules Chametzky Translation Prize is Rebecca Gaye Howell for her translation, with Husam Qaisi, of excerpts from Iraqi poet Amal al-Jubouri's Hagar before the Occupation/Hagar after the Occupation. This translation from Arabic into English appeared in the journal’s Winter 2010 issue (5104).
Rebecca Gayle Howell’s poems and translations have graced the pages of Ninth Letter, Ecotone, Indiana Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Poetry Daily. She holds a combined MFA in Poetry and Translation from Drew University and was a 2010-2011 fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
In December of 2011, Howell & Quaisi’s translation of Amal al-Jubouri's Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation was published by Alice James Books.