The prize is named for Bang, whose translation work in recent years has been recognized alongside her impressive accomplishments as a poet.
Derick Mattern, a PhD candidate in comparative literature, won the first Mary Jo Bang Award for Poetry Translation. He submitted a translation of sections from “Passage to Efsus” by Yücel Kayıran from Turkish into English.
Matt Erlin, coordinator of the prize selection committee, said that they received a high number of outstanding submissions. Students submitted works translated from Spanish, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, and Chinese. “The committee chose Derick’s translation on the basis of excellence and intellectual ambition, as well as the resonance and freshness of the English version of the poem,” said Erlin, the chair of comparative literature and thought and a professor of German and comparative literature.
The Mary Jo Bang Award for Poetry Translation was established this year by an anonymous donor to honor Bang and her accomplishments as a poet and translator. The donor’s pledge establishes an endowed fund that will also provide ongoing support for three additional writing awards within the Department of English.
Bang, who came to WashU’s English department in 2000, is an acclaimed poet who has received numerous honors, including the Berlin Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Bellagio Foundations, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton. She has also won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Discovery/The Nation award, with her work featured in multiple editions of “The Best American Poetry.”
In the early 2000s, she began to explore translation while still writing original poetry. In 2005, Bang translated the first three lines of Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno” — a project that she said started off as nothing more than “indulgent play.” But she found herself drawn further and further into the work until, after seven years, she’d translated the entire thing. She then undertook Dante’s “Purgatorio,” published in 2021. This July, 25 years after starting the project, she’ll complete the trifecta and publish her translation of “Paradiso.” She also co-translated Shuzo Takiguchi’s “A Kiss for the Absolute” with native Japanese speaker Yuki Tanaka and “Colonies of Paradise” by Matthias Göritz, a professor of practice in WashU’s comparative literature program.
For Bang, it’s important to bring a poet’s mind to translation. “There’s a difference between translators of poetry who are scholars and translators who are poets,” she said. “I think the poet understands something about writing poetry that the scholar may not.” She believes that in translating poetry, it’s important to look beyond precise word equivalencies and instead consider the temperature and register of the language — something for which poets are uniquely suited.
“I’m really touched that someone would choose to create this prize, and I’m pleased that we now have a prize for translation,” Bang said. “It’s an encouragement for our graduate students to think about the possibilities. In translation, one becomes sensitive to language in a way that will influence one’s own writing.”
Mattern is honored to be the award’s first recipient, which was announced two weeks before he graduated with his PhD. “I'm grateful to have found myself, for the last six years, amid a community that values and celebrates translation as an essential and creative practice,” he said.
Göritz, who served as both Mattern’s thesis adviser and a member of the prize jury, noted that Mattern’s translation stood out for its fluidity and boldness. Göritz collaborated closely with Bang when she translated his book and sees a connection between works by Bang and Mattern, admiring their shared ability to creatively preserve the original work’s novelty without disrupting the reader’s flow. “Mary Jo was so hardworking, never resting until she found a solution that best reflected how my poems sound in German,” he said. “That’s exactly what Derick is all about. He doesn’t stick to an easy solution that just reads well, he goes deeper, beyond the surface. He has a certain stubbornness that a translator needs.”
