New York City, May 3, 2005—The Academy of American Poets announced today that Daryl Hine is the winner of the Academy's 2005 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for his translation of Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, published by the University of Chicago Press. Poet and translator Mark Strand served as judge. Mr. Hine will receive $1,000. On selecting this volume for the award, Mr. Strand wrote:
His translations from the works of Hesiod and from the Homeric hymns sound neither quaintly old, nor faddishly new. Hine's diction, a robust mix of Latinate and Anglo-Saxon words, never sliding into dullness or abstraction, has a charged and resonant identity of its own. Surely his translation of the "Hymn to Demeter" ranks among the very best translations into English of any work at any time.
Daryl Hine was born in 1936 in British Columbia, Canada. He studied Classics and Philosophy at McGill University and after an interval abroad took a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago in 1967. From 1968 to 1978 he edited Poetry, and has taught at the University of Chicago, The University of Illinois, and Northwestern University. In addition to academic scholarships and fellowships, he has received three Canada Council Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has published eleven books of verse and six of verse translation.
Mark Strand is the author of ten books of poems, most recently Blizzard of One (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize, two books of prose, several volumes of translation (including works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. His honors include the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Bollingen Prize, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Edgar Allen Poe Prize, and a Rockefeller Foundation award, as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He currently teaches in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
The Harold Morton Landon Translation Award was established at the Academy of American Poets in 1976 as a biennial prize given to an American for a published translation of poetry from any language into English. Since 1984 the competition has been held annually. Previous winners include Mark Anderson, William Arrowsmith, Saralyn R. Daly, Guy Davenport, John DuVal, Robert Fagles, Robert Fitzgerald, Cola Franzen, Martin Greenberg, Peter Hargitai, David Hinton, Edmund Keeley, Galway Kinnell, Rika Lesser, Stephen Mitchell, Howard Norman, Robert Pinsky, Andrew Schelling, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, W. D. Snodgrass, Edward Snow, and Rosmarie Waldrop. The award was established by Mrs. Harold Morton Landon in memory of her husband.
The Academy of American Poets is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 1934 to foster appreciation for contemporary poetry and to support American poets at all stages of their careers. The Academy serves millions of individuals each year through outreach, arts education, and the most important collection of awards for poetry in the United States. The Academy's major programs include National Poetry Month, Online Poetry Classroom, Poets.org, and the Poetry Audio Archive.