Graduate Student Excels in Translation Prize
The translator Robert Fitzgerald had a strong connection to Massachusetts. Although he was born in Switzerland and travelled throughout the world in a career as a journalist, he was a professor at Harvard from 1964-1981, and claimed that the earliest stages of his Aeneid translation were conceived as he boarded a train at Boston’s South Station. Just months before his death in 1985, the founders of Boston University’s respected Translation Seminar honored him by establishing the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize, which has been awarded to the best literary translation by an undergraduate or graduate student at BU annually for over thirty years. The prestigious Prize attracts entries from students from all disciplines, languages, and levels. This year, the winner was Romance Studies graduate student David Shames, who translated two chapters from the novel Los geniecillos dominicales by the 20th century Peruvian writer, Julio Ramón Ribeyro. The second prize was won by a sixth-year graduate student in Classical Studies, Peter Blandino.
For his entry in the competition, Peter translated a series of lyrics and fragments from the female poet Sappho. Peter is currently writing a dissertation on music in Euripides, and he brought some of that passion and sensitivity for music and rhythm to his rendering of Sappho’s Greek. The judges wrote that Peter ranged ‘with a fine ear through a variety of meters and intense moods’, choosing poignant passages that dealt with ‘love, longing, ecstatic unions and bittersweet separations, death and aging, accursed rivals, and poetic immortality’. Although the Sappho fragments had been translated many times, Peter ‘succeeded against the odds’ in producing new and creative translations of the ancient poet, according to the judges. Translation has long been valued highly as a facet of the classicist’s mission at Boston University, and we are delighted to see Peter carry on this torch. Congratulations to him on this great achievement.
With Peter’s permission, one of his translations is reproduced here:
Eros again
loosens the limbs
in vertigo, sweet, bitter
impossible.
Eros from the aether
mantled in Rose,
but I do not think to touch
heaven
in my dripping pain.