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                                                              ANNOUNCING

              THE FIRST ANNUAL JOSEPH BRODSKY POETRY TRANSLATION PRIZE COMPETITION

“            Prosody is simply a repository of Time within language.”
                                                                                         −Joseph Brodsky



The Department of Russian and Eurasian Studies of Mount Holyoke College is pleased to announce the First Annual Joseph Brodsky Poetry Translation Prize.



A prize of $100 and a book will be awarded to the best original translation into English of a poem originally written in Russian.  The competition is open to any student currently matriculated at Mount Holyoke College.

RULES:

An individual student may submit up to three poems, each no more than sixty lines in length.  Contestants may submit excerpts from longer works as long as the total length of the excerpt does not exceed sixty lines. No more than one excerpt may be submitted from any single work.

1) Together with her translation into English, a contestant must submit the Russian original of the poem translated.

2) Entries should be submitted e-mail as attachments in standard PDF format to carmsull@mtholyoke.edu. The subject line of the e-mail submission should read “Brodsky Translation Prize Submission.”

3) The name of the contestant must not appear either on the translation or the original.  Instead, a separate cover sheet should be attached with each submission giving the contestant’s name, e-mail address, and the Russian and English title(s) or first line(s) of the poem(s) submitted for consideration. 

4) The deadline for submissions for this year’s poetry competition is April 15, 2013. Winners will be announced by the end of the final-exam period in May.

Preference will be given to those entries that show an understanding of a poem as a memorably organized structure of sound, grammar, syntax, and meaning.  To put it another way: the poem must be translated, not just the words. 

The decision of the judges is final and not subject to review. At their discretion, the judges may decide not to award a prize for in any given year.

This judges for this year’s competition will be Professors Dengub, Jones, Nazarova, Pleshakov and Scotto

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