I should have mentioned this yesterday: on Monday, all the 2006 PEN Literary Award Winners were announced. The PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, judged by Pierre Joris, went to Wilson Baldridge for his translation of Recumbents by Michel Deguy (Wesleyan University Press), a book I've championed before on RSB.
In his citation, he writes: “Recumbents is a work whose rhetorical and philosophical complexities make a successful translation a true tour de force. Exquisitely balancing poetic sensibility and philosophical insight, Wilson Baldridge has accomplished this feat through superb craftsmanship, an accurate ear for the complex music of the French original, and the depth of scholarship indispensable for the project. With its wide-ranging annotations, comprehensive introduction, and an afterword by Jacques Derrida (also translated by Baldridge), this bilingual volume is everything a poetic translation should be."
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