Osdany Morales and Harry Bauld win inaugural Poetry in Translation Prize

Giramondo Publishing, Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions are pleased to announce the inaugural winner of the Poetry in Translation Prize is Osdany Morales’ Security Questions, translated from the Spanish by Harry Bauld. The Poetry in Translation Prize is a new biennial award for an outstanding poetry collection translated into English. Security Questions was selected from a shortlist of eight, with 259 submissions overall.

The winners receive an advance of US$5,000, to be shared equally between poet and translator, followed by simultaneous publication in Australia and New Zealand with Giramondo, in North America with New Directions and in the UK and Ireland with Fitzcarraldo Editions. Publication is scheduled for early 2027.

Security Questions (El pasado es un pueblo solitario; Bokeh, 2015) uses the security questions that Morales was asked on his arrival in the US as way into his experiences as an immigrant. Harry Bauld and Osdany Morales first met while working at the same school. Bauld’s curiosity was piqued by the new hire, a Spanish-speaking novelist and poet, and he found his poems online. In his words, ‘they spoke to me, I did a translation of one, and by way of introduction and welcome sent it to him. He paid me the compliment of saying how strange it was to “hear my own voice in English.”’ Harry Bauld goes onto explain that, ‘[t]he poems from Security Questions are, on the one hand, a lyric sequence shaped by coming of age in small-town Cuba during the late stages of Fidel Castro’s regime, and on the other a testament of exile and immigration, traces that remain in the wake of forsaking a problematic homeland for the uncertainties of the present. The English “prompt” titles are the security questions required to establish an online identity which the newly arrived Morales only half-understood and, indeed, given Morales’ characteristically unflinching irony, questions which open trenchant implications for the poet’s new “American” persona.’

‘Before arriving in the US, I had written only fiction. If it weren’t for this book, it would have taken me much longer to reach the lands of memory,’ Morales says. ‘At the time, I believed that fiction wasn’t confessional, that only poets had access to that kind of meaning. It was through writing poetry that I realised I carried many memories in literary form – that exile had established a past I could already recount without waiting for old age. Exile and poetry made me look not exactly backward, but inward.’

Harry Bauld says, ‘Frost famously said poetry is what’s lost in translation, but in my experience, poetry is also, to borrow from William Carlos Williams, “what is found there.” Always there are the contrary weights and measures of the source traditions and those of what is often called (horribly) the “target” language; the translator, working toward something like equivalency, labours in those “between” spaces. Our memories of reading and admiring literature published by Fitzcarraldo, Giramondo and New Directions make us doubly proud to be the inaugural translation prize collection to appear in their catalogue.’

Rachael Allen, the poetry editor at Fitzcarraldo Editions, says of the winning collection, ‘We, the judges, kept returning to these poems over the course of the reading period, and were struck continually with their newness, their humour, their prescience and their timelessness. The style of these poems feel unique and irreverent, shocking and moving. They have stuck with us from the moment we first read them, and they feel, sadly, stunningly pertinent. The poems are a necessary documentation of the context of a specific time and place, while also transcending their specifics as a reminder of the absurd semiotic brutality of all borders.’

Nick Tapper from Giramondo added, ‘Osdany Morales’s brilliant, urgent Security Questions, translated by Harry Bauld with intensity and clarity, is an outstanding winner of the first Poetry in Translation Prize. The qualities of the collection – its intricate weaving of memory and experience, heightened by the absurdities of exile, and underpinned by the poems’ unmistakeable, syncopated, pulsing rhythms – were evident from first reading. Its publication in English will be an important event. At Giramondo we are delighted to continue our collaboration – following on from the Novel Prize – with Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions, and to publish such essential international writing.’

Jeffrey Yang concluded, ‘New Directions is honoured to be a part of the first biennial poetry translation prize with our publishing friends Fitzcarraldo and Giramondo. Harry Bauld’s brilliant translation of Cuban writer Osdany Morales’ Security Questions speaks deeply to our embattled times while elevating our hearts and minds with humour and compassion.’