Iain Galbraith has won the Poetry Society’s Popescu European poetry translation prize for his translation of Jan Wagner’s collection Self- Portrait with a Swarm of Bees, published by Arc Publications. The prize was judged this year by Olivia McCannon and Clare Pollard. They said that “Galbraith converts every challenge (formal, lexical, metrical) into an opportunity, matching Wagner’s ingenuity and investment at every step …  The result is a perfect sufficiency: a set of poems in English that somehow inhabit the same skin as the German, with their own autonomous heart and lungs.”

The winner was chosen from a shortlist of six collections by seven translators. The judges also commended a further five collections. Clare Pollard said: “We really wanted to celebrate the number of major female poets who are now being translated into English. And it has been such an astonishing two years for German poetry - at one point an all-German shortlist didn't look impossible. Ultimately though, we hope our selection showcases some of the variety of translated poetry being published, and is also just a list of books we would thoroughly recommend to any reader of poetry.”

The other translators on the shortlist were: David Constantine and Tom Kuhn for Love Poems by Bertolt Brecht, published by Liveright [from German]; Anne Stokes for Ice Roses - Selected Poems by Sarah Kirsch, Carcanet [from German]; Ellen Doré Watson for The Mystical Rose by Adélia Prado, Bloodaxe [from Portuguese]; Susan Wicks for Talking Vrouz by Valérie Rouzeau, Arc Publications [from French]; Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese for Nothing More by Krystyna Miłobędzka Arc Publications [from Polish].

Commendations were: Peter Daniels for Selected Poems by Vladislav Khodasevich, Angel Classics [from Russian]; Michael Hofmann for Impromptus by Gottfried Benn, Faber & Faber [from German]; Karen Leeder and David Constantine for Rubble Flora: Selected Poems by Volker Braun, Seagull Books [from German]; David McDuff for One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake by Tua Forsström, Bloodaxe [from Swedish]; David Paisey for Selected Poems and Prose by Gottfried Benn,  Carcanet [from German].

PHOTOGRAPH: KAREN LEEDER