Congratulations to the winners of the 2021 Senior Prize in Literary Translation and the Classical Translations Contest

Senior Prize in Literary Translation

The Senior Prize in Literary Translation is an annual translation contest hosting by the Department of Comparative Literature and open to all graduating seniors at the University of Michigan. Annika Hoffmann was awarded the 2021 Senior Prize in Literary Translation for her translation from German of the short story “Seegeister” by Ilse Aichinger. 

The prize committee admired Annika’s haunting translation of a haunting story about mysterious happenings at a lake. In an eloquent translator’s preface, Annika explained how her translation “heightens” the atmosphere of the German text, “coming at the story through a veil” through the stylistic strangeness of English that “enhances the mythical and supernatural elements of the tale.”

20th Annual Contexts for Classics Classical Translations Contest

To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, Contexts for Classics expanded its annual Classical Translations contest to include a wider range of languages taught in the departments of (I) Classical Studies, (II) Asian Languages and Cultures, and (III) Middle East Studies. Graduate and undergraduate students from across the University of Michigan were invited to submit literary translations of texts from (I) Latin, Ancient Greek, and Modern Greek; (II) classical Japanese, Chinese, and Sanskrit; and (III) Akkadian, Assyrian, Coptic, Syriac, Biblical Hebrew, Hittite, Middle Egyptian, Sumerian, and Classical Armenian, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Here are the winners in each category.

(I) Classical Studies

  • Hussein Alkadhim translated an excerpt from the Iliad by Homer from Ancient Greek.
  • Anna Cornel translated Bion’s fragment 8 from Ancient Greek.
  • Joshua Johr translated Rudens by Plautus from Latin into a short film.
  • Isabella Reacher translated Aeneid, Book 12, Lines 930-952 by Publius Vergilius Maro from Latin.

(II) Asian Languages and Cultures

  • Jahnabi Barooah Chanchani translated from the Classical Sanskrit excerpts from a Sanskrit anthology of devotional poems called the Bālagopālastuti.
  • Elinor Lindeman translated Kankyo no tomo by Priest Keisei from the Classical Japanese.

(III) Middle East Studies

  • Sara Yeager translated Ecclesiastes 4 from Biblical Hebrew.
  • Allen Kendall translated Hymns to Senwosret III from Middle Egyptian.
  • Mehrdad Kavani translated excerpts from Sacho Sarmast’s Masnawi from Persian.