Yesterday, PEN America announced its 2021 career achievement award winners, including the PEN/Manheim Award for Translation, which went to Pierre Joris.
The judges' citation begins by noting Joris' unique position within the field: "In a landscape of literary translation that is still beholden to linguistic and national silos, Pierre Joris's work has long been and remains essential in mapping currents and countercurrents of global modernity. As literary translation struggles to confront imperial histories of violence and erasure, and to engage with and encourage voices of cultural and linguistic differences, Joris has blazed a path for generations of emerging translators to follow." They continue:
Having spent over half a century moving between Europe, the U.S., and North Africa, and working across multiple languages, Joris has built a stunning and unparalleled career as a translator, poet, essayist, editor, critic, performer, and academic. Indeed, Joris's personal trajectory has fueled his articulation of a "nomad poetics" that cannot be contained by national or linguistic boundaries, one in which Anglo-European perspectives are enriched and complicated by those of the Global South, and where translation models the potentialities and necessary complexities of cross-cultural contact.
They conclude by singling out Joris' work on Paul Celan and listing some of the iconic authors he's translated into English (Adonis, Jean-Pierre Duprey, Safaa Fathy, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Pablo Picasso, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kurt Schwitters, Habib Tengour, and Tristan Tzara) and French (Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Sam Shepard, and Pete Townshend). You can read more here.
If you'd like to engage with some of Joris' award-winning work, we gladly point you in the direction of his PennSound author page, which is home to dozens of recordings spanning the past twenty-five years, including readings, talks, interviews, and podcast appearances. We send our heartiest congratulations to Joris for this great honor.
