tooting my own horn
I won a prize!
On Monday, at a formal ceremony at Boston University, I was awarded the first prize in the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Competition for my series of poems from the German of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.
The judge who made the award said that the panel's decision had been quite unanimous; he singled out for special praise my "mastery of meter" and my "extraordinary sensitivity to the nunances of punning and ambiguity in Meyer's poems," and the success with which I had evoked Meyer's verbal playfulness. Speaking to me privately after the ceremony ended, he referred to the "astonishing virtuosity" of my dactyllic hexameter.
Thank you to tgl, honar, and g lib for patiently listening to the poems during spring break, and for helping me to fine-tune them. Can I buy you each a beer some time, out of the $250 prize money?
It's only a university-wide competition, but hey, it's the first money that my poetry has ever earned, and the most flattering public recognition I've ever received. Let me bask in my fifteen seconds of glory.
P.S. It does seem to me, though, that frame609's recent success in the wider world of publishing is a greater achievement than mine, whose scope is limited to my particular ivory tower. I envy him, and offer him my sincere congratulations.