The 28^th MGSA SYMPOSIUM

The Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize for 2024

The MGSA and the Elizabeth Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize Committee is pleased to announce the results of the 2024 prize competition. The evaluating committee consisting of Will Stroebel (Chair), Patricia Felisa Barbeito, Joanna Eleftheriou, Angelica Sgouros, and Brian Sneeden carefully read the submissions over several weeks this summer and arrived at their decision after two rounds of discussion. This was not an easy deliberation; the committee noted an unusually high quality from the submissions—there were nine in total, from both poetry and prose, with source texts representing a wide range of genres, periods, and writers in the field of Modern Greek Studies.

The 2024 Elizabeth Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize will be awarded to Jennifer R. Kellogg for her translation of Book of Exercises II by George Seferis, which will be published later this fall by World Poetry. Jennifer R. Kellogg is a literary translator from Modern Greek and holds a PhD in Modern Languages and Literatures from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). In 2019 she was an Emerging Translator Mentee of the American Literary Translators Association. Her translations have appeared in The Common, Kenyon Review, Plume, and AGNI. Warm congratulations to our winner! The prize of $500 will be awarded on the first night of the MGSA Symposium, at Princeton University, on Thursday, October 17^th.

The committee’s citation reads as follows:

““Seferis unplugged and uncut in English!” The Committee was deeply impressed by Jennifer R. Kellogg’s masterful translation of  Book of Exercises II, which presents to English-language readers a heretofore unknown Seferis: at turns savagely ironic, quietly playful, or inward-looking and pensive, but always offering incisive commentary on his time and place. After so many decades of translations and retranslations, many of us in the committee were taken aback by how this book really does draw out fresh nuance from Seferis, and it achieves this not only through the idea-worlds of the poems themselves but through Kellogg’s deft, daring, and often acrobatic translations. We were particularly impressed with her range and poise, by which she managed to reconstruct not only the content and feel of a given poem but the dynamic rhythms, syncopations, and energy of the verse forms themselves. No small task for a collection so intimate and, in its intimacy, so unpredictable and wide-ranging across the registers and affective span of the Greek language. Kellogg’s book will doubtlessly help a broad and diverse readership to open new, inviting windows not only onto Seferis himself but onto Greek literature more generally”.

 The Constantinides Prize is open to both members and non-members and to published and unpublished work worldwide, and it is this openness and the strong contributions of translators that make the prize such an important beacon for Modern Greek literature. The MGSA conveys its gratitude to all the translators for submitting and sharing their work with us.

Yours sincerely,

Vangelis Calotychos, MGSA Executive Director

The MGSA Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize is intended to raise the profile of contemporary Greek literature in English and to award translation as a creative, intellectually meaningful exercise. Established in 1995 and administered by the MGSA, the Prize honors the memory of Elizabeth Constantinides (1932-1992, Ph.D. in Greek and Latin from Columbia University), who taught Modern Greek language and literature at Queens College of CUNY from 1978 to 1992, wrote on Alexandros Papadiamantis, and translated twelve short stories by Papadiamantis, published as Tales from a Greek Island (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). Constantinides served on the Executive Committee of the MGSA and was awarded the 1987 prize of the Society of Literary Translators in Athens, Greece.