Blog / Prize Winners

Interview with Aleksandar Brezar and Enis Čišić, Part One

October 19, 2016 - By Jim Hicks

Remembering a Life Cut Short

Jim Hicks: Probably the best place to start, since nobody in the United States is really going to know the background, would be to summarize the story of Karim Zaimović.

Aleksandar Brezar: Well, it’s not a story that can be summarized. The simplest way to describe his life and his work would be to say that he was a journalist and a writer from Sarajevo who, during the war and the siege, had a radio show where he read his stories on air—short stories that were a way of escaping the reality of the war, and that  in some way provided at least a...

Interview with Aleksandar Brezar and Enis Čišić, Part Two

October 19, 2016 - By Jim Hicks

Between Realism and Fantasy

(Read Part One here.)

JH: The next obvious subject is to talk about process, and how this comic came about. From an idea to an object that exists in the world, there’s a hell of a lot of work. So tell us about that. One of the things people who don’t know much about it don’t know is just how much work it is to make comics.

EČ: It took us what, six months?

AB: No, more than six months. Between nine months and a year.

EČ: A long, long process...

Interview with Aleksandar Brezar and Enis Čišić, Part Three

October 19, 2016 - By Jim Hicks

Alternative Realities

(Read Part One and Two here.)

JH: One of the things we’ve done in the Massachusetts Review blog—because we thought we needed to—is book reviews of other work that pretends to come out this period and this history. In particular, two novels were very successful in the US: Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife and Sara Nović’s Girl at War. About the reviews we did, well, I’ll give you just the title of the one for The Tiger’s...

Chametzky Translation Prizewinner, Iza Wojciechowska

April 23, 2015 - By Christopher Schafenacker

Massachusetts Review: First of all, congratulations on winning the 2013 Jules Chametzky Translation Prize for your work on Anna Piwkowska’s poem, “A letter from Paul Éluard to his wife who is in Cadaqués with Salvador Dali”!

Iza Wojciechowska: Thank you! I was delighted when I found out.

MR: You certainly deserve it. The translation is beautiful. Would you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became interested in translation? When did you begin translating poetry, and what drew you to it?

IW: My parents were very strict about speaking Polish at home when I was growing up, so from a very young age I was existing in both languages: reading in both, writing in both, and...

Ju-Chan and Bruce Fulton, Winners of the 4th Annual Chametzky Prize

April 7, 2015 - By Regina Galasso and Chang Young Park

An Interview with Ju-Chan and Bruce Fulton

Congratulations for having your translation of Kim Tae-yong’s “Pig on Grass” selected for publication in the Massachusetts Review and then for winning the 4th Annual Chametzky Prize for Translation! How did you celebrate?

We were beside ourselves with joy and had a glass or two of wine, then forwarded the news to the author and our family and friends. Last December in Seoul we celebrated with Mr. Kim over a bottle of Chilean malbec and gave him half the prize money.

When and how did you start translating literature?

Around the time we were married in Seoul, Korea (in the...