Current Issue
Volume 65, Issue 2
Front Cover by Daisy Quezada Ureña
Untitled (detail) 2018
Porcelain and clothesline in Wuhan Student Dormitory
500 Sq. Ft.
Celebrating our 11th Annual Jules Chametzky Translation Prize Winner and Honorable Mention
We are pleased to announce Aga Gabor da Silva as the winner of our annual Chametzky Translation Prize for her translation of Ewa Lipska’s “Can Always Happen” from its original Polish. Published in our Spring 2021 issue, Gabor da Silva’s masterfully translates this poem about longing for one’s country of origin. You can read Gabor da Silva’s 10 Questions interview with The Massachusetts Review here.
Our judges included one honorable mention as well: Diana Senechal’s translation of Gyula Jenei's poem “Scissors” (MR Vol. 61, Issue 2).
Biographies:
AGNIESZKA (AGA) GABOR DA SILVA graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she studied Lusophone Literatures and Cultures. Aga also holds a Master of Arts in English Literature and Linguistics from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her translations have appeared in Lunch Ticket, ANMLY, and Columbia Journal.
EWA LIPSKA is considered one of the most important Polish poets. She has won numerous award such as the Kościelski Prize (1973), the Polish PEN Club prize (1992), the Jurzykowski Foundation Prize (1993), and the Gdynia Literary Prize (2011). She has been nominated several times for the Nike Literary Award, one of the most prestigious awards for Polish literature, including for her 2017 volume of poetry Pamiȩć operacyjna [Internal Memory], where the poem “Can Always Happen” appeared. Collections of her verse have been translated into several languages, such as Czech, Danish, Dutch, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, and Swedish.
DIANA SENECHAL is the 2011 winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities and author of Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (2012) and Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies (2018). Her translations of Tomas Venclova’s poetry have appeared in Winter Dialogue (1997) and The Junction (2008); her translations of Hungarian literature have appeared in Literary Matters, Literary Imagination,The Satirist, Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, and The Continental Literary Magazine. "Scissors" is included in the collection Always Different: Poems of Memory (Deep Vellum, 2022), her translation of Gyula Jenei's Mindig más (2018). She teaches English and civilization at Varga Katalin Secondary School in Szolnok, Hungary.
GYULA JENEI (born in 1962 in Abádszalók, Hungary) is a poet, writer, editor, educator, and winner of several honors and awards. As founder and chief editor of the quarterly literary magazine ESO(translatable as Rain or Falling), he has brought literature and literary events to the Szolnok area for over twenty years. His writings include thirteen books; the original Hungarian text of his poem “Scissors” appears in his acclaimed 2018 collection Mindig más (Always Different).
