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Stryk Winner 2011
Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize

The 2011 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize winner is Charles Egan for his translation of Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown: Poems by Zen Monks of China.

Charles Egan is Professor of Chinese and Director of the Chinese Flagship Partner Program at San Francisco State University. His interests include Classical Chinese literature and culture, medieval China and Buddhism. He has published numerous articles on Chinese poetry, folk songs, and art, and is a frequent translator.

Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown presents 190 poems by monk-poets of the eighth to 17th centuries, in styles ranging from vernacular and direct to imagistic and evocative.

After receiving the prize, Egan said, “I am deeply grateful to ALTA for this award, as it is recognition from those who really understand how difficult translation can be, my fellow translators. Given the vast differences between the Chinese and English languages, and the literary traditions of East and West, composing translations that both work in English and are true to the original sources requires a delicate balancing act.”

The jury for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize praised Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown for “not only the high quality of its translations, which strive to keep a handsome formal ease even when observing in English the demands of syntactic parallelism, but also the considerable scholarship that Egan employs with admirable accessibility.”