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NTA Winner 2002
National Translation Award

The 2002 National Translation Award winners are E.H. and A.M. Blackmore for their translation of Selected Poems of Victor Hugo: A Bilingual Edition .

E. H. Blackmore was formerly Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of Western Australia, and has also been a dramatist, actor, and stage director. His publications have included literary criticism, translations studies, and psycholinguistic research.

A. M. Blackmore was formerly lecturer in Education at Edith Cowan University and is now a member of the faculty at Curtin University in Australia. She has also published research on grammatical awareness and other aspects of reading.

Selected Poems of Victor Hugo was also the recipient of the MLA Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation. In addition to Selected Poems of Victor Hugo, the Blackmores have translated in collaboration, Six French Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000).

“In order to understand the goals of today’s translator, it is useful to revisit Eugene Nida’s pithy definition of the process, “translation consists in producing in the target language the closest natural equivalent of the message in the source language” (Principles of Translation 19). The Blackmore edition is very welcome because it indeed meets Nida’s standard skillfully and vibrantly. While providing a huge number of samples from various periods, it has rhyme and rhythm without loss of meaning and without the triviality of Victorian predecessors.” –- Wendy Greenberg, Nineteenth Century French Studies

“. . . E.H. and A. M. Blackmore have done a valuable service for students and teachers of visionary romanticism in Europe. . . . The Blackmores show a knack for resolving the puzzles of the text with lucid, judicious endnotes, and a thoroughly-researched glossary of the many exotic names Hugo deployed lavishly. An extensive select bibliography of criticism is also provided . . . should prove attractive for use in advanced classes, for comparatists, and for the cultivated general reader.” –- Laurence M. Porter

“Translators E. H. and A. M. Blackmore have collected Victor Hugo’s essential verse into a single, bilingual volume that showcases all the facets of Hugo’s oeuvre, including intimate love poems, satires against the political establishment, serene meditations, religious verse, and narrative poems illustrating his mastery of the art of storytelling and his abiding concern for the social issues of his time.” –- The University of Chicago Press

Excerpt of the winning translation:

The last stanzas of Victor Hugo’s “Booz Endormi” – “Boaz Asleep,” from
Selected Poems of Victor Hugo

(. . .)
All slumbered in Jerimadeth and Ur;
The stars enameled the deep, somber sky;
Westward a slender crescent shone close by
Those flowers of night, and Ruth, without a stir,
Wondered—with parting eyelids half revealed
Beneath her veils—what stray god, as he cropped
The timeless summer, had so idly dropped
That golden sickle in the starry field.