Free contest, 2011 Tollund Poetry Translation Contest (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian), prize: 3 winners of $300

Deadline: 10 March 2011

In collaboration with the popular literary blog E-Verse Radio, Tollund Inc., an international legal translation firm, is happy to announce the second annual Tollund Poetry Translation Prize.

Translators are asked to recreate an English-language poem in one of three Nordic languages, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. Tollund Poetry Translation Prize judges select poems for translation (this year, three by Jennifer Grigg) and select the best in each language based on translator creativity, resourcefulness, and skill. Each of the three winners will be awarded USD $300.00.

Jennifer Grigg is an American who has lived in England for twenty years. She has worked in the art world as a writer and researcher and has published poems in many magazines and journals.

The submission deadline is Monday, February 28th. Winners will be announced here and on http://www.everseradio.com on March 10th. Please send submissions to poetry@tollund.com.

Danish:

Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan, Stands for her Betrothal Portrait

It must have been winter when Holbein began.
Henry ordered him to Denmark -
in the palace Christina shivered,
read the letter, then thought of what to wear.
Her aunt’s advice to the virgin widow, aged sixteen:
Mourning is still appropriate though it was three years
since the Duke had died, making his proxy wife
duchess of a warm, ripe place she’d never seen.

A sixteenth century mail-order bride:
her life-sized portrait carried more
weight than gold, an Italian duchy,
temporary peace.
Henry sat, peevish and ill in his stone hall
as she was uncrated,
leant against the wall,
candles held to the just-dry
surface of shiny blacks and browns.
Henry looks for bosom and hips,
tilts his candle, curses as the wax
drips, burns his hand.

Christina, in widow’s weeds,
kept her secrets to herself:
head to toe in thick black satin
edged with brown fur.
Slender fingers stroke kid gloves,
a ruby ring hugs her knuckle.
Lucky girl,
he didn’t take the bait.

Lips turned up at the corners move
the plump paleness of her face.
Not a hair escapes her black cap -
it frames her face like a baby’s bonnet.
Delicate white ruffles
make a plate for her neck.
There’s polite confidence in her brown eyes
as if she sees her son, born safely
years after Henry’s death.

Swedish:

Bareback

A plunging fall into wetness as they leave the shore,
the sandy bank drops away and she floats above
the wide, dark back, tendrils of mane
gripped with slippery reins. Rearing, taking off
across the secret deep of snappers and green pond-weed.
Blowing and snorting, the horse’s front legs strike out,
weightless as they swim, cold eddies
where the springs feed in, sun-warmed shallows,
the smell of wilted leaves like mulch, then the suck of gravity
drags her close to his body again. She’s high up,
clinging, as he gives a mighty shake and shiver
like a dog, blows once, hard.
Sliding off, there’s a slick of dark hairs on her thighs
where she clutched,
stronger, faster, laughing.

Norwegian:

Day One

We realize nothing has happened.
Another tick of our collective clocks, that’s all.
The passing year continues under a pseudonym.
The still, cold day was as dry as the bales of brown hay.

The big, bay mare is wild at the gate tonight –
not like her stolid self – she rolls her eyes at the underfoot dogs
and does a slow jog, a passage, to the barn,
high as a leaf at the end of her lead .

But such a stillness when the horses are put to bed –
after the stamping, pissing into dry shavings, slurping of water and munching of oats,
stillness –
Hong Kong already in day two,
the rest of the world at stages of sunset, darkness, sleep.

More information here.