We are delighted to announce that the winners of our Her Gyfieithu and Translation Challenge this year are Grug Muse and Dr Eleoma Bodammer.
Grug Muse is a poet, editor and researcher. She is one of the founding members and editors of Y Stamp literary magazine. Her first volume of poetry, Ar Ddisberod, was published with Barddas in 2017. She is one of the Welsh participants of the Creative Europe’s exchange residencies programme Ulysses Shelter 2020, a project managed jointly by Literature Across Frontiers and Wales Literature Exchange and was awarded a Literature Wales Writers’ Bursary in 2020. Her work has been published in several publications including O’r Pedwar Gwynt, Barddas, Poetry Wales and others. She is currently working on a PhD research project at Swansea University.
Dr Eleoma Bodammer is a Black Welsh academic. Born and raised in Wales, she learned German in her local comprehensive school in Newport, before studying German at the University of Manchester, where she was awarded a first-class BA Honours in German Studies and a PhD in German literature. She teaches German literature, grammar, written language, and translation, including literary translation into and out of German and English at postgraduate level at Edinburgh University. Her published research has focused on mid-18th and early 19th century German literature, and she has also published in the field of literary translation. She is currently working on representations of disability in the works of E. T. A Hoffmann.
Both winners will receive a prize of £ 200. The winning translations will be published on O’r Pedwar Gwynt and Poetry Wales websites, and the Her Gyfieithu Staff, sponsored by Cymdeithas Cyfieithwyr Cymru, will be awarded to Grug for the best translation into Welsh..
This year, the challenge was to translate a series of short poems from German entitled ‘Nahaufnahmen’ by poet Zafer Şenocak, Zafer Şenocak lives in Berlin, where he has become a leading voice in discussions on multiculturalism, national and cultural identity, and a mediator between Turkish and German culture.
Adjudicator of the Her Gyfieithu, Mererid Hopwood, received 11 entries, and said that Grug’s entry was the translation that captured her imagination more than the others and was most successful in creating the feeling of a ‘poem’.
Karen Leeder, author, translator and academic at New College, Oxford, was the adjudicator of Translation Challenge. She said that Eleoma’s translation “stood out at once, following the sinuous language to perfection and entirely in tune with that spare voice.”