ALTA Translation Award Honors Pulitzer Poet

Pulitzer-winning poet and translator Richard Wilbur was honored with the prestigious 2008 National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) during the group’s annual conference on Thursday, Oct. 16, in Minneapolis.

Each year, the National Translation Award honors the translator whose work, by virtue of both its quality and significance, has made the most valuable contribution to literary translation during the previous year. The award was conferred on Richard Wilbur for his translation of French dramatist Pierre Corneille’s The Theatre of Illusion.

Richard Wilbur is a Pulitzer Prize winner for his books of poetry New and Collected Poems (1988) and Things of This World (1956). He is the former president and chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has won the National Book Award, the PEN Translation Prize and two Bollingen Prizes. He served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1987 to 1988.  A Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets, Wilbur currently lives in Cummington, Mass.

The University of Texas at Dallas has been home to ALTA since 1978. The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is a broad-based organization dedicated to the promotion of literary translation through services to literary translators, forums on the theory and practice of translation, and cooperation with the international literary community.

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