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Heather McHugh is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington. In addition to six acclaimed books of poetry, including most recently, the Pulitzer Prize finalist Eyeshot, and the collection of essays Broken English: Poetry and Partiality, she has translated poems by Jean Follain and Euripides’ Cyclops.

Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan 2001 International Winner

Wesleyan University Press, USA

Judges’ Citation

Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh have achieved the seemingly impossible: more than translating Celan into English, they have found a way to translate English into Celan.

Paul Celan is arguably the most important European poet of the twentieth century, but much of his work has seemed too hermetic, linguistically complex, and bound to his struggle with the German language in the aftermath of the Shoah to be translatable. In Glottal Stop, however, Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh have achieved the seemingly impossible: more than translating Celan into English, they have found a way to translate English into Celan.