White Pine Press is pleased to announce that A Hand Full of Water by Tzveta Sofronieva is the winner of the first Cliff Becker Prize in Translation. Translated by Chantel Wright the book will be published by White Pine Press in fall 2012 in a bilingual edition. 

The book is being published in collaboration with the Cliff Becker Endowment for the Literary Arts and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri, Columbia. The Cliff Becker Prize in Translation is an annual prize for a book of poetry in translation and the next submission deadline is October 1, 2012. 

Willis Barnstone, the judge for this year’s contest says of A Hand Full of Water:

“Tzveta Sofronieva’s poetry sparkles, not in her native Bulgarian, but in German; like her compatriot Bulgarian Julia Kristeva, she changed tongues to reach a wider world. Her A Hand Full of Water is the most compelling volume in German verse since the work of Ingeborg Bachman and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Her memories go from Homer and Dostoievski to Charlie Chaplin’s dance steps. Above all Sofrinieva is a mythological poet. Each narration is a Cavafian voyage, never completed in order to compel wonder. George Seferis wrote that a poet must find a symbolic landscape for one’s diction. She creates her visionary landscape and lexicon as she adventures through the Greek islands and the Mediterranean. The surreal is natural when she says, "She makes her bed with sheets of Pompeian red. / The sea roars in her bed." Subtly, Tzveta Sofronieva refreshes and re-jewels the German language, making it plainer and richer by her global iridescence. The lucent version by Chantal Wright captures the verve and fluid images of Sofornieva’s poetry. Though close to original song, she plays with syntax in English to convey the strength and spontaneity of the German. In the best sense her translation stands as an original book of poetry.”