The Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts

Special Guest Judge, Soje

“if you give them / something to guard they think themselves gods,” writes Emil-Iulian Sude, one of the first award-winning poets of Roma ethnicity in Romania, translated into English by Diana Manole, a Romanian-born Canadian scholar, writer, and literary translator. Though no poem should be burdened with the task of making a literature, a history, a people legible in English translation, these two poems excerpted from The Night Security Guard stopped me in my tracks to consider all that remains untranslated and willfully unknown about the Roma. Diana Manole’s translation channels the colonized, infantilized, and dehumanized subjects who speak of a “missus doctor,” “missus technology teacher,” and “mister German teacher” while recognizing the innocence of a child in their midst. I especially admire the final lines—“a child who doesn’t arrive on time. / we coddle him we’re kind.”—as the strange syntax haunts in its simplicity.

Soje is a poet and the translator of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla (Tilted Axis Press, 2020), Lee Soho’s Catcalling (Open Letter Books, 2021), and Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon (Honford Star, 2021). They also make chogwa, a zine that features one Korean poem and multiple English translations per issue.