On Friday, April 18th, 2008, Professor Kozue Uzawa and Ms. Amelia Fielden, authors of Ferris Wheel: 101 Modern and Contemporary Tanka, were presented with the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Translation Prize for modern literature at the Donald Keene Center in New York.
Professor Uzawa is a tanka poet and a former professor of Japanese language and culture, recently retired from the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Her first collection of tanka was titled Kanada nite (In Canada). With Amelia Fielden, Professor Uzawa has co-translated As Things Are (100 tanka by Yūko Kawano), as well as the forthcoming Kaleidoscope: Selected Tanka of Terayama Shūji from Hokuseidō Press. Professor Uzawa is also an editor of Gusts, Canada’s first English tanka journal.
Ms. Fielden is an Australian translator and poet. Her other published translations include collections of contemporary tanka by Hatsue Kawamura, Kyoko Kuriki, Mariko Kitakubo, Machi Tawara, and Yūko Kawano, for the last of whom she is the official translator. Ms. Fielden has also published collections of original poetry and tanka, of which Baubles, Bangles & Beads is the fifth and most recent (May 2007). She is currently working with Professor Kozue Uzawa on translations from Yukitsuna Sasaki’s latest book, First Snow.
The Translation Prize has been awarded since 1979 through a grant from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. The Commission, established in 1975, is an independent federal agency that promotes scholarly, cultural, and public affairs activities between the United States and Japan, through the issuing of grant programs in areas such as Japanese studies in the United States, policy-oriented research, public affairs and education, the study of the United States, and the arts.
The prize for best translation of a classical work of literature was awarded to Professor Anthony H. Chambers for Tales of Moonlight and Rain, his translation of Akinari Ueda’s Ugetsu monogatari (Columbia University Press, 2006).