Brasfield, Lysheha Win Pen Literary Award

May 11, 2000
New York — James Brasfield of Penn State and Ukrainian poet Oleh Lysheha will receive a PEN American Center award this month for their joint, book-length translation of Lysheha’s poetry — which the Center described as "poetry of high literary achievement."

The Center is a national association of literary writers headquartered in New York. Brasfield and Lysheha will receive the award for their translation of "The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha," published by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Rachel Hadas, one of the judges, said the translation was "confident, fluent, dignified" and rendered Lysheha's poems "in eloquent and graceful English."

Lysheha, a Soviet dissident, was forbidden to publish in the Soviet Union from 1972 to 1988. The translation of his poetry was completed during Brasfield’s two Fulbright lectureships in Ukraine in 1994 and 1999. The awards will be presented May 15 in New York at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.

Brasfield, a senior lecturer in Penn State’s English department, finds himself in good company this year as a PEN award winner. Among PEN’s other honorees this year are novelist, short story writer and essayist William Gass ("Omensetter’s Luck," "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories"), dramatist Horton Foote ("Tender Mercies," the screenplay adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird"), and essayist Annie Dillard ("For the Time Being").

For more information on the PEN Literary Awards, contact John Morrone, PEN American Center, at 212/334-1660, ext. 108, or via e-mail at . Or point your Web browser to http://www.pen.org/awards/../index.html.