Modern Poetry in Translation

Marilyn Hacker

Translator, Poet

Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve books of poems, including Names (Norton, 2009), Essays on Departure (Carcanet Press, UK, 2006) and Desesperanto (Norton, 2003). Her essay collection Unauthorized Voices, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2010. Her ten volumes of translations from the French include Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2008) which received the 2007 Robert Fagles Translation Prize and the 2009 American PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, Hédi Kaddour’s Treason (Yale University Press, 2010), recipient of a “French Voices” award from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s Nettles (The Graywolf Press, 2008). 

For her own work, she is a past recipient of the Lenore Marshall Award, the Poets’ Prize, the National Book Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the American PEN Voelcker Award for poetry in 2010. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. 

- photo Florence Trocmé