Adnan Haydar Wins Lois Roth Award for Translation

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Adnan Haydar

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The Modern Language Association of America announced it is presenting its sixth biennial Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work to Adnan Haydar of the University of Arkansas and Michael Beard of the University of North Dakota for their translation of Adonis’s Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs, published by BOA Editions.

The late Lois W. Roth worked for the United States Information Agency as an advocate for the use of literary study as a means of understanding foreign cultures.

The committee's citation for the winning book reads, in part, “Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard have exquisitely translated Adonis's innovative and influential modernist first book, voiced by a chameleonic ‘knight of strange words.’ The translators ... accomplish the marvelous: anchoring these multilayered poems in an English that, rich with metaphor, reflects their compact and endlessly inventive originals.”

Adnan Haydar is head of the Arabic section in the department of foreign languages and professor of Arabic and comparative literature in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, where he also directed the King Fahd Middle East Studies Program from 1993 to 1999. Haydar was previously affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Pennsylvania; Middlebury College; and the University of Massachusetts. Books that he has coauthored or coedited include Naked in Exile: Khalil Hawi's The Threshing Floors of Hunger, Interpretation and Translation; and Naguib Mahfouz: From Regional Fame to Global Recognition. He has been a recipient of Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. He founded, directed, and taught at the Summer Institute for Arabic Language and Culture at the Lebanese American University and the Beirut-Brummana Arabic Language Institute at the American University for Science and Technology in Lebanon.

Established in 1997, the Lois Roth Award is one of 18 awards that will be presented on Dec. 28 during the association's annual convention, held this year in Philadelphia.