2021-22 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation Presented to Deep Vellum Publishing

Published on November 1, 2022 

The Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago is proud to announce the 2021-2022 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation to Deep Vellum Publishing for its upcoming book Is it Poetry? by Toshiko Hirata, translated by Spencer Thurlow and Eric E. Hyett.

Is it Poetry? is a profound collection of poetry from Japanese poet Toshiko Hirata, expounding on readership and everyday life.  American readers’ awareness of contemporary Japan, through literature and poetry, has increased in recent decades, but many are still left with little means of understanding the everyday cultural phenomena that makes Japanese culture what it is. Hirata uses her poems to genuinely investigate aspects of Japanese culture in a way that makes it easy for the reader to understand, and she has an extraordinary way of breaking down a normal event, like seeing an old man riding a bicycle in a park, into a journey that elucidates something profound. Her poems gain prosody while keeping a core narrative aspect which is colored with her own dark and warm artistic lens. Every poem in Is It Poetry? helps the reader understand and think about what is to be cherished, feared, loved, and what is not.

The William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation is an annual competition coordinated by the Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. Sibley was Associate Professor Emeritus in East Asian Languages & Civilizations and a renowned scholar and translator of Japanese literature. He is best known for his work, The Shiga Hero, first published in 1979 by the University of Chicago Press, which introduced Western readers to the fiction of Shiga Naoya, one of Japan’s foremost modern writer. In keeping with Sibley’s lifelong devotion to translation and to the place of literature in the classroom, up to $3,000 is awarded each year as a publishing subvention for translations of Japanese literature into English.