#OxOnSong French Poetry Translation Competition WINNERS

AND THE WINNER IS....

Congratulations to the winners of the #OxOnSong French Poetry Competition.

Under 17s:

Winner: Phoebe Ali

Runner Up: Elizabeth Ogunde.

18 and over:

Winner: Leo Charlier 

2nd: Alexander Dawkins 

3rd: Amira Ramdani

Read the winning entries here

Messages from our Judges:

« Poetry is a Centaur » said Ezra Pound. « The word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties. » This is equally true of translation, notably the translation of verse. The best versions retained the lexical and musical values of the Francis Jammes poem, while also attending to the natural syntactic word order of idiomatic English. This becomes fiendishly hard when the words are to be set to music, so bravo to the winners! - Stephen Romer

The best translations were clear, naturalistic, and attentive to the spirit of the original. Some of the most interesting pieces reached for striking poetical effects. All were a pleasure to read and hopefully the authors will go on to do more translation. - Andrew Wynn Owen

A huge thank you to the judges:

 Elise Angioi 

Stephen Romer 

Catriona Seth 

Andrew Wynn Owen

Also see #OxonSong project website, part of the TORCH Humanities Cultural Programme.

Watch the announcement here:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/mRbPuzTT04c