Peter Constantine

A master of languages ranging from German to Russian and from French to Arvanitika and Greek, Peter Constantine started receiving awards for his literary translations with his very first publication: Thomas Mann: Six Early Stories (Sun & Moon Press, 1997) won the 1998 PEN Translation Prize, and ten years later he garnered a PEN Translation Prize citation for The Essential Writings of Machiavelli (Random House Modern Library, 2007). In the intervening decade, he won the National Translation Award (1999) for The Undiscovered Chekhov: Thirty-Eight New Stories (Seven Stories, 1998), which underwent two expansions, to forty-three (Seven Stories, 2000) and fifty-one (London: Duckworth, 2001) stories, respectively; his Complete Works of Isaac Babel (Norton, 2001) received in 2002 both the Koret Jewish Literature Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation; Greece’s Hellenic Association of Translators of Literature Prize was awarded to his translation of Stylianos Harkianakis’ poetry collection Mother; and his translation of Benjamin Lebert’s The Bird is a Raven won the 2007 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize.

In addition, Mr. Constantine has translated works of Gogol, Tolstoy, Voltaire, Rousseau, Günter Grass, Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, and Sophocles, to name but a few. He was one of the editors for A Century of Greek Poetry: 1900-2000 and The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (W.W. Norton, 2010), and is also a senior editor at Conjunctions magazine. He received a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Translation, and has twice been a Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Fellow at Princeton University’s Program in Hellenic Studies and twice a Fellow in the Program in Hellenic Studies at Columbia University.

During his Guggenheim Fellowship term, he will be completing a translation of Pope Joan and other writings by the nineteenth-century Greek writer Emmanuel Roidis.