This year, the Phoebe Taylor Prize for Outstanding Work in Spanish Translation was awarded to Sophia Khwaja-Clarke for her project on translations of selected poems from the collection Un Montón de escritura para nada by Mexican poet and academic Sara Uribe.
Like Phoebe’s project, this translation focuses on a Latin American author, with Sophia taking up the work of the award-winning contemporary Mexican poet and academic Uribe.
The twelve semi-autobiographical poems that comprise Un montón de escritura para nada vary greatly in form and style and refuse to follow any fixed rule. Sophia carefully chose to translate extracts that represent this variety and foreground the collection’s key focus on the difficulties of existing as a writer—particularly as a female writer—in Mexico’s masculinised literary sphere.
Opening with a short note on Uribe’s work and career, the introductory essay underscores the gender politics of Uribe’s collection, whose poems deal with a material reality: what Sophia insightfully calls (using Kaplan Daniels, 1987) the “invisible work” of the domestic sphere that lays bare real barriers to writing for women. In foregrounding this reality in her poems, Uribe challenges the damaging belief that “el verdadero escritor no necesita más que su talento” (“the true writer does not need more than talent”). As Sophia notes, Uribe refuses to let this immaterial labour go unseen, highlighting the manifold ways in which working within a system that assumes that “escritores” is written “en masculino” makes writing a particularly difficult pursuit for women.
In the translation itself Sophia prioritised preserving the feminist politics of Uribe’s work, opting at times for a less traditionally “neutral” translation. Examiners praised the project for how it translated the ways in which Uribe disrupts the use of the masculine as a gender-neutral default and subverts the linguistic and societal concept of male-as-norm. They also commended the translation for how it deftly handled the linguistic challenges presented by the poems, such as alliteration, internal rhyme, anaphora, and metaphor.
The project shows demonstrable commitment to the ethics of translating as it remains conscious of the politics of the text, as well as the translator’s impact on it, and endeavours to make readers conscious of its politics too.
We are immensely grateful to Phoebe’s family for supporting the department’s students, and for helping us honour the work of brilliant young scholars like Phoebe and Sophia, who use the Translation Project as a way of putting their language skills and finely-tuned literary sensibilities to highly creative ends.
Maite Conde UTEO in Spanish and Portuguese 1 July 2025
