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WMU translator wins national book prize

June 3, 2010

KALAMAZOO--Dr. Jeffrey M. Angles, associate professor of foreign languages at Western Michigan University, has been awarded the 2009 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.

Columbia University's Donald Keene Center for Japanese Studies annually gives out one prize in modern literature as well as one prize in classical literature. The 2009 prizes were presented during an April ceremony in New York.

Angles earned the modern literature honor for his forthcoming translation of Tada Chimako's "Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako," scheduled to be published by the University of California Press this year.

Angles is the director and advisor for WMU's Japanese language program. He has been on sabbatical during the 2009-10 academic year working at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan. In addition to serving as a visiting professor there, he is conducting a major research project on the cultural history of translation.

Angles teaches Japanese literature and translation studies. His book, "Writing the Love of Boys: Desire Between Men in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature," is due out in 2011 from the University of Minnesota Press. He earned a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2008 to support a project to translate the memoirs of Takahashi Mutsuo, one of the most prominent poets in Japan.

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Media contact: Jeanne Baron, (269) 387-8400, jeanne.baron@wmich.edu

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