Susan Bernofsky's Blog, page 15

2018 Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize Announced

The 2018 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize has gone to Isabel Fargo Cole for her translation of Old Rendering Plant by Wolfgang Hilbig, published by Two Lines. Congratulations, Isabel!

More information about the prize and the winning translation can be found on the Goethe-Institut USA website. The prize will be awarded at a ceremony in New York on June 7.

The post 2018 Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize Announced appeared first on TRANSLATIONiSTA.

2018 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Shortlist Announced

The Oxford–Weidenfeld Translation Prize (which honors a book-length literary translation into English from another modern European language) is presented every year at Oxford Translation Day at St Anne’s College, Oxford. This year’s Oxford Translation Day will be held on June 9, and the 2018 Oxford-Weidenfeld shortlist (selected by judges Kasia Szymanska, Simon Park, Jessica Stacey, and Adriana X. Jacobs), has just been announced. I’m thrilled to have a book on it!

Here’s the shortlist:

Dorthe Nors, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra (Pushkin Press)
Yoko Tawada, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (Portobello Books)
Pablo Neruda, Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems, translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander (Bloodaxe Books)
Émile Zola, A Love Story, translated from the French by Helen Constantine (Oxford University Press)
Louis Guilloux, Blood Dark, translated from the French by Laura Marris (New York Review Books)
Andrés Barba, Such Small Hands, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman (Portobello Books)
Édouard Louis, The End of Eddy, translated from the French by Michael Lucey (Harvill Secker)
Daša Drndić, Belladonna, translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth (MacLehose Press)

A list of past winners of the prize (and shortlists past) can be found on the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize page of the St Anne’s College, Oxford website.

Congratulations and best of luck to all the shortlisted translators!

The post 2018 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Shortlist Announced appeared first on TRANSLATIONiSTA.

Study Translation at Columbia This Summer

Greetings, translationophiles. Just heard there are still openings in the summer translation workshop being offered at Columbia University this July and August. If you’re a writer who’s always wanted to try their hand at translating, this one’s for you: two evenings a week you’ll be invited to do just that (and guided in doing so), under the capable tutelage of translator and editor Ian Dreiblatt. What better way to jumpstart your translating life? Information on applying (pretty straightforward, rolling deadlines) and course fees can be found on the Columbia School of the Arts website. May the great translating begin!

The post Study Translation at Columbia This Summer appeared first on TRANSLATIONiSTA.

Translation on Tap in NYC, May 1 – 31, 2018

©Patricia Chang

Greetings, translation fans. Spring is finally springing, and translation is in the air. Enjoy the fruits of the season (cherry blossoms and translation events alike):

Friday, May 4:

Berlin, Alexanderplatz: Translator Michael Hofmann joins Ian Buruma for a conversation about Hofmann’s new translation of Alfred Döblin’s classic novel of Berlin. More information here. NYU Deutsches Haus, 42 Washington Mews, 6:30 p.m.

Thursday, May 10:

Translations and Transgressions: the New York Circle of Translators presents a reading by translators TBA. More information here. $10 cover charge (cash only) includes one drink. Cornelia Street Cafe, 29 Cornelia St., 6:00 p.m.

Monday, May 14:

And/With: Writer-translators Iman Mersal and Aditi Machado, joined by Omar Berrada. Co-sponsored by the Belladonna* Collective, more information here. Institute of Arab and Islamic Art, 3 Howard St., 6:30 p.m.

Tuesday, May 15:

Us&Them, Crime and Mystery Fiction Edition, featuring Donald Nicholson-Smith translating Jean-Patrick Manchette (France); Jeremy Tiang translating Chan Ho-Kei (Hong Kong); and Allison Markin Powell translating Fuminori Nakamura (Japan). More information here. Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren St., 6:30 p.m.

The post Translation on Tap in NYC, May 1 – 31, 2018 appeared first on TRANSLATIONiSTA.

2018 Straelen Translator’s Prize Announced

The Europäisches Übersetzer-Kollegium in Straelen, Germany has announced the winner of the 2018 Straelen Translator’s Prize, which this year honors a translator of German-language literature into English. The prize is awarded by the Kunststiftung NRW (Foundation for the Arts of North Rhine-Westphalia). I’m so delighted to see Katy Derbyshire honored in this way; for years, she’s been a key and very active member of the transatlantic translation community, most recently helping to bring the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation into being. The Straelener Übersetzerpreis, a nice, hefty prize (€25,000) honors a translator with a substantial body of work as well as recognizing a particular book (in this case her translation of Bricks and Mortar [Im Stein] by Clemens Meyer).

The secondary prize (“sponsorship award” or Förderpreis) given at the same time has gone to Simon Pare for his translation of The Flying Mountain (Der fliegende Berg) by Christoph Ransmayr.

The two Straelen prizes rotate between languages, so there won’t be another one going to an English-language translator for a while, I reckon.

Big congratulations, Katy (and Simon)!

The post 2018 Straelen Translator’s Prize Announced appeared first on TRANSLATIONiSTA.

2018 Man Booker International Prize Shortlist Announced

Shortlists follow longlists as spring follows fall, and here’s the latest list this spring has brought: the Man Booker International Prize shortlist, which narrows the field from the longlisted 13 to six. This is a particularly delightful shortlist in that half the books on it are by women. It looks great! Here are the judges’ top picks:

Virginie Despentes (France), Frank Wynne, Vernon Subutex 1 (MacLehose Press)
Han Kang (South Korea), Deborah Smith, The White Book (Portobello Books)
László Krasznahorkai (Hungary), John Batki, Ottilie Mulzet & George Szirtes, The World Goes On (Tuskar Rock Press)
Antonio Muñoz Molina (Spain), Camilo A. Ramirez, Like a Fading Shadow (Tuskar Rock Press)
Ahmed Saadawi (Iraq), Jonathan Wright, Frankenstein in Baghdad (Oneworld)
Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), Jennifer Croft, Flights (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

The winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize will be announced at a ceremony in London on May 22, 2018.

For more information on the prize and the shortlisted books, visit the Man Booker International Prize website. Congratulations to all the finalists!

The post 2018 Man Booker International Prize Shortlist Announced appeared first on TRANSLATIONiSTA.

2018 Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize Shortlist Announced

The Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize honors an outstanding literary translation from German into English published in the U.S. and comes with a purse of $10,000 for the translator. The prize used to be administered by the Goethe-Institut Chicago, but since 2015 it’s been awarded under the auspices of the Goethe-Institut New York. And last year the Goethe-Institut started publishing a shortlist for the prize rather than just announcing the winner in late spring. Shortlists are interesting, they reveal a jury’s deliberation process, and I’m always glad to see them, particularly as they can generally also be understood as reading recommendations. This year’s jury includes Shelley Frisch (chair), Bettina Abarbanell, Ross Benjamin, John Hargraves, and Susan Harris.

Here are the translators on this year’s Wolff Prize shortlist:

David Dollenmayer, for his translation of Rüdiger Safranski’s Goethe. Kunstwerk des Lebens (Goethe: Life as a Work of Art, Liveright, 2017)
Isabel Fargo Cole, for her translation of Wolfgang Hilbig’s Alte Abdeckerei (Old Rendering Plant, Two Lines Press, 2017)
Stefan Tobler, for his translation of Arno Geiger’s Der alte König in seinem Exil (The Old King in His Exile, Restless Books, 2017)

This shortlist rights a wrong one often sees in lists of this sort: shortchanging nonfiction, which is all too often overlooked for prizes like this one, which typically goes to the translator of a work of fiction, although the prize is officially open to works of any genre. One disappointing thing about this particular shortlist is that – like the 2017 Wolff Prize shortlist – it contains exclusively works by male authors, and indeed the Wolff Prize has gone to the translators of books written by men in all but two of the 22 years of its existence. What does that mean? I was sorry not to see Sophie Seita shortlisted for her translation of Uljana Wolf’s Subsisters, which seemed to me an exceptional feat of translingual artistry (though I certainly have no beef with any of the books that were put forward as finalists). Come to think of it, the prize has never gone to the translator of a book of poems, either. Hmm.

For more information about the prize and the shortlisted books, see the Wolff Prize page on the Goethe-Institut website.

The winner of the 2018 Wolff Prize will be announced in early May. Congratulations and toi toi toi to all the shortlisted translators!

The post 2018 Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize Shortlist Announced appeared first on TRANSLATIONiSTA.

2017 French Voices Awards Announced

The French Voices Awards (sponsored by the FACE Foundation) go to outstanding works translated from French that have not yet appeared in English translation – they are works-in-progress awards presented by the French Cultural Services of the French embassy and include one Grand Prize and a number of additional awards. Each prize is split between the translator and English-language publisher. In past years, this split has been discouragingly imbalanced, with the translator receiving between 1/3 and 2/5 of the prize moneys; this year’s announcement contains no mention of financials, so I don’t know what the current formula is for the distribution of funds, or indeed whether the same funding is available as last year ($10,000 total for the Grand Prize-winning book, $6000 for the others). As with last year’s list, most of these projects are still in search of publishers; the awards are intended among other things as a financial incentive. Unfortunately this year’s announcement also neglects to mention which of the selected projects has been awarded the Grand Prize, and I couldn’t find that information on the French Cultural Services website.

Here are the 13 books selected for French Voices Award support this year:

Nathalie Azoulai

[TITUS DID NOT LOVE BERENICE]

Ruth Diver, translator.

seeking an American publisher – please contact the French publisher.

(Titus n’aimait pas Bérénice, P.O.L, 2015)

Evelyne Bloch-Dano

PAPER GARDENS: A STROLL THROUGH FRENCH LITERATURE

Teresa Lavender Fagan, translator, University of Virginia Press, 2018

(Jardins de papier : de Rousseau à Modiano, Stock, 2015)

Damien Boquet & Nagy Piroska

MEDIEVAL SENSIBILITIES: A HISTORY OF EMOTIONS IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Robert Shaw, translator, Polity Press, 2018

(Sensible Moyen Âge. Une histoire des émotions dans l’Occident médiéval, Seuil, 2015)

Patrick Boucheron

THE POWER OF IMAGES: SIENA, 1338

Andrew Brown, translator, Polity Press, 2018

(Conjurer la peur. Essai sur la force politique des images, Seuil, 2013)

Stéphane Bouquet

[VIE COMMUNE]

Lindsay Turner, translator

seeking an American publisher – please contact the French publisher.

(Vie Commune, Champ Vallon, 2016)

Sarah Gensburger

[MEMOIRE VIVE. CHRONIQUES D’UN QUARTIER BATACLAN 2015-2016]

Katharine Throssell, translator

seeking an American publisher – please contact the French publisher.

(Mémoire vive. Chroniques d’un quartier Bataclan 2015-2016, Anamosa, 2017)

Alain Guiraudie

NOW THE NIGHT BEGINS

Jeffrey Zuckerman, translator, Semiotexte, 2017

(Ici commence la nuit, P.O.L, 2014)

Alexandre Leupin

[EDOUARD GLISSANT, PHILOSOPHE : HERACLITE, HEGEL ET LE

TOUT-MONDE]

Michael Wiedorn, translator

seeking an American publisher – please contact the French publisher.

(Edouard Glissant, philosophe : Héraclite, Hegel et le Tout

Monde, Hermann, 2016)

Maryam Madjidi

[MARX ET LA POUPEE]

Ruth Diver, translator

seeking an American publisher – please contact the French publisher (translated excerpts are avalaible on Asymptote)

(Marx et la poupée, Le Nouvel Attila, 2017)

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

[TERRE CEINTE]

Alexia Trigo, translator

seeking an American publisher – please contact the French publisher.

(Terre Ceinte, Présence Africaine, 2014)

Patrice Nganang

[LA SAISON DES PRUNES]

Amy Reid, translator, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019

(La Saison des prunes, Philippe Rey, 2013)

Martin Page

[L’APICULTURE SELON SAMUEL BECKETT]

Roland Glasser, translator

seeking an American publisher – please contact the French publisher.

(L’Apiculture selon Samuel Beckett, Editions de l’Olivier, 2013)

Anne Percin

[MA MERE, LE CRABE ET MOI]

Kate Deimling, translator

seeking an American publisher – please contact the French publisher.

(Ma mère, le crabe et moi, Rouergue, 2015)

Congratulations to all the translators whose work was selected for support! For more information about the selected books, see the announcement on the French Cultural Services website.

The post 2017 French Voices Awards Announced appeared first on TRANSLATIONiSTA.

2018 Best Translated Book Award Longlists Announced

It’s that BTBA time of year, and the longlists for the Best Translated Book Awards in Poetry and Fiction have just been announced. This year’s judges include Raluca Albu, Jarrod Annis, Tess Lewis, Aditi Machado, and Emma Ramadan for poetry, and Caitlin L. Baker, Katarzyna (Kasia) Bartoszyńska, Tara Cheesman-Olmsted, Lori Feathers, Mark Haber, Adam Hetherington, Jeremy Keng, Bradley Schmidt, and P.T. Smith. The BTBA has been around since 2007 now, run out of the University of Rochester by Three Percent. Each prize comes with $5000 awards for both translator and author/poet.

Behold the longlists:

Poetry:

Adrenalin by Ghayath Almadhoun, translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham (Syria, Action Books)

Hackers by Aase Berg, translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson (Sweden, Black Ocean Press)

Paraguayan Sea by Wilson Bueno, translated from the Portunhol and Guarani to Frenglish and Guarani by Erin Moore (Brazil, Nightboat Books)

Things That Happen by Bhaskar Chakrabarti, translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha (India, Seagull Books)

I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio, translated from the Spanish by Jeannine Marie Pitas (Uruguay, Ugly Duckling Presse)

Astroecology by Johannes Heldén, translated from the Swedish by Kirkwood Adams, Elizabeth Clark Wessel, and Johannes Heldén (Sweden, Argos Books)

Magnetic Point by Ryszard Krynicki, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh (Poland, New Directions)

Third-Millennium Heart by Ursula Andkjaer Olsen, translated from the Danish by Katrine Øgaard Jensen (Denmark, Broken Dimanche Press)

Spiral Staircase by Hirato Renkichi, translated from the Japanese by Sho Sugita (Japan, Ugly Duckling Presse)

Directions for Use by Ana Ristović, translated from the Serbian by Steven Teref and Maja Teref (Serbia, Zephyr Press)

Before Lyricism by Eleni Vakalo, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich (Greece, Ugly Duckling Presse)

Iron Moon by Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry edited by Qin Xiaoyu, translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman (China, White Pine Press)

 

Fiction:

Incest by Christine Angot, translated from the French by Tess Lewis (France, Archipelago)

Suzanne by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins (Canada, Coach House)

Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith (Iceland, Open Letter Books)

Compass by Mathias Énard, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell (France, New Directions)

Bergeners by Tomas Espedal, translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson (Norway, Seagull Books)

The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden (Argentina, Open Letter Books)

Return to the Dark Valley by Santiago Gamboa, translated from the Spanish by Howard Curtis (Colombia, Europa Editions)

Affections by Rodrigo Hasbún, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (Bolivia, Simon and Schuster)

Old Rendering Plant by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole (Germany, Two Lines Press)

I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff (Switzerland, New Directions)

You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin (Germany, Pantheon)

Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall, translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm (Poland, Feminist Press)

Beyond the Rice Fields by Naivo, translated from the French by Allison M. Charette (Madagascar, Restless Books)

My Heart Hemmed In by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (France, Two Lines Press)

Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarac, translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey (Argentina, Soho Press)

August by Romina Paula, translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Croft (Argentina, Feminist Press)

The Magician of Vienna by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson (Mexico, Deep Vellum)

The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker (Mexico, Feminist Press)

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Argentina, Riverhead)

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag, translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur (India, Penguin)

For Isabel: A Mandala by Antonio Tabucchi, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris (Italy, Archipelago)

Ebola 76 by Amir Tag Elsir, translated from the Arabic by Charis Bredin (Sudan, Darf Publishers)

The Last Bell by Johannes Urzidil, translated from the German by David Burnett (Germany, Pushkin Press)

Radiant Terminus by Antoine Volodine, translated from the French by Jeffery Zuckerman (France, Open Letter)

Remains of Life by Wu He, translated from the Chinese by Michael Berry (Taiwan, Columbia University Press)

The finalists will be announced on May 15, 2018, and the awards themselves on May 31, 2018. Congratulations and best of luck to all the longlisted translators!

The post 2018 Best Translated Book Award Longlists Announced appeared first on TRANSLATIONiSTA.

2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in Translation to Esther Allen

The Guggenheim Foundation has been naming fellows in the category “Translation” since 2008, but for some reason I’ve managed not to blog that fact until now (even the year when I myself received one). But it’s time to right that wrong, apropos of the 2018 fellowship awarded to Esther Allen for the translation of The Silentiary (first published in 1964) and The Suicides (1968), two novels by Antonio Di Benedetto (1922-1986), who was himself a Guggenheim Fellow in 1973. Allen won the 2017 National Translation Award in Prose for her translation of Di Benedetto’s novel Zama. It’ll be great to have these two books in her translation to follow it up.

And here’s a complete list of all the Guggenheim translation fellows between 2008 and 2018:

Esther Allen 2018

Ross Benjamin 2015

Susan Bernofsky 2014

Philip Boehm 2013

William Chittick 2014

Peter Constantine 2010

Carl W. Ernst 2009

Andrew Frisardi 2013

Howard Goldblatt 2009

Ann Goldstein 2008

Edith Grossman 2008

Bill Johnston 2013

Tess Lewis 2015

Margaret M. Mitchell 2010

Sachiko Murata 2011

Bill Porter 2011

Sarah Ruden 2010

Damion Searls 2012

Richard Sieburth 2012

Val Vinokur 2008

More information about each recipient (including the current one) and their projects can be found on the Guggenheim Foundation website. Big congratulations, Esther!

The post 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in Translation to Esther Allen appeared first on TRANSLATIONiSTA.