"Judging the merits of literary juries" by Tim Parks

[Peter]

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Some interesting comments, here, on what judging an international translated-literature prize is like. Relevant certainly to Korean literature and its (recent) successes in these contests.

(The writer, Tim Parks, has published a critical commentary on the translation of The Vegetarian by Han Kang, and has insinuated that her Nobel Prize may have been awarded for reasons other than lifetime achievement (https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...). That general sentiment I see shining through several times in this latest commentary, too.)

Quote:

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IF YOU GET MY MEANING
Judging the merits of literary juries

by Tim Parks
Times Literary Supplement [UK]
June 6, 2025.

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Let’s take a look at translation prizes. I’ve won a couple in the past. Now I’m being asked to serve as a judge.

It’s a new prize for English translations of “full-length ambitious, ground-breaking works”. To avoid tied votes, there is an odd number of judges: three. I’m informed that the other two, both women, have already said yes. So we have the desired gender mix while, ethnically speaking, the continents of Europe, Africa and Asia are represented, which, since the books to be judged come from all over the world, has a certain logic. One judge, I see, grew up mainly in the US, while another lives in eastern Europe. We’ve all written novels, though one is more of a poet, whose work has been described as “a vital midwife for the greater global understanding that will one day be born from today’s contracting and relaxing tensions between differing religions, cultures, and languages”. The age range is from forty to, in my case, alas, seventy.

Can one say no to such a project?

I have served in the past on the panel of the IMPAC prize (now the International Dublin Literary Award) and the International Booker prize (when it was for a whole career, not a single novel). In those cases, too, an odd number of judges (three women, two men) of impeccably various backgrounds wrestled with texts from all over the world. My overriding memory of the IMPAC is of the folly of trying to read far more novels over a few months than any sane person would wish to, then put them in some kind of order. By the time one reaches the thirtieth book, the experience of the first is largely forgotten, and by the fiftieth, the thirtieth, too, has long since disappeared. Of the heaps of novels submitted for those prizes, none remains with me as a powerful reading experience, not even the winners. Conversely, I have an excellent memory for the books I’ve reviewed over the years.

Our judging duties were complicated by the varied origins of the novels. How to weigh up political intrigue from Israel against lyrical romance from China or Mexican science fiction? I remember being told by one judge that my enthusiasm for an Indian author, translated from Kannada, was due to my unawareness of how ordinary the book seemed in Indian culture. Perhaps this was true, though the person offering the warning was not from the subcontinent. Add to these considerations the fact that the shortlists we chose were expected to be as inclusive as the judging panels -- the one a kind of mirror of the other and it was hardly surprising if occasionally one felt we'd been employed in a bureaucratic procedure of matching books to slots.

Still, at least we didn't have to judge the translations of the novels we were reading; just the experience of the work in English. The translation prize I won (twice), back in the 1990s, was the John Florio prize for translations from the Italian. The judges there have the advantage of comparing works from the same culture and, as a rule, have some knowledge of Italian. Even so, what divine providence would guarantee that the "groundbreaking" novel is translated by the specially gifted translator? Wouldn't the more reliable sod's law guarantee that fine novels will often be translated by poor translators and vice versa? I have no doubt that my winning the Florio had largely to do with the quality of the works (by Fleur Jaeggy and Italo Calvino) that I'd been commissioned to translate.

But the award I'm now invited to judge is for translations from any language. Studying their bios, I see that the other judges command a knowledge of Chinese, French and possibly Czech. That leaves translations from any number of languages that none of us will have the competence to judge. The fact that you enjoy a foreign novel in English does not necessarily mean it was well translated. I'm reminded of the Italian translator Elio Vittorini, whose influential versions of D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner and many others, turned out to be highly personalized rewritings of more literal versions provided by his "assistant", and often involving lengthy omissions.

It is intriguing that it is only in the West that we seem to have prizes for works from other cultures. Is this openness or presumption? In general, when intelligent people embark repeatedly on projects that are by definition impossible, one has to suppose that something deep is going on. Over the years, there has been less and less media space for serious reviews of novels. Translators continue to be miserably paid, their work rarely properly appraised. But the prizes multiply, as if the only thing that can fire up some enthusiasm for literature is a narrative of winners and losers. Or do we imagine that we're working towards "greater global understanding"? Is this why many authors now indicate on their CVs the prizes they've judged as readily as those they've won? Already I can hear the earnest rhetoric of the award ceremony, the anxious banter between the shortlisted candidates, the moment when the word "groundbreaking" is pronounced.

But I fear I must leave this excitement to someone less grumpy than me.

(end of article)

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Elsewhere:
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Tim Parks
The fact that you enjoy a foreign novel in English does not necessarily mean it was well translated.

Lyn Donaldson
No, but it probably means it was « well-written in translation ». Most of us won’t have access to the original to know how well it is reflected in the translation and whether we would have judged the book as equally enjoyable (or not) had we been able to read it in e.g. Korean, as a Korean.

A « good translation » might not be faithful to every aspect of the original, but ingenious in recreating the original for a different (language) audience. How English translations of different books in different languages might be compared and ranked, I don’t know. But good luck!

At least translators are getting more recognition for their rôle in bringing the rest of the world to anglophone readers, and we readers need that.

Tim Parks
Agreed on all lines Lyn, but a translation prize is surely for a good translation... well written, well translated...

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Steve Eaton
Would you award a prize to a bad novel that was well translated?

Tim Parks
They never do Steve. The whole thing's a bit crazy.

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See also:

British literary figure Tim Parks on the possibility of a World Literature and skepticism of Han Kang's Nobel Prize
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

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