Something gained, not lost, in translation for Portobello
Success for Portobello's translated fiction in the Rossica Translation Prize and The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2009.
Posted: 17:44:00 07/05/09
May has been a happy month for Portobello's translated fiction.
One Soldier's War in Chechyna
Nick Allen has been shortlisted for the Rossica Translation Prize 2009 for his translation of Arkady Babchenko's One Soldier’s War in Chechnya and Sarah Death has been shortlisted for The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2009 for her translation of Alexander Ahndoril's The Director.
Congratulations to Nick and Sarah, and Arkady and Alexander!
Fingers crossed for May 24th and June 10th.
The Rossica Prize
One of the judges of the Rossica prize, Professor Robert Porter, has said:
“This exercise has been challenging, exciting, and bodes well for the future of Russian literature and Russian studies in English speaking countries.”
‘Out of the tension of resistance and affinity… grows the elucidative strangeness of the great translation.’ George Steiner.
The Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize is for translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance. Recent winners include Len Rix for Magda Szabo’s The Door (Harvill Secker), and Michael Hofmann for Ernst Jünger’s Storm, of Steel (Penguin).
The Director
This year Hermione Lee joins the judging panel of The Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. The panel is chaired by Matthew Reynolds who has said, 'This year, recent prose writing was exceptionally strong. All the books on the shortlist were published in their original languages in the last forty years; almost all are here translated into English for the first time. The shortlist also demonstrates the importance of small presses, alongside larger publishers with a longstanding commitment to translation, in bringing significant European writing into English.'
Web Mistress
May 2009
See all articles in Web Mistress
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