Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2008

[Stewart]

All credit to the Literary Saloon for mentioning that The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize shortlist has been announced. This award is for translations into English from any living European language. The titles, with publisher and translator in parenthesis, are:

• The Maias, E?a de Queiroz (Dedalus, Margaret Jull Costa)
• Raving Language: Selected Poems 1946-2006, Friederike Mayr?cker (Carcanet, Richard Dove)
• The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Giorgio Bassani (Penguin, Jamie McKendrick)
• The Bell Of Bruges, Georges Rodenbach (Dedalus, Mike Mitchell)
• We, Yevgeny Zamyatin (Vintage, Natasha Randall)
• The Darkroom Of Damocles, W.F. Hermans (Harvill Secker, Ina Rilke)

The winner will be announced 5 June.

 

[Eric]

Yes, this is another nail on the coffin for the "fog in the Channel, the Continent isolated" mentality so prevalent in Blighty, with regard to "Continental" literature..

Portuguese, German (Austria), Italian, French (Belgium), Russian and Dutch.

This is the second award, after the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, that has stopped staring itself blind at Classical languages, plus only the big living ones. British book prizes are, thank goodness, moving in the direction of intellectual liberation.

The author I'd like to win is the Rodenbach. He is an excellent Flemish (sic!) writer, author of two novels, several short-stories and some poetry. He's good with atmosphere. Although Bruges (aka Brugge) is nowadays a bastion of the Dutch-speaking Flemish literary culture, when Rodenbach was alive, the language of education and elegance was French.

Look at the list of surnames of Belgians writing in French at:

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorie:Belgisch_Franstalig_schrijver

Those that have made it to the English language include, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Rodenbach, Michaux, Lilar, Simenon and Nothomb. The first three are Flemings.

 

[Eric]

This year's winner of the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize was Margaret Jull Costa's translation of The Maias by the Portuguese classic author E?a de Queiros / Queir?z. (The spelling of this last name seems to vary.)

You can see more details, the shortlist, and previous winners, at:

http://www.st-annes.ox.ac.uk/about/translationprize.html