Taking Newspapers to Task

The Literary Saloon has a nice diatribe this morning about the pervasive “lazy-ass reporting” of translation prizes.

Specifically, Orthofer takes the Guardian to task for yesterday’s article on Farouk Mustafa winning the Saif Ghobash Banipal prize for his translation of Khairy Shalaby’s novel The Lodging House.

Which is great, unless you consider that the prize was announced on September 26th . . . Not exactly what one would call timely reporting.

Banipal—the magazine and trust—isn’t well known for timeliness either, and Orthorfer blames their recently released press release for the confusion.

Personally, I blame the “Stranger Magic: The Stories and Translated Selves” invite I received in the mail on Monday. This is an invitation to the November 8th event at the South Bank Centre, which will include the presentation of seven translation prizes (including the Saif-Ghobash-Banipal Prize) and the 2007 Sebald Lecture by Marina Warner. Of course, the winners of the prizes aren’t actually designated on the invite, so without a little research it would be easy to believe that the recipients were being unveiled that evening . . .

Still, this is a huge issue. As I’ve argued before, the biggest champions of international literature these days are independent and small presses, universities and translation centers—generally not the organizations with the largest PR budgets or expertise. Which is sad, since it takes a little something extra to really promote these books/prizes/events/etc.