© University of Rochester 1996-2012
The winners of the 2009 Best Translated Book Awards are out—and the accolades go to a Hungarian novel and a Japanese poetry collection.
Attila Bartis’s Tranquility (Archipelago Books), translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein, won the prize for fiction, while Takashi Hirade’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (New Directions), translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu, took the poetry award.
Organized by Three Percent, the international literature Web site associated with the University’s translation program and Open Letter, its translation press, the awards program is the only prize of its kind to honor the best original works of international literature and poetry published in the United States in the past year.
The complete longlist, a list of finalists, and descriptions of all the books can be found online at www.bestranslatedbook.org.
In other translation news, the University’s new master’s degree program in literary translation studies has been approved by New York State. The University plans to recruit students to the program for the 2010–11 academic year. The program will offer “an intense blend of professional training in the fields of literary translation and publishing practices with rigorous intellectual work in the area of international literature,” says Thomas DiPiero, senior associate dean of humanities.
–Kathleen McGarvey
© University of Rochester 1996-2012