October-December 2021: Translation prize winners

Welcome to the October-December 2021 translation awards season Reading Globally thread. We are going to be talking about the awards for the unsung heroes of the publishing and reading world - the translators who make it possible for people to read a book written in a language they don't understand. Translators tend to be mentioned only when there are issues with a translation - most people don't even check who translated a book until they see problems.

Translation awards are treated differently around the world.

In the English speaking world, special awards and categories are added for translations to ensure that they get visibility (among other reasons). Outside of the Global language, at least in the countries where I looked and the awards I tend to keep track of, the special category is usually for the books written in the local language, protecting the writing in that language - without this the awards will go to translations almost by default. The thread is dealing with translations INTO English (being our shared language here and all that) but I am leaving a comment for translations into other languages as well in case someone decides to read any award winners there.

The list in the next comments is not exhaustive - it just cannot be. While I was looking around, all kinds of awards kept popping up - a lot of organizations and publishers and sometimes governments seem to be trying to make translations more visible. And I struggled to find a unifying theme - translations span every genre, every language, every form. By the time I was done with my initial list, I had a list of over 100 prizes - some of them so obscure or short-lived that finding information for them is almost impossible.

So I decided to pare down the list and keep updating the result through the next 3 months based on how the conversation is going, what people find and what I keep finding. I considered posting the complete lists of winners for each prize but decided against it - instead each award has a link to Wikipedia or its official site so people can explore the winners and nominees on their own.

And just to kick off the conversation, a few questions for discussion (or a few things to consider while deciding what to read or reading):

- Which translation awards do you follow?
- If you read in other languages, do you follow their translation awards?
- No matter how good a translation is and how many awards it wins, the book is never the same. If you can read the book in the original, would you read the award-winning translation or would you read it in the original? Or both?
- Even though our quarterly thread is about the winners, do you follow long and short lists?
-Do you follow translators the way readers follow authors? If so, which ones?

English may be a global language but when awards season rolls in, the literary world forgets about it. I open the thread with the UK awards because they host the one I consider the big translation award these days: The International Booker.

International Booker Prize (2016-current)
The award was initially given for body of work available in English, it changed to a translation award for books published in UK, starting with its 2016 edition.

All the winners:
2016: The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith
2017: A Horse Walks Into a Bar by David Grossman, translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
2018: Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft
2019: Celestial Bodies by Jokha al-Harthi, translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth
2020: The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison
2021: At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated from French by Anna Moschovakis

While the International Booker is a young award in its current form, when it was created it folded into itself one of the long running Translation awards, providing an almost unbroken chain of winners for translations published in UK from 1990 to 2021 if someone wants to explore them (it was not awarded from 1996 to 2000 so there are missing years but still...):

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (1990–2015)
Wikipedia page; LT Awards page
First winner: 1990: The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk, translated from Turkish by Victoria Holbrook.
Last Winner: 2015: The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German by Susan Bernofsky

(and after a copy/paste mishap, I lost my second UK award so here it is:

The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation (2017-current)
Wikipedia page
Official page; LT Awards page

All winners:
2017: Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, translated from German by Susan Bernofsky
2018: Belladonna by Daša Drndić, translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth
2019: The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated from French by Alison L. Strayer
2020: The Eighth Life (for Brilka) by Nino Haratischvili, translated from German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin

On the US side of the language, there is a seemingly never ending list of awards being given every year.

The American Literary Translators Association Awards - the awards from translators to translators come in 3 categories - a general award, an Asian translation award and an Italian Fiction award (this one will show up on a different category downstream).

National Translation Award/NTA (1998-current)
Official page; Wikipedia - Single category until 2015; Separate prose and poetry awards since then.

Latest winners:
Prose: 2020:The Cheffe: A Cook's Novel by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump
Poetry: 2020:Hysteria by Kim Yideum, translated from Korean by Jake Levine, Soeun Seo, and Hedgie Choi

Lucien Styrk Asian Translation Prize (2010-current)
Official page; Wikipedia

First Winner: 2010:In Such Hard Times: The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu by Wei Ying-wu, translated from Chinese by Red Pine
Latest Winner: 2020:Hysteria by Kim Yideum, translated from Korean by Jake Levine, Soeun Seo, and Hedgie Choi (yes, the same translators got both awards for the same book).

The PEN America Awards

PEN Translation Prize (1963-current)
Official page; Wikipedia - Single category for best translation

First winner: 1963:The Viceroys by Federico de Roberto, translated from Italian by Archibald Colquhoun
Latest winner: 2021:A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa, translated from French by Emma Ramadan

PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (1996-current)
Official page; Wikipedia - Single category for best translation

First winner: 1996:7 Greeks, translated by Guy Davenport
Latest winner: 2021:Raised by Wolves by Amang, translated from Chinese by Steve Bradbury

National Book Award for Translation (1968-1983) - First iteration. Best translated fiction. Given by the National Book Foundation.
List of winners; LT Awards page
Last Winner: 1983: Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire, translated from French by Richard Howard

National Book Award for Translated Literature (2018-current) - Second iteration. Fiction and non-fiction, the author should be still alive
Wikipedia
All winners:
2018: The Emissary by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani
2019: Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet
2020: Tokyo Ueno Station by Miri Yu, translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles

Best Translated Book Award (2008-current)
Official page; Wikipedia; LT Awards page - given by Three Percent, the online literary magazine of Open Letter Books, the book translation press of the University of Rochester.

Two awards are given every year - for Fiction and for Poetry.
Latest winners (suspended in 2021, winners for 2020):
Fiction: EEG by Daša Drndić, translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth
Poetry: Time by Etel Adnan, translated from French by Sarah Riggs

Australian awards proved somewhat elusive - either I missed one somewhere or they really do not like awards for translations. This section may need an update.

But when they DO give an award, they give it an appropriate name:

Medal for Excellence in Translation (2016-current)
Web page
Latest award: 2020: Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker by Marie Darrieussecq, translated from French by Penny Hueston

The Canadians embrace their dual languages as usual even with their awards:

Governor General's Award for French to English translation(1987-current) - for the ones reading French, this one has the opposite direction as well
Wikipedia page
First winner: 1987: Enchantment and Sorrow: The Autobiography of Gabrielle Roy by Gabrielle Roy, translated by Patricia Claxton.
Latest Winner: 2020: Si tu m'entends/"If You Hear Me" by Pascale Quiviger, translated by Lazer Lederhendler

While I was looking for the different awards, I found a lot of specific language awards, being given by all kinds of different organizations. The list below contains just a few examples (for Arabic, German, French and Italian translations):

The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation (2006-current) - published English translation of a full-length literary work in the Arabic language; awarded by the literary magazine Banipal
Wikipedia page
First winner: 2006: Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury, translated by Humphrey Davies.
Latest Winner: 2020: Velvet by Huzama Habayeb, translated by Kay Heikkinen

Albertine Prize (2017-current) - awarded by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States of America for French writing that has been publicly recognized in the United States of America
Wikipedia page
First winner: 2017: Bardo Or Not Bardo by Antoine Volodine, translated by J.T. Mahany.
Latest Winner: 2020: Muslim by Zahia Rahmani, translated by Matt Reeck

Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize (1996-current) - honoring an outstanding literary translation from German into English.
Wikipedia page
First winner: 1996: Nobodaddy's Children by Arno Schmidt and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, both translated by John E. Woods.
Latest Winner: 2021: An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky, translated by Jackie Smith

Italian Prose in Translation Award (2015-current)
Official site; Wikipedia - Contemporary Italian prose (fiction and literary non-fiction), given by American Literary Translators Association

Latest winners:
I Am God by Giacomo Sartori, translated from Italian by Frederika Randall

A placeholder for awards for translation into a language different than English.

And with this, the thread is officially open. If anyone has any ideas on improvements in formatting or any requests for complete lists or anything else, please do not hesitate. I suspect that I will be tinkering with the thread until New Year's Eve :)

Happy reading, everyone!

Well done, Annie! I've compiled a list of translation prize winners from my library to consider reading for this theme:

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass (1964 PEN Translation Prize)
Hopscotch by Julian Cortázar (1967 National Book Award for Translated Literature)
The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez (1977 PEN Translation Prize)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1991 PEN Translation Prize)
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago (1993 International Foreign Fiction Prize)
The Royal Physician’s Visit by Per Olov Enquist (2003 International Foreign Fiction Prize)
The Maias by José Eça de Maria de Queirós (2008 PEN Translation Prize)
Blooms of Darkness by Aharon Appelfeld (2012 International Foreign Fiction Prize)
Ten White Geese / The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker (2013 International Foreign Fiction Prize)
Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai (2013 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction)
The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck (2015 International Foreign Fiction Prize)
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (2018 Booker International Prize)
Slave Old Man by Patrick Chamoiseau (2019 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction)
The Years by Annie Ernaux (2019 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation)

To answer your questions:

- Which translation awards do you follow?
I mainly follow the Booker International Prize, which was formerly the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the Best Translated Book Award.

- If you read in other languages, do you follow their translation awards?
Not yet, but I hope to be able to read literature in Portuguese and Spanish in the next three to five years.

- No matter how good a translation is and how many awards it wins, the book is never the same. If you can read the book in the original, would you read the award-winning translation or would you read it in the original? Or both?
Hmm. Ultimately I would prefer to read it in the original language, but once I am able to read literature in Spanish and/or Portuguese I would ideally read the original and the English translation side by side, as a fluency aide.

- Even though our quarterly thread is about the winners, do you follow long and short lists?
Absolutely. I have well over a dozen books that were longlisted for the translation awards I follow.

-Do you follow translators the way readers follow authors? If so, which ones?
Not so much. If there is one translator I particularly like, it's Margaret Jull Costa, who has translated works by several leading Portuguese and Spanish authors into English.

A couple of questions. First, can we read books by authors who write in languages other than English who won literary prizes for their body of work, rather than one particular book? I'm thinking mainly of the winners of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, most of whom write in languages other than English, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and to a lesser degree the Man Booker International Prize from 2005-2015, although four of the six winners write in English. Second, do books that win awards in their own country, such as the Prix Goncourt, and are subsequently translated into English count? I own six Prix Goncourt winners that I haven't read yet.

(I suspect that I'm bending the rules with these questions, so I promise that I won't break out my crying towel if you say "No!!")

You may already know this, but one particularly rich source of literary awards in non-English speaking countries is The Literary Saloon at the Complete Review, which has daily updates and links to these awards.

>9 kidzdoc: "First, can we read books by authors who write in languages other than English who won literary prizes for their body of work, rather than one particular book?"

I excluded these (and specifically the early iteration of the International Booker) from my lists because I chose to focus on the translators and their collaboration (direct or not) with the authors and not so much on the authors. With "body of work" awards, that becomes a bit hard - you have multiple translators usually and the award is for the author, not for the translators (they may not even be mentioned - just see Kadare's win of the International Booker or any of the Nobel winners). Ultimately, I think these will belong to a different category: "Authors who won awards for their translated body of work" - that will give us the Nobel, the early International Booker, some foreign awards possibly (because they don't need to win the award in English technically and will even allow one to read in another language (even the author's native). If you want to include them, I cannot stop you but I'd rather propose that as a future topic than try to mix the two topics :)

Second, do books that win awards in their own country and are subsequently translated into English count? I'm thinking mainly of the Prix Goncourt, as there are half a dozen winners I own that I haven't read yet.

Nope. There is a difference between a translation which wins an award and translating an award-winning work. It comes back to my focus on the translators and their craft as opposed to the authors. :) While I was trying to find my focus, that exact question crossed my mind (I was looking at some Russian awards) and I am waiting for the nominations/discussion thread to start so I can propose it as one of next year's categories (although mine would a bit broader "Works which won non-English language awards in their home countries" - you chose if you read it in their language or in translation).

PS: Yep, I've had that one bookmarked for months - probably since I said I will host this topic... it sent me on a LOT of chasing expeditions. :) Thanks for mentioning it though - it is a great site.

>10 AnnieMod: Thanks, Annie; that's absolutely fair. Besides, I already own plenty of books that qualify for this theme!

>11 kidzdoc: Part of why I was considering listing the complete lists was so that people can look at checkmarks here in the thread and see easily what they have - but the checkmarks functionality is a bit broken (if you do not have the book in one of your standard collections, it won't show a checkmark in a thread). So I am working on plan #2 - updating the awards lists pages here in LT and slowly adding links to them above - the checkboxes work there. I was hoping to finish that before the thread was up but work and all that kinda colluded so still in the works.

And then there is a different question - if one owns the work in a different translation, does it count? My thinking is "no" (for the same reason why I said no to both your questions) but people may think differently (and that's why all books I mention have their translator mentioned).

PS: And I just realized I managed to delete one of the prizes I wanted to include (Warwick Prize for Women in Translation). Oops. Added into the UK section now.

I have mixed feelings about this one — for one thing I've always been suspicious of the awards industry, which often seems to be little more than publishers scratching each other's backs — advertising dressed up to make it look like competition — but is still somehow a valuable way to be made aware of interesting books; for another, I've spent my working life in a multilingual world that has given me a great deal of respect for the skills of translators and a roughly equal amount of healthy suspicion of their product.

On the whole, I like to read books in the original where possible, even in languages I have a fairly imperfect command of. So I tend to use shortlists like the Booker International as a guide to interesting books I missed when they first came out, more than as a guide to good translations. Which is unfair to the translators, of course, but probably a bit less evil than seeing a book in a bookshop and then buying it on Amazon...

I do read translations, of course: there are languages I haven't got to yet (Slavic languages and Arabic, for instance) and others I'm never likely to get to (Hungarian, Japanese, ...). And cases where the language is within my grasp but it's simply difficult to find the book in the original (Swedish, Danish). And there, naturally, I do look at translations that have featured on awards lists, amongst other sources of information. But I don't run out and buy every book on the shortlist.

There are celebrated translators I'm aware of — Donald Keene and James Kirkup for Japanese, for instance, George Szirtes and Len Rix for Hungarian — and before I got proficient in their source-languages, of course I read plenty of translations by Margaret Jull Costa and the late Anthea Bell (her Astérix translations were notoriously better than the originals in many cases). But I don't loiter on their doorsteps waiting for new translations to emerge (I do follow one of those people on FaceBook, but for other reasons).

... I've had a look through a couple of those lists of winners, and I seem to have read a surprising number of them (maybe a third of the shortlisted books for the Independent Prize, for instance). And many of the books on Darryl's TBR pile too!

Filtering out those in languages I can read reasonably well, I see a few gaps I might use this theme to fill:
- I've never read Daša Drndić, who appears on quite a few of the lists, and sounds very interesting, if difficult: maybe I should try some of the translations of her work
- Polish writer Pawel Huelle also comes up frequently on the shortlists and I know nothing of his work — I'm sure that would be interesting, I've read very little Polish literature of any kind
- The only modern Hebrew writer I've read is Amos Oz, but there are quite a few others who pop up regularly on the lists, e.g. Aharon Appelfeld, whose Blooms of Darkness (tr. Jeffrey M. Green) won the Independent Prize in 2012.

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For those who read Dutch, there's an overview of the (numerous) prizes offered to translators to or from the Dutch language here: https://www.vertalerslexicon.nl/vertaalprijzen/

The Martinus Nijhoff Prize seems to be the most prestigious. It's been awarded since 1955 for translations into Dutch, with an occasional extra prize for translations from Dutch into other languages. It is usually awarded to an individual translator for a body of work, not for a specific book. The €35 000 prize money gives an idea of how seriously people take translation here. List of winners: https://www.cultuurfonds.nl/laureaten-martinus-nijhoff-vertaalprijs#482

There's another famous prize given in honour of the Russian>Dutch translator Aleida Schot, who was the first Nijhoff laureate in 1955. It's usually awarded for translations from Slavic languages to Dutch: https://www.aleidaschotstichting.nl/laureaten.html

>13 thorold: I find the translation awards, especially the more established ones, to be more reliable quality-wise than the normal ones. Yes - there is always the element of promotion and what's not - the only way not to have that is to judge books with no author names and publishers. And some of them do not even try to hide what they are promoting or why they exist.

Plus in a lot of cases it is not about the award itself per se - the books won't get any visibility without the noise and if the English speaking world, especially the American side of it, needs something it is exposure to new ideas. People will read a book if gets an award and will turn their nose up if it is just there. So... awards it is.

>14 thorold: I am not really surprised - anyone who reads non-English literature often enough will probably realize something similar. The Independent/International Booker list is always interesting to look at - even if not everything clicks, the choices are often interesting enough to make one think. And even on the US side, the big awards had kept up some semblance of quality. :)

>2 AnnieMod: >9 kidzdoc: The Years by Annie Ernaux (2019 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation)

I see Annie Ernaux is being tipped as the next Nobel laureate (e.g. in today’s Guardian). If you don’t know her work, this might be a good moment to read it, just in case they are right for once! (I read it in French about five years ago, and liked it so much that I’ve been working my way through her back-catalogue ever since.)

oh I want to read that!

>17 thorold: I'm quite familiar with Annie Ernaux's works; my LT library has nine of her books, of which I've read seven, all but The Years and Cleaned Out. She meets my LT criteria for Favorite Author, as I've given 4 stars to at least 3 of her books, although I don't hold her in quite the same regard as Hilary Mantel, Sarah Moss, Aminatta Forna, et al.

National Book Awards short list

Translated Literature
Elisa Shua Dusapin, “Winter in Sokcho”
Translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins

Ge Fei, “Peach Blossom Paradise”
Translated from the Chinese by Canaan Morse

Nona Fernández, “The Twilight Zone”
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

Benjamín Labatut, “When We Cease to Understand the World”
Translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West

Samar Yazbek, “Planet of Clay”
Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price

>20 cindydavid4: And none of them counts for the topic until it wins :) On the other hand, if you read all of them, one will count. :)

0h ok, i misunderstood - thought this would be useful. Not sure which one I will read, they all look interesting.

>22 cindydavid4: It is useful :) It just won't count for the thread (except for the one that wins at the end) :)

ok got it ! (did you enjoy the rain yesterday? Soooo nice!)

A distinguished Balkan writer I didn't know about — my first new discovery through this thread. Hawkesworth and Drndić won the 2018 Warwick Prize for Belladonna and the American Best Translated Book Award in 2020 for this book.

Celia Hawkesworth, who before her retirement taught Slavonic languages at the University of London, has translated a lot of the big names from the Balkans — I've read several of her translations of Dubravka Ugrešić, for example.

(I was intending to read Drndić's earlier novel Belladonna first, but this was the one the library had in English):

E.E.G. (2016) by Daša Drndić (Yugoslavia, Croatia, 1946-2018), translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth (UK, 1942- )

 

Drndić uses a reader-baffling technique a little like W G Sebald's in her fiction: she mixes fictional characters with family photos, descriptions of real events and people, tables of historical data, references to books and websites, and so on, constantly reminding us that it's our responsibility as readers to test the trustworthiness of sources. We know that her pessimistic and sometimes paranoid narrator, the clinical-psychologist-turned-writer Andreas Ban (also the narrator of Belladonna), is not Daša Drndić. Except that a lot of the time he obviously is expressing things that she feels very strongly about, and at least some of his friends and the people he admires seem to be people with connections to the author...

The book ranges widely over different topics — the Nazi genocide in the Balkans, Latvia and occupied France, the role of chess-players on both sides in the war, the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and the intolerance and rabid nationalism of the new Croatia, the random and devastating ways mental and physical illnesses destroy the lives of ordinary people, and much else. Ban confronts us with a lot of hard and unpleasant historical realities, and castigates the world for its reluctance to acknowledge past evils and punish those responsible. And for our amnesia concerning the debts we owe to the past, especially the way the successor-states to Yugoslavia try to erase memories of the struggle for liberation from fascism.

A dark, difficult book, but a very rewarding one: I'm only sorry to discover Drndić so late.

--
Dustin Illingworth on E.E.G. in the Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/05/22/dasa-drndics-eeg-and-the-joys-of-...

>25 thorold: "but this was the one the library had in English"

Libraries are weird. Mine does not have this one (yet?) but they have Belladonna and Trieste (which did not win but was nominated in its year).

Which is way too many nominations for the same author. Which made me think about what is translated out from the small languages (the non-colonial, non-major ones) and how that is reflected in awards - once nominated, an author is a lot more likely to be translated again which is a vicious cycle sometimes. And the number of translators from these languages is minuscule compared to the French/Spanish ones for example. So sometimes when I see a long/short list for a translation award, I wonder if they made a specific choice to give preference to the small language (and if that is the case, does it matter that the colonial languages are the languages of a lot of small countries as well). As our previous quarter topic brilliantly demonstrated, the colonial languages are in a category of their own (and are much easier to translate because there is a LOT more material so a lot more translators as well).

And then there is the pure cultural problem. Most of the books I love in Bulgarian will fall flat when translated without a lot of explanations - the shared experience is what makes them my favorite books - and even when a translation works, it is hard to convey 30+ years of history in a sentence when you did not live through it. As different as the major colonial powers are culturally, they cross-pollinated enough (same applies to the Slavic world - there is enough shared history there (a lot of it being defined as hating the same people or trying to kill each other but still...) to help very often when they translations go between them).

Oh well.. just musing about translations and awards and what actually gets translated...

>26 AnnieMod: Libraries are weird

I'm sure there's method to their madness, but it's difficult to see it sometimes. My local library is used mostly by people whose first language is Dutch, so there's not much point in them having translated works in the English section if those books are also available in Dutch. They have Dutch translations of Trieste and Belladonna.

They do make some concessions to expats, e.g. by having Donna Leon stories in German and Spanish as well as English and Dutch. Not Italian, though — I don't know whether we can read anything into that...

I'm sure you're right about "colonial languages" and cultural crossover: I found it pretty easy to get into the world of the African books I was reading in Portuguese because so much of the background is similar to what I'm used to from African fiction in English and French.

...and while we're on the subject of library-weirdness, here's a book that was staring me in the face from the "recent acquisitions" table. Clearly a perfect fit with the letter — if not the spirit — of this theme: it would have been rude not to borrow it.

Hans Boland's translations of Russian 19th century literature into Dutch have won all the translation prizes mentioned in >14 thorold:, and no doubt a few others not mentioned. He was the 2015 winner of the Martinus Nijhoff Prize.

Het Nederlands van Tsjechov: pleidooi voor een emancipatie van de vertaalkunst (2021) by Hans Boland (Netherlands, 1951- )

  

This is essentially a masterclass in translating Chekhov into Dutch, which also acts as companion to Boland's new Dutch translation of thirty Chekhov stories. Wittily, and with a very light touch, Boland takes us through dozens of difficulties in the Russian text and shows us how he arrived at his solutions, at the same time putting forward a spirited defence for his view that the primary objective of literary translation is to allow readers from a different cultural world to enjoy the experience of reading the text in the same way that it was enjoyed by the readers it was originally intended for. He feels that the essence of Chekhov is in his irony and subversive comedy, and that that is lost if we translate him in a solemn, "Russified" nineteenth-century-classic sort of way.

Boland sees his role as something like that of a skilled and tactful copy-editor, helping Chekhov's modern Dutch alter ego Tsj. to present the material he has got from his Russian-speaking colleague Ч. in the best possible way, without misrepresenting him or intruding his own editorial personality too far. That means breaking a lot of the taboos of translation: not only playing fast and loose with the paragraph and sentence-structure of the original to make the syntax more naturally Dutch, adding lexical variation where Chekhov, having fewer words to choose from, repeats himself, and also replacing Russian standard phrases with characteristic idioms that play a similar role in Dutch (even if the literal meaning is quite different). He also does various things to make the text more intelligible to someone unfamiliar with details of Russian life, e.g. by silently replacing patronymics with surnames and making versts into kilometres (without bothering the reader with the 7% difference between the two).

I'm not likely ever to be faced with the challenge of translating nineteenth century Russian into Dutch, and I'm not sure if Boland's style of translation is the one I would be looking for in a classic text, but I still found this a very interesting look over the translator's shoulder.

---
Boland's Chekhov stories are here: De dertig beste verhalen

>28 thorold: Now that is very interesting. Makes me wonder if Peter Urban ever wrote something similar about translating Chekhov. Actually, maybe I should use this quarter to explore his translations that are waiting on the shelf. And he did win a German translation prize, the Helmut M. Braem prize...
Or maybe Karl Dedecius translating Polish authors. I haven't started thinking about this seriously, yet.