US PEN Translation Prize to Donald O. White

The PEN America Center announced the winners of its literary awards a couple of days ago. Scroll down, down, down to the PEN Translation Prize, which has been awarded to Donald O. White for Albert Vigoleis Thelen's Island of Second Sight.

I'm very pleased indeed. My friend Amanda DeMarco reviewed the novel for Three Percent earlier this year, so I know it must be outstanding. And White got an honorary mention for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize too. I've been feeling eternally guilty because the British publishers sent me a big fat review copy a couple of years ago (the book came out in the UK in 2011). At which I baulked slightly - a 450,000-word novel about bohemian adventures in 1930s Mallorca! - and passed it on to someone else to read, who presumably baulked as well and passed it on to... and so on. Which is why there's no love german books review.

And that's been somewhat of a pattern, I suspect. The story of how the English translation came to be published is an inspiring one. The Cambridge-based translator Isabelle Weiss rediscovered the novel, which was first published in the Netherlands in 1953; too anti-fascist for German publishers even then. And she found out that the American Germanist Donald O. White (don't you love the name overlap?) had been working on a translation for twenty-odd years. A labour of love, I believe we call this. So they spent a year or so approaching major UK publishers with the manuscript, all of whom said no. It was too long and too obscure. In the end, a friend - Robert Hyde - who'd been in on it all from the beginning, decided to revive his old publishing house and bring the translation out himself.

It helped that Thomas Mann and Paul Celan had praised the book in the 1950s. The novel got favourable reviews in serious publications and was then picked up by Overlook Press in the US. Where they certainly know how to honour translators, if not in monetary terms then at least in terms of high-profile awards. White receives $3500 from PEN and the knowledge that a lot of people appreciate his hard work and excellent translation. 

I think this is a great success story, one to remind us that it is OK to publish long, obscure books in translation. Specially for Donald, Isabelle and Robert - and by way of apology - here's the world's biggest band playing their tune in suitably ecstatic manner.

Helen and Kurt Wolff Translators' Prize to Philip Boehm

As the Goethe Institut announced a while ago (and I only just noticed on one of my regular (but obviously not regular enough) trawls through the Literary Saloon), this year's prestigious Helen and Kurt Wolff Translators' Prize for translations from German to English published in the USA has gone to Philip Boehm for Gregor von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol. I met Philip, a multilingual theatre director in St Louis, a year or so ago, so I'm very pleased to see him win this award.

Honorable Mention goes to Donald O. White for his translation of A.V. Thelen’s novel The Island of Second Sight. As far as I'm aware, it's White's untiring efforts we have to thank for being able to read this book in English in the first place.

Congratulations to both!

BTBA Longlist / Four Point Five Percent

First of all, the fiction longlist for the Best Translated Book Award has been announced - and includes four books translated from German:

Awakening to the Great Sleep War by Gert Jonke, translated from the German by Jean M. Snook (Dalkey Archive Press; Austria)

The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller, translated from the German by Philip Boehm (Metropolitan Books; Romania)

Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Thelen, translated from the German by Donald O. White (Overlook; Germany)

My Father’s Book by Urs Widmer, translated from the German by Donal McLaughlin (Seagull Books; Switzerland)

My fingers are crossed quite hard, although not equally for all four.

And then, speaking of Three Percent, Literature Across Frontiers has published a report on translation statistics in the UK and Ireland. At last, someone's done a study - and come up with some figures. According to LAF, translations constitute 2.5% of published titles (all literary genres including biography, literary criticism and others) and 4.5% of published literary titles (fiction, poetry and drama) in the UK and Ireland. German was the second-most translated language in the years under review (after French and before Spanish). The study used data from the British Library, which is more reliable than the Index Translationum for various reasons, as the author reports.

I've oversimplified. The two categories in particular are more complicated and especially interesting for anyone who's worked in a library with the Dewey Decimal system - oh those 800s! The main part of the study is only 28 pages long and well worth a read - especially for publishers. There are some great appendices too including useful resources - a list of publishers who do translations, for instance. Here's my favourite quote:

As previous reports have shown, the status of the translators themselves is precarious in the UK, with reviewers, for example, sometimes even failing to mention that the work is a translation, and failing to name the translator. Publishers play the most important role in raising the profile of translators and translation – and in this apparently small matter, they can make a significant difference.

The small matter is providing the industry with detailed data, but obviously publishers can and do make all sorts of significant differences.