Best Translated Book of 2008
Rochester University’s online magazine of literature in translation, Three Percent, is awarding a prize for the Best Translated Book of 2008. Of the 25 works on the longlist, which includes novels by Marcel Proust, José Saramago, Halldór Laxness, Stefan Zweig and Roberto Bolaño, three are translations from Hungarian, by: Ferenc Karinthy (1921-92), Metropole, translated by George Szirtes, Telegram (original: Epepe, 1970); Imre Kertész (b. 1929), Detective Story, translated by Tim Wilkinson, Knopf (original: Nyomkereső, 1977); and Attila Bartis (b. 1968), Tranquillity, translated by Imre Goldstein, Archipelago (original: A nyugalom, 2001). Of these three, Bartis has made it onto the shortlist of 10.
The overall winner will be announced on 19 February.
All three works were translated into German before English. Hungarian authors, living and dead, have enjoyed something of a resurgence on the international literary field, thanks initially to the German reading public’s appetite for twentieth-century Hungarian prose. Kertész, Esterházy and Nádas are all German-speakers, and will supervise their German translations closely, but not necessarily the English. A number of recent well-known publications of Hungarian literature in English were translated from the German translation. The above three publications, however are translated direct from the Hungarian, and assessed by the judging panel according to how the text ‘works’ in English on its own terms, and whether it holds together, as a whole. It’s encouraging to see the (slowly) increasing number of works available in good translation, and the recognition of Hungarian writers for their quality, rather than for being Hungarian.
UPDATE: The winner in the prose category was Bartis’s Tranquillity (trans. Imre Goldstein), and in the poetry category, Takashi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (trans. Sawako Nakayasu).