Translation Prizes 2011
The Times Literary Supplement, together with the Translators Association of the Society of Authors, is pleased to announce the winners of this year's Translation Prizes
Adrian Tahourdin
"One of the appealing aspects of this year’s excellent list of translation prizewinners is the light it casts on writers who will be unfamiliar to readers in Britain: only the Nobel laureate Günter Grass and, to a lesser extent Javier Marías, of the authors represented, can be said to be at all well known in this country.
Valerio Magrelli, who was born in 1957, has taught French literature at various universities in Italy and published translations of Mallarmé, Valéry and Verlaine. His early work caught the eye of Joseph Brodsky – “I’ve seen things by a young poet that I like very much. His name is Magrelli” – and a selection has now appeared in English: The Embrace: Selected poems (109pp. Faber. Paperback, £9.99. 978 0 571 25176 6), translated by the poet and TLS contributor Jamie McKendrick, wins this year’s John Florio Prize for translation from Italian. In his Note on the Translation, McKendrick reveals that he had been working on Magrelli for a while and that “what had drawn [him] in the first instance to a particular poem was latent or lying in wait with the same intensity of recognition in far more poems than [he’d] expected”. He goes on to suggest that “the translator is in the first place a kind of ‘listener-out’, and then must go on to listen in, must thoroughly absorb what’s alien to make it his or her own”. In his TLS review (April 9, 2010), Peter Hainsworth noted how poet and translator “both have a liking for self-deflating irony, for low-key tones, at times for anti-poetry”, best seen perhaps in the selection from Didascalie per la lettura di un giornale (“Instructions for reading a newspaper”, 1999), with its short lyrics “Date”, “Price” and “Bar Code”. Hainsworth sees Magrelli as a “philosophical poet . . . serious, ludic, unsettling”. He might have had “The Boundary” in mind: “The boundary between my life and another’s death / passes through the sofa in front of the TV, / a pious shoreline where we receive / our daily bread of horror”...."
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