ALTA Honors Translations of Czech
The $5,000 prize is given annually to the translator whose work, by virtue of both its quality and significance, has made the most valuable contribution to literary translation.
Zucker, a freelance translator based in the U.S., has translated two novels and numerous short stories, as well as plays, poems and song lyrics. His translation of Czech author Jáchym Topol’s first novel, City Sister Silver, was selected for inclusion in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.
All This Belongs to Me chronicles the lives of three generations of women in a Mongolian family whose differing points of view reveal complex identities and dramatic secrets beneath the daily rhythms of nomadic existence and the modern realities of living in Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar.
The final jury for this year’s National Translation Award called All This Belongs to Me “beautifully fluent translation that portrays each character in convincingly idiomatic English, and yet still manages to distinguish the five closely related main characters according to their individual temperaments. The story is compelling on personal and broader, political levels, the characters are deeply human, and their difficult choices are portrayed with great dignity. All in all, this is a book to be savored and treasured.”
“It is truly an honor to receive this award,” Zucker said. “[The book]was a challenge to translate mainly because of its five different narrators — five women, each with her own voice and own style of storytelling. But Hůlová put much of her knowledge of the place, including language, into her book, so another challenge was to do the research — geography, history, customs, religion, construction of yurts, and life on the steppe — required to make the text come alive for the English-speaking reader.”
ALTA, which is housed at The University of Texas at Dallas, is a broad-based organization dedicated to promoting literary translation through services to literary translators, forums on the theory and practice of translation, and collaboration with the international literary community. For more information, please visit www.literarytranslators.org.
Taken from web of The University of Texas at Dallas
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