Author News
PEN Literary Awards Winners
A few of the big winners: DeLillo takes the Saul Bellow award for Achievement in American Fiction. Anne Carson wins for Poetry in Translation for An Oresteia from the Greek, and, in a separate translation prize, Michael Henry Heim wins for Wonder by Hugo Claus, from the Dutch. This caught my eye because Heim’s translation of Mann’s Death in Venice pretty much made my summer. I feel like I’ll read anything that guy turns English. Anyway, full list below the fold.
PEN Announces the Recipients of the 2010 PEN Literary Awards
| PEN American Center, the largest branch of the world’s oldest literary and human rights organization, announced today the winners of the 2010 PEN Literary Awards. Each year, with the help of its partners and supporters, PEN confers over $100,000 to writers, editors, and translators. Two new prizes are included in this year’s awards: The PEN/Edward and Lily Tuck Award for Paraguayan Literature and The PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. The winners and runners-up will be honored on Wednesday, October 13, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. The ceremony will begin at 6:30 p.m. and will be followed by a reception. |
| PEN/SAUL BELLOW AWARD FOR ACHIEVEMENT IN AMERICAN FICTION ($25,000)
Winner: Don DeLillo PEN/ROBERT BINGHAM FELLOWSHIP FOR WRITERS ($35,000) Winner: Paul Harding for Tinkers (Bellevue Literary Press) Runners-up: Terrence Holt for In the Valley of the Kings (W. W. Norton & Company) Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa for Daughters of the Stone (Thomas Dunne Books) PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD ($5,000) Winner: Michael Scammell for Koestler (Random House) Runners-up: Jonathan Bate for Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare (Random House) Graham Farmelo for The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom (Basic Books) PEN/W.G. SEBALD AWARD FOR A FICTION WRITER IN MID-CAREER ($10,000) Winner: Susan Choi PEN/LAURA PELS FOUNDATION AWARD FOR A MASTER AMERICAN DRAMATIST (Prize consists of a gift from Bauman Rare Books) Winner: David Mamet PEN/ LAURA PELS FOUNDATION AWARD FOR AN AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT IN MID-CAREER ($7,500) Winner: Theresa Rebeck PEN/ESPN AWARD FOR LITERARY SPORTS WRITING ($5,000) Winner: Marshall Jon Fisher for A Terrible Splendor: Three Extraordinary Men, a World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played (Crown) Runners-up: Wil Haygood for Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson (Knopf) Richard Hoffer for Something in the Air: American Passion and Defiance in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics (Free Press) Warren St. John for Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town (Spiegel & Gray) PEN/PHYLLIS NAYLOR WORKING WRITER FELLOWSHIP ($5,000) Winner: Pat Schmatz PEN/VOELCKER AWARD FOR POETRY ($5,000) Winner: Marilyn Hacker PEN/TUCK AWARD FOR PARAGUAYAN LITERATURE ($3,000) Winner: Esteban Bedoya for El apocalipsis según Benedicto (Arandurã Editorial) PEN AWARD FOR POETRY IN TRANSLATION ($3,000) Winner: Anne Carson for her translation from the Greek of An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides (Faber & Faber) Runners-up: Seamus Heaney for his translation from the Scots of The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables by Robert Henryson (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) Rika Lesser for her translation from the Swedish of Mozart’s Third Brain by Göran Sonnevi (Yale University Press) PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE ($3,000) Winner: Michael Henry Heim for his translation from the Dutch of Wonder by Hugo Claus (Archipelago Books) Runners-up: Esther Allen for her translation from the Spanish of Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto (Grove Press) David Constantine for his translation from the German of Faust 2 by Goethe (Penguin Classics) PEN OPEN BOOK AWARDS ($1,000) Winners: Sherwin Bitsui for Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press) Robin D.G. Kelley for Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press) Canyon Sam for Sky Train: Tibetan Women on the Edge (University of Washington Press) |
Did I miss something? Tinkers bored me shitless.
i hate that: being bored to death by books feted/recommended as exemplary. makes me think i’m a broken reader.
Thanks for posting this, Justin. I’m generally pretty excited about what PEN does (though sure, I’m biased). I’m happy to see Don DeLillo get more praise, and like you, I’m a Heim fan.
But speaking on translations: I’m curious what yr (and others’) thoughts are on the Carson translation. I posted a few months back about various translations of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, including this now award-winning Carson. People seemed to love what she did, but I’m ambivalent. Her translations are very liberal. I understand translation is more than merely translating from one language to another, but she stretches the text almost beyond recognition. Also, what do people think about her decision to call it An Oresteia–a collection Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Sophocles’s Elektra, and Euripedes’s Orestes–as opposed to The Oresteia by Aeschylus? Again, I’m ambivalent. On one hand, it’s certainly fascinating to examine these three different authors’ take on this powerhouse story; on the other hand, their differences are not highlighted but fettered because of Carson’s unmistakable translation style, beautiful though it may sometimes be. I don’t know. Someone convince me of something.
lily, Carson calls her three-play version An Oresteia because it’s not “The Oresteia by Aeschylus”.
If you click on her name in the prize list appended to Justin’s remarks, you’ll go to her discussion of the genesis of the book at the (a?) PEN site, where she reports that, when the three-play set was suggested to her, she replied, “I said ‘Who needs this?’ — meaning, Aischylos has already given an Oresteia richer than rubies of which lots of good translations exist[.]” She goes on to indicate ‘why’.
(Of course, we only get the first part of Aeschylus’s trilogy among Carson’s three-play version.)
I think, in translating so vigorously, Carson means for her versions to instigate conflict about meaning, that is, about the meaning of some particular source-text, about the meaning of going ‘from’ language ‘to’ (another) language, and, especially, about linguistic practice “translating” the language user. She wants you not so much to pounce on her for getting words wrong – though that’s probably ok with her – , but rather to explain to yourself why another locution would be ‘more accurate’, and, in this way, to come to understand her choices (quarrel with them how you might).
Calling her version An Oresteia sounds, to me, inferior to ‘An Atreia’, or maybe ‘A Mycenaeia’ (?). Commercial considerations? – that is, a familiar title.
Making a four-play set, and including Euripides’ Electra between Sophocles’ Electra and his own Orestes, might have been interesting with respect to encouraging the different Greek versions (through the 5th c.) to be read as a comment on Athens’ changing political self-understanding.
I’m gonna defer to deadgod on this, Lily. S/he seems to have a pretty good handle on it, and I actually haven’t read the Carson translation, so I don’t have an opinion on it. I just assumed it/she would be a highlight for folks reading here.
Hi Deadgod: Yes, I fully understand the difference between “an” and “the.” I’ve read the interview, as well as her commentary on her decision to combine the three texts into one Oresteia (which is in the introduction to the book). I’ve also read the text itself. A couple times, actually, but it’s been a while. My question has more to do with others’ reactions to her translation and decision to combine these texts, which as I said above, makes me ambivalent. I very much so like the idea of her putting these texts between two covers. I like the conversation that emerges from their juxtaposition. And I don’t think translation is about “getting the words right.” My point was simply that the conversation that might emerge from the juxtaposition is coloured through Carson’s translation style. That is, they all sound like Carson, which isn’t necessarily a bad or negative thing. Mostly, I’m just interested in people’s thoughts on the matter. I like both Carson and the Greeks. I’m not trying to wage a war here and certainly not with you.
And, I appreciate your point that this collection comments on “Athens’ changing political self-understanding.”
One might consider what bores one shitless and figure out why. Perhaps it’s a shortcoming of the observer, not the observed.
I’m not “trying to wage a war here”, either, lily, as you might tell by looking again at the inoffensive nature of the comments I made.
You asked, “[W]hat do people think about her decision to call it An Oresteia […] as opposed to The Oresteia by Aeschylus?” – and I thought your question was literal. (I guess I should have read: ‘why put these three together instead of the Oresteia?’ (?).)
As I said, she explained how these three plays came together under her translational impress, which I thought – I guess: mistakenly – was what you were interested in.
I see now that you’re more interested in how her heavy translator’s hand actually serves to suppress the differences between the plays, rather than to raise them thematically into view. (- which differences, I thought, were what you were more after.)
I meant, by “she wants you not so much to pounce on her [. . .] quarrel with them how you might”, “you” in the sense of ‘one’, not “you, lily”. After all, you, lily, said nothing about ‘inaccuracy’, just ‘liberality’. (Usually I turn to the ‘one’ address for just this reason.)
I think translation is “about ‘getting the words right'” – which ‘getting right’, of course, would entail everything that “the words”, and one’s reading of them, would disclose. As I suggest, I think Carson is willing to risk inaccuracy in order to get her interpretation of ‘what the words are really saying’ across – as you say, “very liberal”.
Carson herself, quoting Kulick, made the point that these three plays, yoked together, present “three different vantage points of Athenian history[, which] ‘would offer a unique perspective on the Athenian moment'[.]”
Deadgod: I just meant I didn’t want to wage a war over something I essentially like. And I feel ill-equipped to war on this subject, most subjects really. Also, it was a lame joke, you know, the multiple layers of “war” (I’m taking a cue from Carson & using the word/metaphor liberally here) in the Oresteia.
Don’t dismiss how well-equipped you are. We could join forces and invade Freedonia.
Yeah, I asked if I missed anything because I’m ignoring my shortcomings.
yes, let’s.
Wonder is pretty good, though, of everything I read on Archipelago last year, I think Plants Don’t Drink Coffee was my favorite. Then again, I have no idea how one goes about awarding for translation. It seems fucking-a difficult. How do you even get judges together for that? Do they all have to know every original language that the books under consideration were written in? And even then, couldn’t a shitty book be tranlated brilliantly?
glad the Anne Carson did well. Her translations are the funniest and most unique and more so than any other translator she seems part ‘author’ of a text. Really, I don’t read a new Anne Carson translation as “Saapho” or “Euripides”–I read it as a new book by Anne Carson.