Applications for the Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry in Translation are now being accepted from ATA members in good standing. The award recognizes individual solutions to an imaginative and creative solutions to a particular translation challenge.

This award of $250 and certificate of recognition is open to all areas of translation, e.g. literary, medical, legal, etc.

Send a sample of 750 words or less (From French or Spanish into English, or from English into French or Spanish) by the deadline of June 1, 2009. 

The winner will be announced during ATA’s 50th Annual Conference in New York City on October 28–31, 2009.

The Texas Institute of Letters has named AATIA member Marian Schwartz’s translation of White Guard a finalist for the Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Translation.  The winner will be announced at TIL’s April 18 annual meeting at the Hilton Waco Hotel.

Belgian Paul Verhaeghen, who won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his novel Omega Minor, has decided to donate his prize money to the ACLU. Normally the prize is split between author and translator, but having translated his own novel into English from the original Dutch, he won the entire prize.

An excerpt from his acceptance statement (which can be found in its entirety on his blog Babylon Blues:

…to avoid supporting the regime with more tax dollars than I already owe them, I have asked the Arts Council England to donate the money associated with the Prize, all 10,000 pounds of it, to the American Civil Liberties Union. Withholding the tax portion of those 10,000 pounds from the US Treasury will shorten the war by a mere eye-blink - its cost is currently 3,810 dollar per second - but the ACLU can use that money to great effect in their legal battles against torture, detainee abuse, and the silence surrounding it.

We are not immune to history. But neither is history immune to us.

Thanks to Marian Schwartz for passing along this amazing news, which she found on E.J. Van Lanen’s Three Percent. 

The PEN American Center has announced the winner of this year’s Translation Prize, and it couldn’t have gone to a more accomplished translator. This year’s award goes to Margaret Jull Costa for her translation into English from the Portuguese of The Maias (New Directions) by Eça de Queirós.

From the judges’ citation:

Over the years Margaret Jull Costa has produced a number of notable translations of the fiction of Eça de Queirós, the great Portuguese novelist, who is widely considered to be one of the major European novelists of the 19th century, often ranked with Flaubert, Balzac, Dickens, and Tolstoy. Most recently, Margaret Jull Costa turned her hand to Os Maias, Eça de Queirós’s greatest work, and the results are stunning. The sensuous elegance of the prose vividly captures the greatness of the original, bringing the novel to life for the reader in a way only the most masterful of translations can do. Clearly a labor of love, Margaret Jull Costa’s brilliant translation of The Maias stands as a masterpiece in its own right. Eça de Queirós lives in English!