Translation Prizes: Ethical and Aesthetic Responsibilities of the Jury

What responsibilities does this entail for the judges of these prizes? This brings up questions such as: is there a contemporary aesthetics of translation? What are the ethical considerations involved in judging, and how do these evolve within changing social and political environments? Participants in this panel include judges of the 2020 PEN Translation Award, among other prizes.

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Moderator

Elizabeth Lowe translates from Brazilian and Lusophone Portuguese and Spanish. The Brazilian Academy of Letters recognized her translation of Euclides da Cunha’s Backlands (2010). She teaches in NYU’s Master’s in Translation, founded the University of Illinois Center for Translation Studies, and is a member of the PEN Translation Committee.

Presenters

Jim Hicks is Editor of The Massachusetts Review and teaches at UMass Amherst. His translations include texts by Italo Calvino, Ananda Devi, Juan José Saer, Izet Sarajlić, and Erri De Luca. His books Lessons from Sarajevo (2013) and And There Will Be Singing (coeditor, 2019), were published by UMass Press. Geoffrey C. Howes translates from German. Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green State University (Ohio), he has published book translations of Peter Rosei, Robert Musil, Jürg Laederach, and Gabriele Petricek, and shorter texts by more than thirty authors, mostly Austrian. He is Assistant Editor of No Man’s Land. Jenny McPhee is a novelist and translator of books by Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Anna Maria Ortese, Curzio Malaparte, and Pope John Paul II. An administrator and faculty member at NYU, she has taught at Princeton and the European School of Literary Translation. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.