National Translation Award
Past Winners

2007

The 2007 National Translation Award Winner is Joel Agee for his translation of The Selected Writings of Friedrich Dürrenmatt.

2006

The 2006 Award Winner is Ellen Elias-Bursac for her translation of David Albahri's Serbian novel Götz and Meyer. Götz and Meyer is the imaginative reconstruction, through the voice of a Serbian teacher, of two Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern-like noncommissioned SS officers engaged in gassing Jews, as the narrator comes to terms with destruction of his own people and the implications of history.

Ellen Elias-Bursac taught Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian in the Harvard Slavic Department from 1994 to 2005. While at Harvard she co-chaired the South East Europe Study Group at the Center for European Studies. She lived in Zagreb from 1972 to 1990 where she worked as a free-lance translator and coordinated American study-abroad programs for Macalester College and the ACM-GLCA consortia at the Zagreb Faculty of Philosophy. She has also taught at Tufts University. She is currently living in the Netherlands. Götz and Meyer is one of three books by David Albahari that Elias-Bursac has translated.

2005

The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius, translated by Vincent Katz, (Princeton University Press, 2004)
On November 3, 2005, the American Literary Translators Association presented the National Translation Award to poet and translator Vincent Katz during a reception at the 28th annual ALTA conference at the Hotel Omni Mont-Royal in Montreal, Canada.

Katz received the award for his translation of the complete elegies of the first-century BCE Roman poet Sextus Propertius (published by Princeton University Press). The critic Robert Creeley has described the work as "a consummate labor of love, which has managed to translate the ageless sophistication of [Propertius] into the distracted dissonance of our own perilous times."

2004

The 2004 National Translation Award went to Aron Aji, for his translation of The Garden of Departed Cats
by Turkish writer Bilge Karasu (published by New Directions). Karasu (1930-1995) was known for his “allegorical” tales, without conventional plot or characters. Aji also translated Karasu's Death in Troy (2002), and has translated fiction by the authors Elif Shafak and Marathan Mungan.

2003

Jo Anne Engelbert received the 2003 National Translation Award for her translation of Roberto Sosa's The Return of the River, published by Curbstone Press. Engelbert has translated some forty Spanish American writers, including José Marti, Isabelle Allende, Ariel Dorfmann, Claribel Alegria, and Jorge Luis Borges.

Roberto Sosa is the leading contemporary poet of Honduras. He has published some six books of poetry and three of prose, as well as two anthologies of Honduran literature. He has won the Adonais Prize in Spain and the Casa de las Americas Prize in Cuba. We're pleased to provide an excerpt of the winning translation of The Return of the River.

2002

2002 National Translation Award winners are E.H. and A.M. Blackmore for their translation of Selected Poems of Victor Hugo: A Bilingual Edition (University of Chicago Press). Here is an excerpt of the winning translation of Selected Poems of Victor Hugo: A Bilingual Edition.

2001

Danuta Borchardt for her translation from the Polish of Ferdydurke (Yale University Press) by Witold Gombrowicz. To read an excerpt, click here.

2000

Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Lin, for Chu T'ien-Wen's Notes of a Desolate Man (Columbia University Press).

1999

Peter Constantine, for Anton Chekhov's The Undiscovered Chekhov: Thirty-Eight New Stories (Seven Stories Press).

1998

Carolyn Tipton, for Rafael Alberti's To Painting (Northwestern University Press).