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National Translation Award Each year, the ALTA National Translation Award
honors a translator whose work, by virtue of both its quality and
significance, has made an extraordinary contribution to literary
translation during the preceding year. The award carries a $2,500
stipend. Each year, more than 100 translations from at least two dozen
languages are entered for consideration.
(Details on submitting books for this award can be found here.)
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. The Albahari text produces its effect by doggedly maintaining an understated narrative in an unbroken, unremitting paragraph of a tone that varies from grim irony to a lightness that never falls into frivolity, for one hundred fifty pages. The tension and balance between content and tone are essential to the success of this novel. Elias-Bursac’s translation sustains the disparate elements without wavering. “I live in one of those modern neighborhoods, and when I look outside, I see only the high-rises across the way and a patch of sky. The sky over the Fairgrounds is far larger, and by the same token more helpless, which, actually, was a comfort to the prisoners at the camp, because when the sky is close, then life is very far away. I don’t know where I read that, maybe I’ve made it all up, there is no mention of sky in any of the witness statements. But who could think of something so ephemeral, surrounded by barbed wire and caught between the freezing cold and starvation? Now Götz, on the other hand, or Meyer, loved looking up at the sky, especially at clouds, and often, even while they were driving, he would try to get Meyer, if it wasn’t Götz after all, to spot all sorts of shapes in them: an elephant, for instance, or a zeppelin.” 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. David Albahari was born in Serbia and lives now in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He has published eight collections of short stories and eight novels in Serbian. For information about previous winners, click here. |
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