This year, as a contribution to Women in Translation Month, created by Meytal Radzinski in 2014, the PEN America Translation Committee conceived a series of blog posts featuring books written by women that have won the PEN Translation Prize and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, as well as books by female authors that were published after having received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant.
In the final two posts of the series, we expand the concept to feature the books translated by women that have won the PEN Translation Prize and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Both awards were established in order to honor the art of the literary translator and are accompanied by a $3,000 prize.
The fact that PEN America’s translation prizes have gone disproportionately to books written or translated by men over the years illustrates the problem that Radzinski identified in December 2013, when she first noticed, and documented, as she later put it, “this startling skew.”
Click here for an account of how Women in Translation Month came into being, and a look at some of the efforts aimed at getting more female authors translated into English and more people reading them. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow the conversation at #womenintranslation and #WITMonth. Also, please visit Women in Translation (WiT), a Tumblr I cofounded with Alta L. Price, which draws its inspiration from VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and investigates gender disparities within the world of literary translation.
In its 56 years of existence, the PEN Translation Prize has been awarded to a total of 67 translators (translator-collaborators are eligible and have won on several occasions). Of the 67 winners, only 19 have been women. Things are changing, however: In the past decade, women translators have received the honor six times.
The following is a list of the award-winning women, along with the title of the work they translated and its author. We hope you’ll be inspired to pick some of them up and read them this month—and keep on reading women in translation (writers and translators) in all the months to come!
2016: Katrina Dodson, for her translation from the Portuguese of The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector Amazon | Indiebound
2015: Denise Newman, for her translation from the Danish of Baboon by Naja Marie Aidt Amazon | Indiebound
2014: Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov, for their translation from the Russian of Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky Amazon | Indiebound
2009: Natasha Wimmer, for her translation from the Spanish of 2666 by Roberto Bolaño Amazon | Indiebound
2008: Margaret Jull Costa, for her translation from the Spanish of The Maias by Eça de Queirós Amazon | Indiebound
2007: Sandra Smith, for her translation from the French of Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky Amazon | Indiebound
2004: Margaret Sayers Peden, for her translation from the Spanish of Sepharad by Antonio Muñoz Molina Amazon | Indiebound
2002: Larissa Volokhonsky with Richard Pevear, for their translation from the Russian of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Amazon | Indiebound
1996: Clare Cavanagh with Stanislaw Baranczak, for their translation from the Polish of View With a Grain of Sand by Wisława Szymborska Amazon | Indiebound
1991: Larissa Volokhonsky with Richard Pevear, for their translation from the Russian of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky Amazon | Indiebound
1988: Madeline Levine and Francine Prose, for their translation from the Polish of A Scrap of Time by Ida Fink Amazon | Indiebound
1986: Barbara Bray, for her translation from the French of The Lover by Marguerite Duras Amazon | Indiebound
1985: Helen R. Lane, for her translation from the Spanish of The War at the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa Amazon
1979: Adrienne Foulke, for her translation from the Italian of One Way or Another by Leonardo Sciascia Amazon
1975: Helen R. Lane, for her translation from the Spanish of Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo Amazon | Indiebound
1972: Clara Winston and Richard Winston, for their translation from the German of Letters of Thomas Mann Amazon | Indiebound
1967: Harriet de Onis, for her translation from the Portuguese of Sagarana by João Guimarães Rosa