Melville House’s The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven, has won the Best Translated Book Award for Fiction, while the Ugly Duckling Presse book The Russian Version by Elena Fanailova, has won the award for poetry. Hareven’s book was translated from the Hebrew byDalya Bilu, and The Russian Version was translated by Stephanie Sandler and Genya Turovskaya.The award was announced Wednesday night at the Idlewild Bookstore in New York City. The prize is administered by the University of Rochester’s Three Percent, an organization that promotes international literature. The award is, as Three Percent noted in its press release, “the only prize of its kind to honor the best original works of international literature and poetry published in the U.S. over the past year.”
“We’re delighted to receive this award on behalf of the author, Gail Hareven,” said Melville House co-publisher Dennis Loy Johnson, “as it represents what we see as part of our mission at Melville House: Not to publish both fiction and nonfiction in translation just for the sake of essentially preserving it, as if it were something on the verge of going extinct. That strikes us as a way of further ensuring its obscurity. Rather, we see it as our mission to trumpet that work loudly, and to work aggressively to get that work in the hands of as many people as possible, especially those who would not normally encounter translated literature.”
Ugly Duckling’s Matvei Yankelevich said, “It’s a great honor to receive this award — it’s a wonderful public recognition of Genya and Stephanie’s courage in taking on the imposing task (so often deemed ‘impossible’) of translating a great poet. We should all be grateful to the judges who gave of their time and to the people at Three Percent (and other organizations involved) for shining a little light on literary translation, if only once a year.”
The fiction judges were Monica Carter, Scott Esposito, Susan Harris, Annie Janusch, Brandon Kennedy, Bill Marx, Michael Orthofer, Chad W. Post and Jeff Waxman. Poetry judges were Brandon Holmquest, Jennifer Kronovet, Idra Novey, Kevin Prufer, and Matthew Zapruder.
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