The 2007 Risa Domb/Porjes Prize for Translation from the Hebrew Prize

The fourth triennial prize for translations from Hebrew to English was awarded on Thursday 8 November 2007.  The award is sponsored by the Porjes Trust and the Times Literary Supplement, named after the sadly missed Professor of Hebrew Literature Risa Domb and administered by the Jewish Book Council in association with the Society of Authors.

The prize of £2,000 was be awarded to Nicholas de Lange for his translation of A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz.

Nicholas de Lange has worked closely with Amos Oz since 1971 and has translated eleven of his novels, as well as essays and short stories. His translation of Oz's Black Box won the George Webber Prize for translation 1990 and The Same Sea was joint winner of the 2004 Prize.

The winner is announced in the TLS and the prize was awarded at the Society of Authors Literary Translation Prize ceremony.

The British Centre for Literary Translation holds an annual competition for Literary Translation (which includes Hebrew translation). For further details of the John Dryden competition visit
http://www.bcla.org/trancomp.htm

Israel produces a tremendously vibrant and diverse Hebrew literature and one of the highest per capita figures for book ownership in the world. Yet these exciting, creative voices rarely reach into English milieux and into the imaginations of the wider world.

In 1998 the Jewish Book Council unveiled a new initiative, the TLS-Porjes Prize for Hebrew-English Translation, to promote recognition of the skills of Hebrew-English translators. The award is sponsored by the Porjes Trust and the Times Literary Supplement, and administered by the Jewish Book Council in association with the Society of Authors.

The prize of £2,000 is awarded to the winning translator of a full-length book of general interest and literary merit.

The third of these triennial translation prizes, for books published in English in Britain between January 2001 and December 2003, was awarded on 20 September 2004 jointly to Barbara Harshav for her translation of The Labor of Life: Selected Plays by Hanoch Levin and to Nicholas de Lange for his translation of The Same Sea by Amos Oz. The judges were Risa Domb (chair), Avraham Balaban and Ruth Fainlight. Of Barbara Harshav's translation they said, "The Plays of Hanoch Levin are a highly challenging work for a translator. The rhymed songs of the original Hebrew text are ingeniously recreated by Barbara Harshav who sensitively captures the form and spirit of the plays in their entirety." Of Nicholas de Lange's translation they said, "'The Same Sea' is an outstandingly brilliant work, and its poetry and wisdom are beautifully reflected in the translation. De Lange's ability to convey the different rhythms and tones of the original Hebrew text is miraculous."

The Prize was presented at 7.30 on 20 September 2004 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and was followed by the 2004 Sebald Lecture on the Art of Literary Translation, which was given by Carlos Fuentes. The other prizes awarded at the Literary Translation Prizes ceremony were the Scott Moncrieff Prize for French, the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German, the John Florio Prize for Italian and the Premio Valle Inclan for Spanish.

Barbara Harshav
Barbara Harshav began her professional career as an historian and became a published translator more than twenty years ago. Her Hebrew translations include works of fiction, history, poetry, and drama by such prominent authors as S.Y. Agnon, Yehudah Amichai, Hanoch Levin, Meir Shalev, Michal Govrin, and Yitzhak Zuckerman. She also translates widely from German, French, and Yiddish. In the last four years, she has taught a course on translation in the Comparative Literature department of Yale University.

Nicholas de Lange
Nicholas de Lange read Classics at Oxford, and now teaches at Cambridge. He has translated from Greek, French, and Hebrew, and has served as Chair of the Translators Association. He has worked closely with Amos Oz since the early 1970s, and has translated fourteen books by him, the latest being the autobiographical novel 'A Tale of Love and Darkness'.

The previous prizewinners were Dalya Bilu for Open Heart by A. B. Yehoshua (Peter Halban) in 1998, and Peter Cole for The Poems of Ibn Gabirol (Princeton Press) and Nicholas de Lange for A Journey to the End of the Millennium by A. B. Yehoshua (Peter Halban) in 2001.