THE TLS-RISA DOMB/PORJES PRIZE

FOR HEBREW-ENGLISH TRANSLATION

2010

The fifth triennial prize for books translated from Hebrew into English was presented at the Society of Authors’ translation award ceremony, held at King’s Place on January 31st. This prize is sponsored by the Porjes Trust in association with the Times Literary Supplement and is administered by the Jewish Book Council. The prize of £2,000 is awarded to the winning translator of a full-length book of general interest and literary merit. This year’s prize was open to books published in England between January 2007 and December 2009.

  First prize was awarded to Peter Cole for his extraordinary collection of medieval poetry: The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950-1492 (Princeton University Press, 2007). Gabriel Josipovici, one of the prize’s judges, described The Dream in glowing terms for the TLS as ‘a treasure trove, a labour of love and exceptional erudition, which will open up… a world of poetry as rich as anything in human civilization’. Another judge emphasised the challenge posed to the translator in communicating the intricacies of medieval Hebrew poetry for a contemporary readership, with its ‘elaborate verbal virtuosity… prevalent textual allusions and subtle wordplay’.       

Evan Fallenberg won the runner-up prize for his superb rendition of Beaufort (Vintage Books 2009). Ron Leshem’s award-winning novel about soldiers situated in a remote outpost in Southern Lebanon ‘deserves to be ranked with the finest war fiction’, according to Adrian Tahourdin of the TLS. Tsila Ratner observed in her award justification that Evan Fallenberg ‘creatively transfers the colloquial and idiosyncratic language from one cultural context to another. Humour, macabre irony, love and fear are all conveyed through the reconstruction of the young soldiers' authentic language in English’.

Peter Stothard, Editor of the TLS, awarded the prizes and Peter Cole gave a spellbinding account of his work, reciting “The Market” by Shmuel HaNagid to an enthralled audience. He told us that Shmuel HaNagid was not only one of the greatest Hebrew poets of all time, but head (Nagid) of the Jewish community of Iberia, chief vizier (or prime minister) of the city-state of Granada under a Berber king and commander of its Muslim army. Other translators received enthusiastic responses also when they read from their works. The under-sung art of translation was duly celebrated throughout the evening, culminating in Ali Smith’s talk as this year’s Sebald lecturer.

Peter Cole is the author of What is Doubled: Poems, 1981-1998 and Things on Which I’ve Stumbled. His translations from Hebrew and Arabic include War & Love, Love & War by Aharon Shabtai and So What: New & Selected Poems by Taha Muhammad Ali. The Poetry of Kabbalah is forthcoming.  Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza—co-written with his wife, Adina Hoffman—will be published this spring. He has received many honours for his work that include a MacArthur fellowship; the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry; the PEN translation award; and a 2010 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Evan Fallenberg is the author of two novels – Light Fell and When We Danced on Water – and translator of many more, including Batya Gur's Murder in Jerusalem, Alon Hilu's Death of a Monk and The House of Rajani, and Meir Shalev's My Russian Grandmother’s American Vacuum Cleaner and A Pigeon and a Boy, winner of the National Jewish Book Award.  He has won or been shortlisted for many prizes, among them the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award for Literature, the Edmund White Award, the National Jewish Book Award and the PEN Translation Prize. He teaches in the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University.  

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 published in 2004 by Chatto & Windus.

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.