Best French-to-English Translations Honored

By Michael Scharf -- Publishers Weekly, 5/9/2007 5:00:00 AM

The French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation awarded their 20th annual Translation Prizes in New York Tuesday evening, giving the fiction prize to Cambridge University professor Sandra Smith and the nonfiction prize to Bruce Fink, a psychology professor at Duquesne University.

Smith won for her translation of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, the bestselling chronicle of France in 1940-1941. Fink was honored for his new translation of Jacques Lacan’s Écrits. In both cases, it was the translator's first full-length translation.

An audience of about 150 people turned out for the ceremony and reception held at Players Club.

Némirovsky (1903-1942) was born in the Ukraine, and emigrated to France in 1919. In 1938, she, her husband and children were denied French citizenship. In 1942, she was deported from France and sent to Auschwitz, where she died (according to official papers, of typhus). The manuscript of Suite Française was held by her eldest daughter for 50 years, and was published in France in 2004. It won the Prix Renaudot.

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst based in Paris. His Écrits, published in France in 1966, have long been available in a different, abridged translation from Norton. That earlier edition has been replaced by Fink’s, which is nearly 900 pages and was 10 years in the making. (The cover has the reading line “The First Complete Edition in English.”) The Écrits emerged from Lacan’s weekly seminar at Paris’s Sainte-Anne hospital. In the U.S., their influence has been largely confined to literary theory.

Smith was unable to attend the ceremony due to teaching committments at Cambridge. Accepting the prize for her was Vintage Books editor Lexy Bloom, who oversaw the paperback edition of Suite Française, released last month.

In accepting the nonfiction award, Fink gave a history of the Lacan's reception in the U.S., noting that “translations can make or break the reputation of an author,” and that Lacan has previously been thought
“incomprehensible” by the U.S. psychoanalytic community. He also spoke forcefully of the Lacan’s writing as a “counterweight to biologism” -- a means for moving away from a reliance on drug-based therapy. He called on the French-American Foundation to form a translation advisory committee that could consult on the quality of translations, and also for the Foundation to promote theoretical writing. Fink is the author of Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely.

The jurors were former translator and former New Yorker fiction editor Linda Asher; New York University professor Tom Bishop; Columbia University professor Antoine Compagnon; translator Linda Coverdale; poet and translator Richard Howard; and novelist and translator Lily Tuck. In his opening remarks, president Nicolas W. F-R. Dungan spoke of the “astonishing economic censorship” that limits the publication of
translations in the U.S., noting that “of the 200,000 books published in the U.S. every year, three percent are translations, and fewer than one percent are translations from the French.” The prize’s goal, he said, was to
“broaden the audience in the U.S.” for French writing. Asher, in introducing the nominees, spoke of “the risk and difficulty of trying to promulgate translations of all sorts.”

« Back | Print