NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2012

The New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize ($30,000) is offered biennially by Arts NSW and the Community Relations Commission For a multicultural NSW in association with Sydney PEN.

The prize is intended to acknowledge the contribution made to literary culture by Australian translators, and recognises the vital role literary translators play in enabling writers and readers to communicate across cultures and ensuring that dissident voices are heard around the world.

The Prize is offered only to translators who translate works into English from other languages.

The prize was proposed by the International PEN Sydney Centre and is funded by Arts NSW and the Community Relations Commission For a multicultural NSW with a commemorative medallion, sponsored by Sydney PEN.

The 2011 Winner for the NSW Premier's Translation Prize is: Ian Johnston.

Judges Comments

Alison Entrekin (Shortlisted)

Alison Entrekin has a formidable body of work behind her.  Her numerous biographies, novels, screenplays, tourism guides, and other work have been rewarded by several citations, awards, and fellowships. Her range is remarkable: she can convey sublime poetry as well as rough street slang, and practically everything in between.  In the works we were given, City of God, The Eternal Son, The Day I killed my Father, and Budapest, her prose varies from the extreme demotic of the City of God, to the profound introspection of The Eternal Son, the tightly casual psychotic of The Day I Killed my Father, and the dreamlike realism of Budapest.  Her choice of texts is adventurous and well-targeted. Everything she chooses is serious and of high quality.

Budapest is unequivocally a success, perhaps because it presents fewer difficulties than City of God.  Because it is largely in argot, the latter was a highly ambitious choice, which turned out to be fully justified for the most part. Occasionally the street boys of Rio sound like Chicago gangsters of the twenties, but that is rare and probably due to the absence in English of direct or even indirect equivalents.

The Eternal Son is so well done that it is extraordinarily painful to read.  And the eerily casual psychotic tone of The Day I Killed my Father is handled with the lightest of touches.  In none of the books is the flow interrupted - they read like English.

Ian Johnston (Winner)

Dr Ian Johnston's background in medicine informs his work as a translator, as he brings the sharpness and precision of a neurosurgeon's scalpel to the extraordinary translation projects he undertakes in both Classical Chinese and Greek.

These include the only complete translation to date into the English language of The Mozi, the monumental treatise on the philosophy of Mo Di (c.470BC - c.391BC). Johnston's amply annotated resurrection of this classic is a landmark event, even in China, where Mo Di is known about but little read. It establishes Johnston's status as a world-class translator. Johnston's translation involves a mammoth feat of interpolation from the spare Chinese characters, with their minimal 'information', to produce a text that is not only scholarly but beautiful. He captures both the austerity and vivacity of the original without sounding a false note, either of archaism or modernity, making a complex and demanding philosophical tract not only accessible and readable, but compelling.

The same acute sensitivity to tone and nuance and genre is brought to bear on the classical Chinese poetry Johnston has translated. Two anthologies - Singing of Scented Grass: Verses from the Chinese (2003) and Waiting for the Owl: Poems and Songs from Ancient China (2009).- together cover a very broad swathe of time, from the Han dynasty (206BC-221AD) through to the ninth century, each period of language use and style presenting different aesthetic and linguistic challenges for a translator, which Johnston meets with a quietly powerful and humble intelligence that reinvents each poem anew, charging it with life.

Johnston has also translated two major works of writer and physician, Galen (c.129-204AD) from the Classical Greek: Galen on Diseases and Symptoms and Galen's Method of Medicine. These are specialised works, but they will be the texts of reference in the field and their literary qualities further demonstrate Johnston's prowess.

Meredith McKinney (Shortlisted)

Meredith McKinney is one of the foremost translators of Japanese now working in the English speaking world. In just fifteen years she has published a remarkable list of authors dating from the medieval period to the present day. Her titles are all landmarks in the rich cultural history of Japan; one of them, Sei Shonagon's classic, The Pillow Book, is a dazzling, intimate window into tenth century Heian court life. With her translations for Penguin of the nineteenth century writer, Natsume Soseki, McKinney conveys every nuance of the greatest figure in modern Japanese literature. More recently she has returned to the prize winning contemporary author, Furui Yoshikichi, whose collection, Ravine and Other Stories, launched her translating career in 1997.

Whether rendering a description of a Heian courtier or an abused twentieth century wife, McKinney's translations are enriched by scholarship and an artist's ear for literary traditions apart from her own. It is worth noting that one of her authors, Furui Yoshikichi, has translated the Austrian writers, Robert Musil and Hermann Broch, into Japanese.  Their influence is evident in McKinney's outstanding 2008 translation of White Haired Melody, a book that deserves to establish Furui's reputation outside Japan, just as fine translations introduced Portugal's Jose Saramago and Germany's   W.G.Sebald to the English speaking world.

PREMIER'S TRANSLATION PRIZE JUDGES

Patricia Azarias (Chair)

Sally Blakeney

Julie Rose