Rilke shortlisted for Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize
Ina Rilke’s translation of The Darkroom of Damocles (Harvill Secker) has been shortlisted for the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2008. The Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize is for translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance.
This year’s other shortlisted translators are:
- Margaret Jull Costa, for Eça de Queiroz’s The Maias (Dedalus)
- Richard Dove, for Friederike Mayröcker’s Raving Language: Selected Poems 1946-2006 (Carcanet)
- Jamie McKendrick, for Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Penguin)
- Mike Mitchell, for Georges Rodenbach’s The Bells of Bruges (Dedalus)
- Natasha Randall, for Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (Vintage)
[update June 6, 2008: This year’s Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize has been awarded to Margaret Jull Costa for her translation of The Maias by Eça de Queiroz, published by Dedalus. The prize was awarded at a ceremony at St Anne’s College on 5th June 2008. In her speech Helen Dunmore, member of this years’ jury, introduced Hermans’ novel in the following words:
“The Darkroom of Damocles is a novel set during the German Occupation of Holland in the Second World War. Ina Rilke’s translation has a deadpan, colloquial tone which offsets the strange and surreal content to great effect. The dialogue has the laconic, understated tone of a detective novel: ‘She’ll be found eventually, we just want to postpone the discovery.’ ‘Wouldn’t it be better to take her clothes off and bury them elsewhere?’ ‘What do you propose to dig a hole with?’ ‘OK then, not bury them. Take them with us and burn them.’ There are two strands to the novel. One is action-packed and full of suspense. It’s a story of how lives are twisted by war; about resistance and its myths. The other is about the horror of losing all the reference points which make sense of life. It reflects a Kafkaesque struggle against distortions of experience. The novel is immensely readable but not in any sense an easy read. Ina Rilke has translated it into a spare, fast-paced English narrative. This is a translation set in sharp light, with an inky heart.”]