“I wish the whole village could be covered and erased and finally be clean.”
Let's be honest, we aren't totally comfortable with our Declining Empire lifestyle. Life is hard, priorities are changing, the debt ceiling is buckling, or bursting (or whatever), and we have to do something disturbing almost on a daily basis: “face facts." On the national level, there are a lot of facts to face, but in the facing of them there are perks. Maybe the biggest perk is the slow but steady realization that (US) American Exceptionalism isn’t an inherent attribute granted by divine right. It might not even be a real thing. And what does that mean for the economy that used to be our baby? Should we continue waffling over the “recovery” of something that might very well be lost for good, or should we begin talking seriously about a profound move - one that includes a redistribution of wealth, and planned mechanisms for a more equitable society? Or maybe we should just shut up and go see the Hangover II or possibly Bad Teacher (those are some dark billboards for light comedies it would seem).
But back to facing facts, among them being Thomas Teal’s translation from the Swedish of Tove Jansson's novel True Deceiver, which was announced as the fiction winner for the 2011 Best Translated Book Awards. A slim volume, True Deceiver isolates issues of desire and the nature of honesty with pristine, scalpel-like cuts of language. Jansson was not only a writer, but an illustrator and cartoonist as well, and is perhaps best known for her creation of kindly bohemian trolls: the Moomins.
The 2011 BTBA comes with an unprecedented cash prize. (Yes Virginia, there are such things as "literary translation awards" with cash prizes.) The awards are organized by Three Percent, an online resource out of the University of Rochester dedicated to international literature. Amazon's involvement with Three Percent, which takes its name from the meager annual percentage of published books that represent translated works, has allowed the program to offer $5000 to each of the winners. Yes, even the poets and their translators get the money. If this isn’t evidence of a major ideological shift in priorities, heaven knows what is. Read about the awards, other winners, and short lists here.
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