Chekhov's Mistress
Kadaré Translator David Bellos Winner of the Man Booker Translator Prize
by Bud Parr
From the Man Booker International Prize Press Release:
David Bellos is today, 22 June, announced as the sole winner of the Translator’s Prize of £15,000 awarded as part of the Man Booker International Prize.
In accordance with the rules of the Man Booker International Prize, a translator (or translators) is chosen by the winner if their work is published in English translation.
Bellos, a Professor of French and Comparative Literature, has translated five of Kadaré’s novels including, The File on H, Spring Flowers, Spring Frost and The Pyramid. He is currently working on Agamemnon’s Daughter and has finished work on The Successor, both new titles to be published by Canongate in the UK.
DAVID BELLOS (D. Phil, Oxon is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton. He has taught at the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh, Southampton, and Manchester (England), where he served as head of the department (1985-1988) and as chair of the Graduate Studies Committee (1992-1996). He was chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Princeton from 1999 to 2002. He has published three books in the field of Balzac studies (Balzac Criticism in France, 1850-1900, Oxford, 1976; a critical study of La Cousine Bette, London, 1981; and an introduction to Old Goriot, Cambridge, 1987) as well as many articles on the history of fiction and the book market in 19th-century France.
Bellos has also worked closely on the modern French writer Georges Perec, first as his principal English translator (Life, A User’s Manual, 1987, which won the French-American Foundation’s translation prize in 1988; W or the Memory of Childhood, 1988; Things, 1990; 53 Days, 1992) and then as the author of the first literary biography (Georges Perec. A Life in Words, Boston, 1993) which in French translation, was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie (1994). His biographical study of the French filmmaker Jacques Tati appeared in Fall 1999; a French version was published by Seuil in April 2002. He is currently working on a life of the novelist and diplomat Romain Gary. David Bellos holds the rank of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
And here’s some information on the the winner of the International Prize itself:
Ismail Kadaré was born in 1936 in Gjirokaster, in the south of Albania.
He studied first at the University of Tirana, and then in Moscow, at the Gorky Institute for World Literature, a training school for writers and critics.
Returning home in 1960 after his country broke off relations with the Soviet Union, Kadaré worked first as a journalist and also published his first poems. He then wrote a short story, which he redrafted several times before it was published as his first novel, The General of the Dead Army, which made his name in Albania. He was then able to become a full-time writer. He also served as editor of a literary review, Les Lettres albanaises, published simultaneously in Albanian and in French.
Ismail Kadaré‘s works are published in France by Éditions Fayard, and they comprise novels, stories, story collections, a collection of verse and a play. The first eleven volumes of his Complete Works are now in print in Albanian and in French.
Translations of Kadaré‘s novels have been published in more than forty countries and for some years Ismail Kadaré has been considered as one of the greatest writers of his epoch.
Kadaré broke with the Tirana regime and was granted political asylum in France in October 1990. For the last ten years he has divided his time between France and Albania.
In 1996 Ismail Kadaré was elected to the seat of Karl Popper as foreign associate member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques,
Bibliography
The following Kadaré titles have been translated into English:
The General of the Dead Army
The Three Arched Bridge
Broken April
Chronicle in Stone
Durontine
The File on H
The Concert
The Palace of Dreams
Albanian Spring
The Pyramid
Elegy for Kosovo
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost
The Successor (forthcoming, January 2006)
Agamemnon’s Daughter (forthcoming, date TBC)
In the UK, he is published by Random House (Harvill/Vintage), and for the two forthcoming novels and relaunched backlist, Canongate.
In the US, he is published by Arcade.
I’ll once again point you to James Marcus’s post on Kadaré pointing to an article by Bellos.
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: June 22, 2005
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
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