Past winners

The following is a comprehensive list of past recipients of the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize. Descriptions courtesy of the publishers.

35th Annual Translation Prize (Awarded in 2022)

FICTION

Lara Vergnaud, for her translation of “Life Sciences” by Joy Sorman

Restless Books

Joy Sorman’s Life Sciences takes an overtly political premise—the medical establishment’s inability or perhaps refusal to take seriously the physical struggles of women—and transforms it into a surreal and knife-deep work of fiction that asks: What pain can we abide, and what pain must we fight back against, even if the fight hurts more than the disease itself?… Translated by Lara Vergnaud into prose that is both deceptively simple and playfully archaic, Sorman’s story [is] among the first to tackle illness as metaphor, as birthright and as feminist rebellion…. Sorman’s alternative history of female malady offers both a horrific dose of truth and a comforting alternative to the stories sick women have told ourselves since time began.

NONFICTION

Susan Emanuel, for her translation of “The Belle Époque” by Dominique Kalifa

Columbia University Press

The years before the First World War have long been romanticized as a zenith of French culture—the “Belle Époque.” The era is seen as the height of a lost way of life that remains emblematic of what it means to be French. […] This book traces the making—and the imagining—of the Belle Époque to reveal how and why it became a cultural myth. Dominique Kalifa lifts the veil on a period shrouded in nostalgia, explaining the century-long need to continuously reinvent and even sanctify this moment. He sifts through images handed down in memoirs and reminiscences, literature and film, art and history to explore the many facets of the era, including its worldwide reception. The Belle Époque was born in France, but it quickly went global as other countries adopted the concept to write their own histories. In shedding light on how the Belle Époque has been celebrated and reimagined, Kalifa also offers a nuanced meditation on time, history, and memory.

and “Rescue, Relief, and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee’s Anti-Nazi Operations, 1934–1945″ by Catherine Collomp

Wayne State University Press

Rescue, Relief, and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee’s Anti-Nazi Operations, 1934–1945 is the English translation of Catherine Collomp’s award-winning book on the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC). Formed in New York City in 1934 by the leaders of the Jewish Labor Movement, the JLC came to the forefront of American labor’s reaction to Nazism and antisemitism. Situated at the crossroads of several fields of inquiry—Jewish history, immigration and exile studies, American and international labor history, World War II in France and in Poland—the history of the JLC is by nature transnational. It brings to the fore the strength of ties between the Yiddish-speaking Jewish worlds across the globe.

Sophie R. Lewis, for her translation of “In the Eye of the Wild” by Nastassja Martin

New York Review Books

In the Eye of the Wild begins with an account of the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s near fatal run-in with a Kamchatka bear in the mountains of Siberia. Martin’s professional interest is animism; she addresses philosophical questions about the relation of humankind to nature, and in her work she seeks to partake as fully as she can in the lives of the indigenous peoples she studies. Her violent encounter with the bear, however, brings her face-to-face with something entirely beyond her ken—the untamed, the nonhuman, the animal, the wild. In the course of that encounter something in the balance of her world shifts. A change takes place that she must somehow reckon with. […] In the Eye of the Wild is a fascinating, mind-altering book about terror, pain, endurance, and self-transformation, comparable in its intensity of perception and originality of style to J. A. Baker’s classic The Peregrine. Here Nastassja Martin takes us to the farthest limits of human being.

34th Annual Translation Prize (Awarded in 2021)

FICTION

Chris Andrews, for his translation of “Our Riches” by Kaouther Adimi

New Directions Publishing

Our Riches celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto “by the young, for the young,” discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties (he was hopelessly generous) and the vicissitudes of wars and revolutions, Charlot (often compared to the legendary bookseller Sylvia Beach) carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers.

Our Riches interweaves Charlot’s story with that of another twenty-year-old, Ryad (dispatched in 2017 to empty the old shop and repaint it). Ryad’s no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop’s self-appointed, early illiterate guardian, opens the young man’s mind. Cutting brilliantly from Charlot to Ryad, from the 1930s to current times, from WWII to the bloody 1961 Free Algeria demonstrations in Paris, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her swift and poignant novel. But most of all, it’s a hymn to the book and to the love of books.

NONFICTION

Hoyt Rogers, for his translation of “Rome, 1630: The Horizon of the Early Baroque, Followed by Five Essays on Seventeenth-Century Art” by Yves Bonnefoy

Seagull Books, University of Chicago Press

Bernini, Poussin, Velázquez, Cortona, Borromini, Valentin: the list could go on and on. In 1630, despite their signal differences, the finest artists of the European Baroque converged on Rome, where Caravaggio was still a lingering influence. In response to the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church turned to masters such as these to celebrate the glories of heaven, while other patrons granted them commissions for secular works. With splendid monuments like Bernini’s Baldachin at St Peter’s, or profound canvases like the landscapes of Poussin, Rome became the crucible of major advances in seventeenth-century sculpture, painting and architecture.

In the title study of this book, Yves Bonnefoy focuses on the pivotal year in the development of the Baroque style. Richly illustrated, his Rome, 1630 reveals how a pan-European movement was born from the achievements of the Italian and foreign artists who congregated in the city during that seminal period. The five supplementary essays in the volume further explore the evolution of seventeenth-century painting, particularly in the works of Elsheimer, Caravaggio, Cortona and Poussin. In his afterword, Hoyt Rogers pays homage to the author, analyzing the centrality of Baroque art to Bonnefoy’s poetry and aesthetics.

 

33rd Annual Translation Prize (Awarded in 2020)

FICTION

Alyson Waters, for her translation of “A King Alone” by Jean Giono

New York Review Books

A King Alone is set in a remote Alpine village that is cut off from the world by rugged mountains and by long months when the ground is covered with snow and the heavens with cloud. One such winter, villagers begin mysteriously to disappear. Soon the village is paralyzed by terror, which gives way to relief and eager anticipation when the outsider Langlois arrives to investigate. What he discovers, however, will leave no one reassured, and his reappearance in the village a few years later, now assigned the task of guarding it from wolves, awakens those troubling memories. A man of few words, a regal manner, and military efficiency, Langlois baffles and fascinates the villagers, whose different responses to him shape Jean Giono’s increasingly charged narrative. This novel about a tiny community at the dangerous edge of things and a man of law who is a man alone could be described as a metaphysical Western. It unfolds with the uncanny inevitability and disturbing intensity of a dream.

NONFICTION

Michael Loriaux and Jacob Levi, for their co-translation of “Murderous Consent: on the Accommodation of Violent Death” by Marc Crépon

Fordham University Press

Murderous Consent details our implication in violence we do not directly inflict but in which we are structurally complicit: famines, civil wars, political repression in far-away places, and war, as it’s classically understood. Marc Crépon insists on a bond between ethics and politics and attributes violence to our treatment of the two as separate spheres. We repeatedly resist the call to responsibility, as expressed by the appeal—by peoples across the world—for the care and attention that their vulnerability enjoins.
Pushing against the limits of liberal rationalism, Crépon calls for a more radical understanding of interpersonal responsibility. Not just a work of philosophy but an engagement with life as it’s lived, Murderous Consent works to redefine our global obligations, articulating anew what humanitarianism demands and what an ethically grounded political resistance might mean.

 

32nd Annual Translation Prize 

FICTION

The fiction prize was split between two winners:

Linda Coverdale, for her translation of Slave Old Man by Patrick Chamoiseau

The New Press

From one of the most innovative and subversive novelists writing in French, a “writer of exceptional and original gifts” (The New York Times), whose Texaco won the Prix Goncourt and has been translated into fourteen languages, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man is a gripping, profoundly unsettling story of an elderly slave’s daring escape into the wild from a plantation in Martinique, with his master and a fearsome hound on his heels. Chamoiseau’s exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose. Offering a loving and mischievous tribute to the Creole culture of early nineteenth-century Martinique and brilliantly translated by Linda Coverdale, this novel takes us on a unique and moving journey into the heart of Caribbean history.

 

Chris Clarke, for his translation of Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob

Wakefield Press

Imaginary Lives remains, over 120 years since its original publication in French, one of the secret keys to modern literature: under-recognized, yet a decisive influence on such writers as Apollinaire, Borges, Jarry and Artaud, and more contemporary authors such as Roberto Bolaño and Jean Echenoz. Drawing from historical influences such as Plutarch and Diogenes Laërtius, and authors more contemporary to him such as Thomas De Quincey and Walter Pater, Schwob established the genre of fictional biography with this collection: a form of narrative that championed the specificity of the individual over the generality of history, and the memorable detail of a vice over the forgettable banality of a virtue. These 22 portraits present figures drawn from the margins of history, from Empedocles the “Supposed God” and Clodia the “Licentious Matron” to the pirate Captain Kidd and the Scottish murderers Messrs. Burke and Hare.

NONFICTION

The nonfiction prize was awarded to:

Malcolm Debevoise, for his translation of Good Government by Pierre Rosanvallon

Harvard University Press

Few would disagree that Western democracies are experiencing a crisis of representation. In Good Government, Pierre Rosanvallon examines the long history of the alternative to which the public has gravitated: the empowered executive. Rosanvallon argues that, faced with everyday ineptitude in governance, people become attracted to strong leaders and bold executive action. If these fail, they too often want even stronger personal leadership. Whereas nineteenth-century liberals and reformers longed for parliamentary sovereignty, nowadays few contest the “imperial presidency.” Rosanvallon traces this history from the Weimar Republic to Charles De Gaulle’s “exceptional” presidency to the Bush–Cheney concentration of executive power. Europeans rebelling against the technocratic EU and Americans fed up with the “administrative state” have turned to charismatic figures, from Donald Trump to Viktor Orbán, who tout personal strength as their greatest asset. This is not just a right-wing phenomenon, though, as liberal contentment with Obama’s drone war demonstrates.

 

Book descriptions courtesy of the respective publishers. 

31st Annual Translation Prize 

FICTION

Paul Eprile’s translation of Melville: A Novel by Jean Giono
New York Review Books

In the fall of 1849, Herman Melville traveled to London to deliver his novel White-Jacket to his publisher. On his return to America, Melville would write Moby-Dick. Melville: A Novel imagines what happened in between: the adventurous writer fleeing London for the country, wrestling with an angel, falling in love with an Irish nationalist, and, finally, meeting the angel’s challenge—to express man’s fate by writing the novel that would become his masterpiece.

Eighty years after it appeared in English, Moby-Dick was translated into French for the first time by the Provençal novelist Jean Giono and his friend Lucien Jacques. The publisher persuaded Giono to write a preface, granting him unusual latitude. The result was this literary essai, Melville: A Novel—part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy. Paul Eprile’s expressive translation of this intimate homage brings the exchange full circle.

Howard Curtis’s translation of The Principle by Jérôme Ferrari
Europa Editions

Beguiled by the figure of German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who disrupted the assumptions of quantum mechanics with his notorious Uncertainty Principle, earning him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1932, a young, disenchanted philosopher attempts to right his own intellectual and emotional course and take the measure of the evil at work in the contemporary world.

In this critically acclaimed novel, Jérôme Ferrari takes stock of European culture’s failings during the 20th century and inserts their implications into a compelling vision of the contemporary world. His story is one of eternal returns, of a perpetual fall of Icarus—the inevitably compromised meeting between a man’s soul and the mysterious beauty of the world.

NONFICTION

Samuel E. Martin’s translation of Bark by Georges-Didi Huberman
MIT Press

On a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Georges Didi-Huberman tears three pieces of bark from birch trees on the edge of the site. Looking at these pieces after his return home, he sees them as letters, a flood, a path, time, memory, flesh. The bark serves as a springboard to Didi-Huberman’s meditations on his visit, recorded in this spare, poetic, and powerful book. Bark is a personal account, drawing not on the theoretical apparatus of scholarship but on Didi-Huberman’s own history, memory, and knowledge.

The text proceeds as a series of reflections, accompanied by Didi-Huberman’s photographs of the visit. The photographs are not meant to be art—Didi-Huberman confesses that he “photographed practically everything without looking”—but approach it nevertheless. Didi-Huberman tells us that his grandparents died at Auschwitz, but his account is more universal than biographical. As he walks from place to place, he observes that in German birches are birken; Birkenau designates the meadow where the birches grow. Didi-Huberman sees and photographs the “reconstructed” execution wall; the floors of the crematorium, forgotten witnesses to killing; and the birch trees, lovely but also resembling prison bars. Taking his own photographs, he thinks of the famous photographs taken in 1944 by a member of the Sonderkommando ,the only photographic documentation of the camp before the Germans destroyed it, hoping to hide the evidence of their crimes. Didi-Huberman notices a “bizarre proliferation of white flowers on the exact spot of the cremation pits.” The dead are not departed.

Alison L. Strayer’s translation of The Years by Annie Ernaux
Seven Stories Press

The Years is a personal narrative from Annie Ernaux of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir “written” by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I” for the “we” (or “they,” or “one”) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents’ generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents’ generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the ‘we’ and impersonal pronouns.”

30^th Annual Translation Prize 

FICTION WINNER:

Sam Taylor

The Heart by Maylis de Kerangal // Farrar, Straus & Giroux

About the Book

Just before dawn on a Sunday morning, three teenage boys go surfing. While driving home exhausted, the boys are involved in a fatal car accident on a deserted road. Two of the boys are wearing seat belts; one goes through the windshield. The doctors declare him brain-dead shortly after arriving at the hospital, but his heart is still beating.

The Heart takes place over the twenty-four hours surrounding the resulting heart transplant, as life is taken from a young man and given to a woman close to death. In gorgeous, ruminative prose, it examines the deepest feelings of everyone involved as they navigate decisions of life and death.

As stylistically audacious as it is emotionally explosive, The Heart mesmerized readers in France, where it has been hailed as the breakthrough work of a new literary star.

 

Read an Interview with Sam Taylor

NONFICTION WINNERS:

Jane Marie Todd

The French Resistance by Olivier Wieviorka // Harvard University Press

About the Book

Olivier Wieviorka presents a comprehensive history of the French Resistance, synthesizing its social, political, and military aspects to offer fresh insights into its operation. Detailing the Resistance from the inside out, he reveals not one organization but many interlocking groups often at odds over goals, methods, and leadership. He debunks lingering myths, including the idea that the Resistance sprang up in response to the exhortations of de Gaulle’s Free French government-in-exile.

The Resistance was homegrown, arising from the soil of French civil society. Resisters had to improvise in the fight against the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy regime. They had no blueprint to follow, but resisters from all walks of life and across the political spectrum formed networks, organizing activities from printing newspapers to rescuing downed airmen to sabotage. Although the Resistance was never strong enough to fight the Germans openly, it provided the Allies invaluable intelligence, sowed havoc behind enemy lines on D-Day, and played a key role in Paris’s liberation.

Wieviorka shatters the conventional image of a united resistance with no interest in political power. But setting the record straight does not tarnish the legacy of its fighters, who braved Nazism without blinking.

 

Read an Interview with Jane Marie Todd

 

 

Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandell

Jean Cocteau: A Life by Claude Arnaud // Yale University Press

About the Book

Unevenly respected, easily hated, almost always suspected of being inferior to his reputation, Jean Cocteau has often been thought of as a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. In this landmark biography, Claude Arnaud thoroughly contests this characterization, as he celebrates Cocteau’s “fragile genius—a combination almost unlivable in art” but in his case so fertile.

Arnaud narrates the life of this legendary French novelist, poet, playwright, director, filmmaker, and designer who, as a young man, pretended to be a sort of a god, but who died as a humble and exhausted craftsman. His moving and compassionate account examines the nature of Cocteau’s chameleon-like genius, his romantic attachments, his controversial politics, and his intimate involvement with many of the century’s leading artistic lights, including Picasso, Proust, Hemingway, Stravinsky, and Tennessee Williams. Already published to great critical acclaim in France, Arnaud’s penetrating and deeply researched work reveals a uniquely gifted artist while offering a magnificent cultural history of the twentieth century.

 

Read an Interview with Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandell

 

 

29^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

 

Learn more about the 29th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

28^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

 

Learn more about the 28th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

 

 

 

27^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

 

Read an Interview with Alison Dundy

 

Learn more about the 27th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

26^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

 

Learn more about the 26^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

 

 

25^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Marina Harss for her translation of The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by Her Daughter by Elisabeth Gille (New York Review Books)

 

 

 

 

 

 Arthur Goldhammer for his translation of  The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville (Cambridge University Press)

 

 

 

Read an interview with Arthur Goldhammer

 

Richard Howard for his translation of  When the World Spoke French by Marc Fumaroli (New York Review Books)

 

 

 

24^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Mitzi Angel for her translation of 03 by Jean-Christophe Valtat (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

 

 

 

 

 

Lydia Davis for her translation of Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (Viking/Penguin Group)

 

 

 

 

 

Frederick Brown for his translation of Letters from America by Alexis de Tocqueville (Yale University Press)

 

 

 

 

 

Jane Marie Todd for her translation of Reading and Writing in Babylon by Dominique Charpin (Harvard University Press)

Read an Interview with Jane Marie Todd

 

 23^rd Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

John Cullen for his translation of Brodeck by Philippe Claudel (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

 

 

 

 

22^nd Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Jody Gladding & Elizabeth Deshays for their translation of Small Lives by Pierre Michon (Archipelago Books)

 

 

 

 

 

Matthew Cobb & Malcolm DeBevoise for their translation of Life Explained by Michel Morange (Yale University Press/Odile Jacob)

 

21^st Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Linda Coverdale for her translation of Ravel by Jean Echenoz (The New Press)

 

 

 

 

 

Linda Asher for her translation of The Curtain by Milan Kundera (HarperCollins)

 

 

 

 

20^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Sandra Smith for her translation of Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (Alfred A. Knopf Publishers)

 

 

 

 

 

Bruce Fink for his translation of Écrits by Jaques Lacan (Norton)

 

 

 

 

19^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Daniel Weissbort for his translation of Missing Person by Patrick Modiano (David Godine)

 

 

 

 

 

Sharon Bowman for her translation of The American Enemy: the History of French Anti-Americanism by Philippe Roger (University of Chicago Press)

 

 

 

18^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Helen Marx for her translation of Silbermann by Jacques de Lacretelle (Helen Marx Books)

 

 

 

 

 

Arthur Goldhammer for his translation of Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (The Library of America)

Read an interview with Arthur Goldhammer

 

 

 

  17^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

 

Lydia Davis for her translation of Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (Viking Press)

 

 

 

Janet Lloyd for her translation of The Writing of Orpheus by Marcel Detienne (Johns Hopkins University Press)

 

 

16^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Jeff Fort for his translation of Aminadab by Maurice Blanchot  (University of Nebraska Press)

 

 

 

 

 

James Hogarth for his translation of The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo (Modern Library)

 

 

 

 

 

Anthony Roberts for his translation of Jihad by Gilles Kepel (Harvard University Press)

 

 

 

 

 

 15^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Jordan Stump for his translation of The Jardin des Plantes by Claude Simon (Northwestern University Press)

 

 

14^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Linda Asher for her translation of The Case of Dr. Sachs by Martin Winckler (Seven Stories Press)

 

13^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Richard Howard for his translation of The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal (Random House)

 

 

 

 

 

 

12^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Madeleine Velguth for her translation of Children of Clay by Raymond Queneau (Sun & Moon Press)

 

 

 

 

 

 

11^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Linda Coverdale for her translation of Literature or Life by Jorge Semprun (Viking Penguin)

 

 

 

 

 

Barbara Wright for her translation of Here by Nathalie Sarraute (George Braziller)

 

 

 

 

 

 

10^th  Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Arthur Goldhammer for his translation of Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Vol.1 by Pierre Nora (Columbia University Press)

 

 

Read an interview with Arthur Goldhammer

9^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Joachim Neugroschel for his translation of With Downcast Eyes by Tahar Ben Jelloun (Little Brown & Co.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

8^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Nina Rootes for her translation of Sky Memoirs by Blaise Cendrars (Paragon House)

 

7^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Lydia Davis for her translation of Rules of the Game I: Scratches by Michel Leiris (Paragon House)

 

 

 

 

 

 

6^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Burton Raffel for his translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (Norton)

 

 

 

 

 

5^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Arthur Goldhammer for his translation of A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution by François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)

Read an interview with Arthur Goldhammer

 

 

4^th Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Franklin Philip for his translation of The Statue Within by François Jacob (Basic Books)

 

 

 

 

 

3^rd Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

David Bellos for his translation of Life, a User’s Manual by Georges Perec (David Godine Publishers)

 

Read an interview with David Bellos

 

2^nd Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Richard Howard for his translation of William Marshal, the Flowering of Chivalry by Georges Duby (Pantheon Books)

 

 

 

 

 

 

1^st Annual Translation Prize Awards Ceremony

Barbara Bray for her translation of The Writing of Stones by Roger Callois (University of Virginia Press)