Here’s the winner of the 2021 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize.
May 21, 2021, 10:35am
Germany’s Goethe-Institut has just announced the winner of this year’s Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the German government-funded prize celebrating an outstanding literary translation from German into English published in the U.S. in the previous year. This year’s winner of the $10,000 prize is Jackie Smith, for her translation of Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses (New Directions), picked from a shortlist of four translated works.
Said the judges’ citation, “Jackie Smith’s translation . . . brilliantly captures the musicality of the original text, its philosophical depths, psychological insights, meticulous scientific observations—as well as its playful ingenuity and deeply poetic imagination.”
