09 Jun 08

Winner: The maias, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

The prize, which is funded by Lord Weidenfeld, and by three Oxford colleges - St Anne’s, New, and The Queen’s, is for book-length translations of fiction, poetry, or drama from living European languages. This year’s prize attracted entrants from all over the UK, with a variety of national publishers.

This year’s first prize went to Margaret Jull Costa for her translation of The Maias by Eça de Queiroz, published by Dedalus. She received her prize at the ceremony for shortlisted entrants on 5 June 2008.

Guest judge Helen Dunmore called the book ‘a brilliant drama of a family’s decline and downfall’ rendered in a translation, which is  ‘supple, transparent and wonderfully paced’.

She said: ‘I have a great regard for the linguistic gifts, the sensitivity, the daring and the commitment of translators. I owe an enormous debt to those many translators whose work enabled me to read Tolstoy, Turgenev, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Gunter Grass, Rilke, Sappho, Milosz, Dante...without them I would not be the writer or the person that I am.’

Dr Reynolds, Tutor in English at St Anne’s and Times Lecturer in English Language, said: ‘What is unusual about this year’s shortlist is the number of new translations of books that have been translated into English before. This reflects the nature of the submissions we received. It is clearly vital for translators to bring texts vividly into English for the first time, but a no less important task of the translator is to revisit books we perhaps thought we knew, discovering in them fresh pointedness and nuance, re-releasing their imaginative life.’