Blog / Prize Winners

An Interview with Alice Guthrie and Corine Tachtiris

April 10, 2019 - By

Corine Tachtiris interviews Alice Guthrie, winner of the 8th Annual Jules Chametzky Prize for Translation for her translation of Atef Abu Saif's "The Lottery".

Corine Tachtiris: I thought we could start by talking about “The Lottery.” One of the things I noticed is that there’s a balance between this really intimate voice, where you feel like you’re part of a community, and these larger political forces that are outside of people’s control. So I wanted to ask you about creating that balance in the translation.

Alice Guthrie: Yes, that...

Chametzky Prize-winner Alice Guthrie on translating Atef Abu Saif

April 5, 2019 - By Abby MacGregor

We talked to Alice Guthrie, winner of the 8th Annual Jules Chametzky Prize for Translation, about translating Atef Abu Saif's "The Lottery." Here's what she told us:

I think what I really enjoyed about this story, and what made me want to translate it, was the way Atef paints this vivid picture of several aspects of Gazan life, offering this very pointed political and social commentary along the way, but all with such a light touch. It never feels contrived, or dogmatic, and there's plenty of humor—which is such an achievement, given the intensely poignant material we are dealing with here. And that playful...

“A devastating downshift”: Paula Bohince on translating Corrado Govoni

April 23, 2018 - By Krzysztof Rowiński

An Interview with Paula Bohince, winner of the 7th Annual Jules Chametzky Prize for Translation

Krzysztof Rowiński: First of all, congratulations on winning the Jules Chametzky Translation Prize! Thank you for taking the time to talk about your work. Could you start by telling me about how you came to translation? Was it something that was a result of your own writing, or was it more about the love for Italian language or literature?

PB: I began in 2015, after my third book of poems was finished but before it was published—in that kind of blank space. That collection, Swallows and Waves, was based on Japanese Edo-period artworks, and I approached those poems as a kind of erasure of self—there is no...

10 Questions for Katie Farris

January 24, 2017 - By Amal Zaman

"And would’ve you passed the

Would your past
                                            
                                              would you your past?

      Would the
                        
                        (your or ...

Interview with Aleksandar Brezar and Enis Čišić, Part One

October 19, 2016 - By Jim Hicks

Remembering a Life Cut Short

Jim Hicks: Probably the best place to start, since nobody in the United States is really going to know the background, would be to summarize the story of Karim Zaimović.

Aleksandar Brezar: Well, it’s not a story that can be summarized. The simplest way to describe his life and his work would be to say that he was a journalist and a writer from Sarajevo who, during the war and the siege, had a radio show where he read his stories on air—short stories that were a way of escaping the reality of the war, and that  in some way provided at least a...