The 2020 Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation

Linda Asher, 2020 recipient of the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation. Photo by Bryan Schutmaat.

In May 2020, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Linda Asher, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker and acclaimed translator of French literature from Balzac to Hugo, the 2020 Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation.

Asher is particularly known for her translations of the works of Milan Kundera. Of her work, committee member Terry Tempest Williams had the following to say: Asher is singular in her ability and plasticity of language to convey what the original intent of the writer had in mind. She makes “reading between the lines” synonymous with “translating between the lines.” It is not only her great alacrity of mind and skills that bring her translations into a heightened state of elegance for the reader and commonness, but her curiosity with words and what they mean to the soul of a particular writer or discipline or culture. I find her translations thrilling, rigorous, and full of wit and enthusiastic depth.

In keeping with Thornton Wilder’s life-long work as a translator and alongside translators, since 2009, the American Academy of Arts and Letters has administered the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation, which awards $20,000 to a practitioner, scholar, or patron who has made a significant contribution to the art of literary translation every other year.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters was founded in 1898 as an honor society of the country’s leading architects, artists, composers, and writers. Thornton Wilder was elected a member in 1928. He received the Gold Medal for Fiction in 1952.

Though Wilder’s dramatic reputation soared with the premiere of Our Town (1937), his first Broadway shows were translations: André Obey’s Lucrece (1932) and A Doll's House (1937) by Henrik Ibsen. He also translated Jean Paul Satre’s The Victors [Mort sans sepulture] from French at Sartre’s personal request, and The Bride of Torosko by Otto Indig from German for producer Gilbert Miller. The Victors was produced off-broadway in 1948 at The New Stages Theatre in the West Village, directed by Mary Hunter Wolf. Wilder’s translation of The Bride has never been produced in the United States.

Wilder also enjoyed working closely with writers who translated his own work into French, Italian and especially German. In the case of his German translators, he felt so strongly that translators never received their due, that he broke with custom and shared ongoing royalties with them.

Each year, the Academy solicits nominations for the Wilder Prize from its members. Works by the nominated translators are then read over two years by the Literature Awards Committee. The 2020 committee was chaired by Joy Williams and includes Louise Glück, Amy Hempel, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Terry Tempest Williams. The committee meets three times a year: in May, November, and January, at which point a final decision is made on the prize.

The next prize will be awarded in May 2022.

Previous prizewinners are:

Bill Porter (Red Pine) with his editor at the Wilder Prize ceremony on May 23, 2018

Bill Porter (Red Pine), 2018, has translated classic Chinese Taoist and Buddhist texts, in particular the three hundred surviving Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, where he has done the nearly impossible: personalized the poems of an ancient master without making them sound antique or foreign or contemporary American. Porter’s translations of Han Shan, the 13th-century poet called Cold Mountain, have set the standard for all future English language versions of these spare, luminous, concrete, and transcendent Chinese poems.

Jamey Gambrell, 2016, has translated the works of the wizardly Russian, Vladimir Sorokin, and her translations are wizardly in their own right. Hip, unflappable and at ease in the otherworldly post-apocalyptic mesmeric Xtreme sport of storytelling Sorokin represents, Gambrell captures the tone of this rogue modernist masterfully.

David Hinton, 2014, translates classic Chinese poetry. His Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China is a classic, like Cathay and Poems of the Late Tang. The translations read in English as though they were written in it originally. A magician’s grace glows through all of the poems.

Michael Hofmann, 2012, has translated Joseph Roth’s work into English. He has also rendered the savage war diary of Ernst Jünger and the plays and fiction of Thomas Bernhard, Gert Hofmann, Peter Stamm, and the novelist and poet Herta Müller. A poet in his own right, Hofmann has published translations of the poems of Durs Grünbein and the essays of filmmaker Wim Wenders.

Gregory Rabassa, 2009, has brought into English many of the titans of South American fiction in translations that are both scrupulous and inventive, and in doing so he has created a luminous ideal to which all translators now aspire. He has mastered the magic of conjuring from a thousand possibilities the single best choice. Among his celebrated translations is Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude.