SF&F Translation Awards Closing Down

It is with great sadness that we announce that the Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation (ARESFFT) is being officially dissolved.

There are many reasons for this, but mostly they are to do with the time and effort required to run the awards on an amateur basis. It has become increasingly difficult to find people willing to act as jurors. Several of the existing Directors have had major changes in their lives that have left them with far less free time than they had previously. And all attempts to find new Directors have failed to produce any volunteers.

We still very much believe in the need to promote science fiction and fantasy in translation, and hope that in due course new people will come forward and a new award be created. The Directors will continue to do whatever they can as individuals to continue the work of the Association.

The bulk of the money held by the corporation has been returned to the most recent donors. A small amount has been held back to cover the administrative costs of winding up the Association.

Any questions regarding the winding up of the Association should be directed to our contact address.

2014 Awards Update

The Board of Directors of the SF&FT Awards is currently considering whether we will be able to present Awards this year. When the decision is made, we will make an announcement here regarding this year’s Awards.

Alchemy Journal Science Fiction Issue

Alchemy, a journal of translation published by UCSD students, is scheduling a special issue focusing on Global Science Fiction. They are looking for students to submit works of poetry, short fiction/non-fiction as well as reviews of books in translation. They are also accepting cover art submissions.

To submit, you must currently be a student, so please include the name of the school or institution of higher learning you attend as well as your program of study (if applicable). Also, please provide contact information of one teacher or faculty advisor who has agreed to assist you in preparing your translation for publication, as well as copies of the original texts with your translations for reference. Please limit submission to five pages of poetry or ten pages of prose.

They will assume that, by submitting to Alchemy, you have acquired permission from the original author or rights holder to publish the translation.

The deadline for Issue Six is January 31, 2013.

Send all submissions to: alchemythejournal@gmail.com with the heading “Science Fiction Submission.”

2013 Winners

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2013 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (for works published in 2012). There are two categories: Long Form and Short Form. The jury has additionally elected to award three honorable mentions in each category.

Long Form Winner

Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City by Kai-cheung Dung, translated from the Chinese by Anders Hansson, Bonnie S. McDougall, and the author (Columbia University Press)

Long Form Honorable Mentions

Belka, Why Don’t You Bark? by Hideo Furukawa, translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich (Haikasoru)

Kaytek the Wizard by Janusz Korczak, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Penlight)

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, translated from the Russian by Olena Bormashenko (Chicago Review Press)

Short Form Winner

“Augusta Prima” by Karin Tidbeck translated from the Swedish by the author (Jagannath: Stories, Cheeky Frawg)

Short Form Honorable Mentions

“Every Time We Say Goodbye” by Zoran Vlahović, translated from the Croatian by Tatjana Jambrišak, Goran Konvićni, and the author (Kontakt: An Anthology of Croatian SF, Darko Macan and Tatjana Jambrišak, editors, SFera)

“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” by Xia Jia, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld #65)

“A Single Year” by Csilla Kleinheincz, translated from the Hungarian by the author (The Apex Book of World SF #2, Lavie Tidhar, editor, Apex Book Company)

The winners were announced today at Liburnicon 2013, held in Opatija, Croatia, over the weekend August 23-25. The awards were announced by ARESFFT Board member Cheryl Morgan and convention Guest of Honor, Jacqueline Carey. Zoran Vlahović was in the audience.

The winning authors and their translators will each receive an inscribed plaque and a cash prize of $350. Authors and translators of the honorable mentions will receive certificates.

“Anyone who doubts the vitality of worldwide science fiction and fantasy,” said Gary K. Wolfe, President of ARESFFT, “could do worse than to use this impressive list of winners and honorable mentions as a reading list. The breadth and variety of the translated works themselves, as well as their venues of publication, attest to the valuable efforts of many to bring a genuine international dimension to genres that have sometimes (and sometimes accurately) been described as provincial in attitude.”

The money for the prize fund was obtained primarily through a generous donation by Society for the Furtherance & Study of Fantasy & Science Fiction (SF3). SF3 is the parent non-profit corporation of Wiscon, the feminist science fiction convention.

The jury for the awards was James & Kathryn Morrow (Chairs); Felice Beneduce, Alexis Brooks de Vita, Stefan Ekman, Martha Hubbard, Ekaterina Sedia, Kari Sperring, and Aishwarya Subramanian. Comments from the jury on the chosen works follow.

Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City

In praising Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, Jurist Kari Sperring called it a “hugely innovative, playful, intensely political, accomplished book, and the best piece of fantastical history/historiography I have ever read. The translation is excellent, too: elegant, fluent, and lively. I applaud the preservation of Cantonese pronunciation (a decision which is itself a political act). Moreover, novel and translation are actively engaged with each other—the act of translation has produced changes in the Chinese as well as the English texts.”

“Disrupting the concept of the novel,” Jurist Alexis Brooks de Vita wrote of Atlas, “irresistibly quotable, Dung Kai-cheung’s amazingly yearning creation of short chapters toys with conceptions of place and being, with feeling and mythmaking, centered in the fictional story of one of the most painfully politicized cities still in existence in the world.”

For Jurist Aishwarya Subramanian, Atlas is a book that “clearly delights in its own cleverness.” But beyond the breathtaking inventiveness, she found the text “intensely political and engaged with the present – it’s fifteen years old, but it still feels to me contemporary and relevant.”

Co-chair Kathryn Morrow discovered in Atlas “a masterwork on the nature of translation itself. The prose is beautifully rendered into English, and the author’s essential subject is the process by which myth, legend, and fact translate themselves into human cultural artifacts.”

Jurist Martha Hubbard concluded, “This beautiful and elegiac book examines the very nature of how knowledge is created … The language is at once poetic and specific. The book is so moving, I would deeply love to own a proper copy to keep and cherish.”

Belka, Why Don’t You Bark?

Kari Sperring singled out Belka, Why Don’t You Bark? for its “thoughtful engagement with the issue of abandonment” and she also appreciated the author’s insights into “the consequences of globalization and social exclusion.” Kari argued that, while Belka presents itself “as military fiction and gritty crime drama,” the book is ultimately “a pacifist narrative.” She added, “The excellent translation negotiates the difficulty of a narrative that switches between third person and second person, past tense and present tense.”

In confronting Belka, Martha Hubbard noted that “this strange and compelling book grows on you. I think it is a powerful and brave attempt to comment on the aftermath of the wretched situation in the world after decades and decades of war.”

Kaytek the Wizard

Alexis Brooks de Vita found Kaytek the Wizard “sublimely poignant, as painful as it is raw, so obviously written by a man who loves childhood and children and uses fantasy to prepare them—and us—for fatality as well as mortality. Huckleberry Finn more than Tom Sawyer, reaching across a century-and-a-half to conjure Harry Potter, Kaytek’s loner protagonist finally becomes not only Frankenstein but his self-created monster, a childish Melmoth the Wanderer, made wise enough to have become capable of conveying the author’s historically heartbreaking final lines.”

Kathryn Morrow added, “This is a fresh, sophisticated, and psychologically authentic exemplar of the Bildungsroman type of fantasy. The author’s unique sensibility is well served by Lloyd-Jones’s lively translation.”

Roadside Picnic

Negotiating the new translation of Roadside Picnic, Jurist Felice Beneduce took pleasure in “the Raymond Chandleresque approach of the authors, whose writing oozes noir.” He added, “The notion of aliens being completely indifferent to the consequences of their actions and in essence their ‘trash’ is brilliant in my view.”

Co-chair James Morrow was pleased to report that the Olena Bormashenko rendering of Roadside Picnic “restores scenes and sentences that, owing to the machinations of Soviet censorship, never appeared in Antonina W. Bouis’s earlier version.”

Martha Hubbard provided a personal coda. “As someone living in a region which had the dubious pleasure of hosting the Soviet Army’s roadside picnics, the picture posited of the mess they created and left behind is far too accurate.”

World Fantasy Awards Recognize Translations

The short lists for this year’s World Fantasy Awards were announced this week, and can be found in full here. They contain a number of works of interest to us.

In the Anthology category there is Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, edited by Eduardo Jiménez Mayo & Chris N. Brown (Small Beer Press).

In the Collection category there is Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck (Cheeky Frawg), one story from which, “Augusta Prima”, is short-listed for our awards.

And in the Special Award Professional category there is a mention for Lucia Graves for her translation of The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Weidenfeld & Nicholson; Harper).

We are delighted to see this recognition of translators and translated work in these major awards.

Short Lists for 2013

The Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation (ARESFFT) is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2013 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (for works published in 2012). There are two categories: Long Form and Short Form.

Long Form

Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City by Kai-cheung Dung, translated from the Chinese by Anders Hansson, Bonnie S. McDougall, and the author (Columbia University Press).

Belka, Why Don’t You Bark? by Hideo Furukawa, translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich (Haikasoru).

Kaytek the Wizard by Janusz Korczak, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Penlight).

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, translated from the Russian by Olena Bormashenko (Chicago Review Press).

Seven Terrors by Selvedin Avdić, translated from the Bosnian by Coral Petkovich (Istros Books).

Three Science Fiction Novellas by J.-H. Rosny aîné, translated from the French by Danièle Chatelain & George Slusser (Wesleyan University Press).

The Whispering Muse by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb (Telegram).

Note: The version of Roadside Picnic in question is a brand new translation of this well-loved work, and therefore eligible for the award despite the existence of a previous English language version.

Short Form

“Augusta Prima” by Karin Tidbeck translated from the Swedish by the author (Jagannath: Stories, Cheeky Frawg).

“Autogenic Dreaming: Interview with the Columns of Cloud” by TOBI Hirotaka, translated from the Japanese by Jim Hubbert (The Future Is Japanese, Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington (eds.), Haikasoru).

“Every Time We Say Goodbye” by Zoran Vlahović, translated from the Croatian by Tatjana Jambrišak, Goran Konvićni, and the author (Kontakt: An Anthology of Croatian SF, Darko Macan and Tatjana Jambrišak (eds.), SFera).

“The Flower of Shazui” by Chen Qiufan, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Interzone #243).

“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” by Xia Jia, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld #65).

“A Single Year” by Csilla Kleinheincz, translated from the Hungarian by the author (The Apex Book of World SF #2, Lavie Tidhar (ed.), Apex Book Company).

The nominees were announced at Finncon 2013 in Helsinki, over the weekend of July 6-7 during a discussion about international science fiction. ARESFFT Board member Cheryl Morgan and jury member Stefan Ekman, who was a Guest of Honor at Finncon, were present, as was Short Form nominee, Karin Tidbeck. Other countries represented at Finncon this year include Latvia, Estonia, Russia, China, France, Canada, the UK, and the USA.

The winning works will be announced in August. Each winning author and translator will receive a cash prize of US$350.

ARESFFT President Professor Gary K. Wolfe said: “The number of fine works that our jury has to consider is increasing each year. We are delighted to be able to bring such fine fiction from a wide range of different cultures to the attention of the English-speaking world.”

The money for the prize fund was obtained primarily through a generous donation by Society for the Furtherance & Study of Fantasy & Science Fiction (SF3). SF3 is the parent non-profit corporation of Wiscon, the feminist science fiction convention.

The jury for the awards was James & Kathryn Morrow (Chairs); Felice Beneduce, Alexis Brooks de Vita, Stefan Ekman, Martha Hubbard, Ekaterina Sedia, Kari Sperring, and Aishwarya Subramanian.

Nominations Closed

Our jury needs to get on with looking at 2012 works, so we are closing nominations for this year. The full list of works that we know about is available here. If we have missed something, the award rules do allow us to carry works forward to next year (and indeed you’ll see some 2011 works in the list for that reason).

Our 2013 jury will be chaired by Kathryn Morrow who, along with husband James, edited the SFWA European Hall of Fame anthology. The rest of the jury are: Felice Beneduce, Alexis Brooks de Vita, Stefan Ekman, Martha Hubbard, Kari Maund, Ekaterina Sedia and Aishwarya Subramanian.