Betsy Carter
 Prize Recipient 2023

Gutekunst Prize FOG updated

Prize Recipient 2023

For her translation of an excerpt from Simone Scharbert’s novel Rosa in Grau. Eine Heimsuchung (edition AZUR im Verlag Voland & Quist, 2022), the winner of the thirteenth annual Gutekunst Prize of the Friends of Goethe New York is Betsy Carter.

The jury, comprised of Tess Lewis, book critic and translator, Alta Price, translator, and Jeremy Davies, senior editor at And Other Stories, stated:
 

''Simone Scharbert’s Rosa in Grau is a hauntingly powerful novella narrated by a woman struggling to care for her daughter while also grappling with a mental health condition. Scenes drawn from everyday life in 1950s Germany evocatively hint at how how past trauma and subsequent challenges combine to take a toll. Hallucinatory episodes, flashbacks, and the characters she meets while institutionalized are the unlikely building blocks of a story that ultimately affirms the healing powers of art. The text is poetic, poignantly fragmented, obliquely violent at times, and peppered with cultural references that present unique linguistic challenges.

Betsy Carter’s bold translation convincingly and consistently captures the narrator’s singular voice and mood as she navigates alternating scenes of disorientation punctuated by moments of longing and hope. It strikes a nuanced balance between idiomatic English and the more distant, formal tone of a middle-class woman in the mid-twentieth century, caught between societal expectations and her own tenuous mental stability. 

Carter’s version also respects the tone of the original prose while deftly handling culturally specific references from the realms of music and history. Using concise hidden glosses for a Brahms Lied and making an apt adaptation to a nursery rhyme, Carter successfully conveys the effect of the original with a daringly creative approach.

The jury applauds the skill and flexibility with which Betsy Carter handled these obstacles, and unanimously awards her the 2023 Gutekunst Prize.''
 

Betsy Carter had the following to say on his experience of translating Simone Scharbert's work:
 
''In my translation, I aimed to create a piece of writing that successfully stands on its own as an English-language text, while retaining most of the original meaning. I wanted the text to be intelligible to an American audience and simultaneously to convey as much of the original's German-ness as possible. I domesticated references that wouldn't make sense to most Americans, like the play on a German children's song, but included the original references when I could provide context or hints that would make their meaning clear. I translated some portions of the text literally, when they made sense in my English translation. I also had to take some liberties; for example, the German word "Land" would literally be translated as "land" or "country." However, I didn't think it would make sense to describe, in English, the protagonist's coat as "a whole land" or "a whole country." Therefore, I settled on describing her coat as "a whole landscape." I enjoyed working with Scharbert's uniquely poetic prose that allows for beautiful imagery and great insights into the protagonist's emotional states.''
 

You can read Betsy Carter’s prizewinning translation of an excerpt from Simone Scharbert’s novel Rosa in Grau. Eine Heimsuchung:

Rosy Shades of Darkness, A Tribulation(PDF, 199 KB)


Please join us for a festive award ceremony at the Goethe-Institut New York on August 15, 2023: more information and registration via Eventbrite.

 

About Betsy Carter

Betsy Carter Patrick Antoniazza Betsy Carter is a Ph.D. student in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) at the University of Arizona and a graduate associate teacher with the university's Department of German Studies. The past two summers, she has taught German to UA students interning abroad through the Research in Munich program. In 2022, she also studied at the University of Leipzig with the support of a DAAD University Summer Course Grant. She holds a master's degree in German studies from the University of Colorado Boulder, where her thesis focused on literary translation. Prior to that, she earned her bachelor's degree at Brown University, majoring in music and comparative literature with an honors thesis also in literary translation. She has primarily studied translation with Zachary Sng and Forrest Gander at Brown University and Patrick Greaney at CU Boulder. While at Brown, she studied abroad in Vienna, Austria, and while at CU Boulder, she studied abroad in Göttingen, Germany. 

 

About the Gutekunst Prize of the Friends of Goethe New York

In 2010, the Goethe-Institut New York received a generous donation in memory of Frederick and Grace Gutekunst. A prize was created to identify outstanding young translators of German literature into English and assist them in establishing contact with the translation and publishing communities. As of 2017, the prize is supported by the Friends of Goethe New York.

The Gutekunst Prize of the Friends of Goethe New York is open to college students and to all translators under the age of 35 who, at the time the prize is awarded, have not yet published, nor are under contract for, a book-length translation.

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