Betsy Carter Prize Recipient 2023

''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.''
 

''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.''