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Elizabeth Raab
 Prize Recipient 2024

Gutekunst Prize FOG updated © Gutekunst Prize FOG updated

Prize Recipient 2024

For her translation of an excerpt from Julia Schoch’s Das Liebespaar des Jahrhunderts (dtv, 2023), the winner of the fourteenth annual Gutekunst Prize of the Friends of Goethe New York is Elizabeth Raab.

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

"The jury of the 2024 Gutekunst Prize enthusiastically commends Elizabeth Raab for her engaging, nimble translation of a passage from Julia Schoch’s Das Liebespaar des Jahrhunderts (The Couple of the Century). Schoch’s novel recounts the unraveling of a passionate, three-decade long relationship against the historical background of East Germany’s ideological collapse and its adaptation to a unified Germany. For Schoch’s narrator, the personal is political with more than usual immediacy. She looks back with detachment at the gradual fraying of her great love, trying to understand how a passionate, unconditional attachment could have soured into suspicion and distrust. Elizabeth’s supple translation convincingly captures the shifts in tone as the narrator recollects in tranquility and without sentimentality the emotional ups and downs of early love, her swings between exhilaration and adolescent melancholy, hopeful confidence and self-doubt.

Julia Schoch is particularly adept in writing elegant, laconic prose that expresses as much in what is not said as in what is. Elizabeth’s English is well-suited to conveying the narrator’s suggestive terseness as well as her colloquial charm. She has a finely tuned ear for the nuanced and subtle rhythms and registers of Schoch’s prose and a readerly eye sensitive to the shadings of words.

This year’s two dozen entries were particularly strong but Elizabeth Raab’s stood out for its intuitive feel for vagaries of the inner monologue and confident grasp of the colloquial tone."
        
You can read Elizabeth Raab's prizewinning translation of an excerpt from Julia Schoch’s Das Liebespaar des Jahrhunderts:

The Couple of the Century(PDF, 242 KB)

New Books in German recommends: The Couple of the Century

About Elizabeth Raab

Elizabeth Raab
© Jonathan Kößler
Elizabeth Raab is pursuing an MA in Classical Philology at the University of Heidelberg, supported by a DAAD scholarship. Her thesis focuses on German Romantic receptions of Greek tragedy. She graduated from Yale University in 2023 summa cum laude with a joint BA/MA in Classics and the German Advanced Language Certificate. Excerpts of her translation of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis appeared in Ancient Exchanges 5: Invention. In her spare time, she enjoys reading contemporary fiction and biking along the Neckar River.
 

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. The prize is now supported by the Friends of Goethe New York in partnership with New Books in German.

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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