Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize
Shortlist 2024

jury statement

Selected from the twenty-four German-to-English translations published in 2023 that were submitted for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, this shortlist celebrates the art and craft of translation in an array of fictional and nonfictional forms. The language in each of these texts is fresh and lively, and conveys the content and spirit of their originals in a dazzling display of the power of the English language.

The six books that constitute this year’s shortlist—Yevgenia Beloruset’s War Diary, translated by Greg Nissan, Thomas Brussig’s The Short End of the Sonnenallee, translated by Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson, Max Czollek’s De-Integrate, translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot, translated by Peter Wortsman, Florian Illies’ Love in a Time of Hate, translated by Simon Pare, and Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs, translated by Tess Lewis—take us from marble cliffs in the early twentieth century, to a romp through real-life love stories in that same troubled era, to marvelous tales of the uncanny in the Romantic past, to a narrative of the Ukraine invasion in progress right now, to a concrete-and-barbed wire wall in the waning days of the German Democratic Republic, to a polemic about figurative walls that continue to define, divide, and de-integrate us.

We congratulate all the translators for their outstanding contributions in bringing German-language texts to our shores, thank them for the pleasure and insights they afford their new readerships, and encourage readers to dive into every one of these remarkable books.

Shelley Frisch, Jury Chair
Princeton, New Jersey
August 2024

Jon Cho-Polizzi
For his translation of Max Czollek's Desintegriert euch!

De-Integrate: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century
(Restless Books, 2023)

Jon Cho-Polizzi is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He was born and raised in Northern California and received his PhD in German and Medieval Studies from UC Berkeley after studying Literature, History, and Translation in Santa Cruz and Heidelberg. His literary translations highlight the polyphony of contemporary German-language literature. Jon lives and works between Michigan, California, and Berlin.
 

Jonathan Franzen and Jenny Watson
For their translation of Thomas Brussig's Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee

The Short End of the Sonnenallee
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)

Jonathan Franzen is a novelist, essayist, journalist, screenwriter, and translator. His engagement with German literature began in college, where he majored in German, and deepened in the two years he spent in Germany, one in Munich with Wayne State University's junior-year-abroad program, the second in Berlin with a Fulbright Scholarship. In addition to The Short End of the Sonnenallee, he has published translations of essays by Karl Kraus (The Kraus Project, FSG, 2013) and Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening (FSG, 2007).

 

Jenny Watson has a PhD in German and Scandinavian Studies.  She is an Associate Professor of German Studies at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Her research and teaching interests revolve around German-Scandinavian literary relationships as well as the literary portrayal of East Germany and German reunification.  Her translation work with Jonathan Franzen was a dream come true—to work with Jonathan Franzen, one of her favorite authors—as well as to expose the English-speaking world to Thomas Brussig’s Sonnenallee, a novel that she has hoped to teach to non-German speakers in her Reunification course since it appeared.  
 

tess Lewis
For her translation of Ernst Jünger's Auf den Marmorklippen

On the Marble Cliffs
(New York Review Books, 2023)

 

Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Anne Weber, Lutz Seiler, Philippe Jaccottet and Montaigne. Her translation of Maja Haderlap’s Angel of Oblivion won the ACFNY Translation Prize and the 2017 PEN Translation Award. Her essays and reviews have appeared in many journals and newspapers including The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, World Literature Today, The Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, and Bookforum. A Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow as well as a ‘scholar of note’ at the American Library in Paris, she serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and has curated the Festival Neue Literatur, New York City’s annual festival of German language literature in English.

Greg Nissan
For their translation of Yevgenia Belorusets' Anfang des Krieges. Tagebücher aus Kyjiw

War Diary
(New Directions, 2023)

Greg Nissan is a poet and translator living in New York. Their translations include kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Press) and forthcoming works from Jutta Koether (Blank Forms) and Henrike Kohpeiß (Divided Publishing). They are the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellowship to translate Austrian poet Ann Cotten’s Banned! An Epic Poem into English, as well as a Fulbright Scholarship.

Simon Pare
For his translation of Florian Illies' Liebe in Zeiten des Hasses

Love in a Time of Hate
(Riverhead Books, 2023)

Simon Pare has translated thirty works of fiction and non-fiction from German and French. His translation of Christoph Ransmayr’s The Flying Mountain made the Man Booker International 2018 longlist, and he was runner-up for the 2021 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. In 2016, he was part of the team that translated The Panama Papers into English. He lives near Zurich.
 

Peter Wortsman
For his translation of E.T.A. Hoffmann's Der goldne Topf

The Golden Pot and Other Tales of the Uncanny
(Archipelago Books, 2023)

Peter Wortsman’s English rendering of Robert Musil's Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, now in its third edition, has been called “a classic in itself.” He has translated works by the Grimms, Heine, Hoffmann, Kafka, Kleist, Varnhagen, et al. Wortsman is the author of original works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays and the indefinable. Odd Birds & Fat Cats, An Urban Bestiary, in collaboration with his daughter, Aurélie Bernard Wortsman -- his text, her illustrations -- is forthcoming in 2024. He was a Fulbright Fellow in 1973, a Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellow in 1974, and a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010.
 

Jury

Shelley Frisch (Chair), Elisabeth Lauffer, Philip Boehm