Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Italian Translator of Tsukuru Tazaki, Antonietta Pastore, Wins Japanese Translation Prize

I haven't written much on this blog about Italian Murakami translations, probably because I don't speak Italian, but a few days ago today I found that Antonietta Pastore won the 21st Noma Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature.  This is an annual prize given by the Japanese publisher Kodansha, which was awarded to Pastore for her translation of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki.

Congratulations!

Jay Rubin is the only other Murakami translator to have received the award, which came his way in 2003 for the translation of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

      

Here is a link to a 2014 interview with Pastore about the book and its translation.  Apart from works by Murakami -- Wind and Flipper, Men Without Women, A Wild Sheep Chase, South of the Border West of the Sun (with Mimma de Petra), The Elephant Vanishes, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, to name just a few titles --  Pastore has also translated Natsume Soseki, Kawakami Hiromi, and other writers. Her translation of Murakami's Novelist As a Vocation, titled Il mestiere dello scrittore, is due out in mid-February, according to the announcement on the page of Murakami's Italian publisher, Einaudi.

Speaking of awards, as I have mentioned on this blog before, Haruki Murakami won the Hans Christian Andersen Award last year. The award ceremony took place last October in Odense, and was accompanied by a series of events in late October and early November, including readings and interviews in different Danish cities. Mette Holm, Murakami's Danish translator, moderated several of these events. Below is a photo from one lively conversation between Murakami and Holm, which took place on November 2 in the super modern Royal Library in Copenhagen, known as "The Black Diamond." I post this picture because one doesn't often see pictures of Haruki Murakami bursting out laughing. Here is the link to the story on the Library webpage. And here you can see the picture of the library.

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