Ursula Gräfe Wins the Noma Award for Translation

Ursula Grāfe, the German translator of Murakami, is a very hard-working person who has also translated a number of other Japanese authors. This year she won the 22nd Noma Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature, awarded by the publisher Kodansha. The other winner is Nora Bierich. The award ceremony will take place in Frankfurt in October. Congratulations to Ursula!

picture from the interview quoted later

Ursula was awarded the prize for her many contributions over the years, including the translations of Murakami's 2009-2010 novel 1Q84 and Keigo Higashino's 2005 The Devotion of Suspect X (Yōgisha X no kenshin). Nora Bierich also won for her many years of contributions, including Oe Kenzaburo's Changeling. Ursula previously won the Japan Foundation Prize for her translation of Yoko Ogawa (2004).

The Japanisches Kulturinstitut (The Japan Foundation) Facebook page states that Ursula has translated 48 works, including fifteen with Kimiko Nakayama-Ziegler.

I could ask Ursula for a list of authors she has translated, but since she is a modest person, I am going to rely on Wikipedia, Amazon.de, etc., and hope that if I get something wrong, she will point it out (names are listed in Japanese order, with surnames first):


Murakami Haruki, Murakami Ryū, Kawakami Hiromi, Ogawa Yoko, Oe Kenzaburo, Higashino Keigo, Tsuji Hitonari, Yamada Taichi, Hiraide Takashi, Inoue Yasushi, Ohmura Tomoko, Sukegawa Durian, and Murata Sayaka, among others.

Additionally, Ursula has translated a book by Gandhi and the letters of Jane Austen to her sister, Cassandra (the last two from English, of course). 

Here are some of the beautiful covers of Ursula's translations, with Haruki Murakami's books featured in the first two rows. If the number 48 is accurate, the covers below represent just one third of Ursula's translatorial production!

 

  

  

  

Here is an interview with Ursula on Beuchermeschen.de, which appeared after the publication of the German translation of Killing Commendatore. Ursula explains what she likes about Murakami's writing, offers her impressions of meeting Murakami, and describes how she works, by first producing a draft "almost intuitively . . . spontaneously, like the wind" and then polishing it - a task that she says "takes forever." 

Ursula is the fifth Haruki Murakami translator to win the award, and the fourth to win it for a translation of Murakami. The first, in 1991, was Patrick de Voss for his French translation of A Wild Sheep Chase; followed by Jay Rubin (2003) for the English translation of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Antonietta Pastore (2017) for the Italian translation of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. Giorgio Amitrano, another of the Italian Murakami translators, also won the Noma Award in 2001, but for his translation of Miyazawa Kenji.