Flashback: ACF TRANSLATION PRIZE 2009: Award Ceremony
by Simona Sivkoff

On December 1st 2009, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York inaugurated the ACF Translation Prize, an award supporting the translations of contemporary Austrian literature into English. The event honoring the three winners Jean M. Snook, Uljana Wolf, and Christian Hawkey incorporated two aspects on literature in translation: the first being of the people promoting and working with it and the other, a more intimate one, of the translators themselves. ACF Deputy Director Martin Rauchbauer introduced the award, and conveyed the Forum’s aspiration that the award support and facilitate intercultural exchange through literature in translation. Rauchbauer gratefully acknowledged the volume and quality of submissions, and thanked all participants in the competition for making the work of the jury both exciting and challenging.  Having talked about the importance of bringing Austrian literature and culture to the American public in its native tongue, Rauchbauer turned the podium over to the Festival Director of World Voices PEN, Caro Llewellyn. She spoke about the crucial significance of supporting the translation of national literatures, saying that it contributed to a global cultural exchange and critical international dialogue.

Michael Orthofer,  of The Literary Saloon, delivered a laudation for the poets Uljana Wolf and Christian Hawkey, who gathered and translated the works of the distinguished author Ilse Aichinger in Bad Words, an anthology of short prose pieces, published by Fischer Verlag. Bad Words includes a large selection of Aichinger’s texts from the sixties onwards that have not appeared in English before. The concluding laudation was held by Fatima Naqvi, a professor of German and Austrian Literature at Rutgers University. She spoke of the literary and linguistic intricacy of Gert Jonke’s work and praised Jean M. Snook’s outstanding translation of his novel The Distant Sound for conveying this intricacy in English.

The winners participated in a discussion with Daniela Strigl, a literary critic and professor of German, at the University of Vienna. The translators talked about their motivation for getting involved with the literary world of Austria and their experience translating such challenging authors as Aichinger and Jonke. The discussion was followed by a reading, for which each winner had prepared a short excerpt of their work. The ceremony concluded with the presentation of the award by Caro Llewellyn and the presentation of crystalline trophies, a gift from Swarovski, to each winner. The evening ended with a reception at the Austrian Cultural Forum.  

More than ten years ago, in 1997, the WAGNER FORUM GRAZ, led by Heinz Weyringer and Walter Bernhart, developed the idea of organizing a competition in the field of the musical theatre, but a competition which, different from most others in the field, would not concentrate on the musical side of works but focus on stage direction and stage design. This idea was inspired by the fact that contemporary practice puts remarkable weight on these two features of theatrical production, which have the greatest potential of innovation in the musical theatre today.

From the outset it has been the most distinctive feature of the RING AWARD that, at the finals, actual performances take place on a large stage and that, accordingly, not only conceptions are submitted for assessment, but contestants are judged by their capacity for producing live realizations of their conceptions.  It is this real-life aspect of the RING AWARD which turns it into a unique event – also from the viewpoint of audience experience – but, at the same time, also into a daunting financial challenge. It is an invaluable advantage and needs to be most gratefully acknowledged that the public authorities of the Province of Styria and the City of Graz have early on recognized the unique position of the RING AWARD in the arts world and have been willing to support it generously as a significant instrument for encouraging young artists on an international scale. Yet it would be impossible to operate the RING AWARD without the very active participation – in cooperation with the WAGNER FORUM GRAZ – of BÜHNEN GRAZ, the official local theatre organization with all its subdivisions, and the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.

The RING AWARD has so far seen five runs, with a constant increase in numbers of participating contestants and nations, in 2008 holding at 158 participants from 22 nations. On account of its origin in the WAGNER FORUM GRAZ, the first two competitions (1997 and 2000) were based on works by Richard Wagner, the Rhinemaidens scene from Rheingold and the second act of Parsifal, respectively. Later themes were the Antonia act of Contes d’Hoffmann (2002), the second act of Le nozze di Figaro (2005), and the last act of Rigoletto  (2008). The latest competition, with its finals coming up in June 2011, is based on Die Fledermaus (The Bat). Thus the contestants have been faced with a wide range of musico-theatrical challenges, and in future it may widen even more.

A quantified confirmation of the need of a competition on such a singular scale is given by the fact that so far 682 young artists from 40 different nations have participated in it.