Montclair State Students of Italian Translate for US-Italy Book Prize Ceremony

桥奖是每年颁发给在意大利和美国出版的小说和非小说类书籍的奖项。由大洋两岸的两个评委会选出的作品分别被翻译成英语和意大利语。 Unlike traditional prizes, the Bridge places emphasis on the enrichment that books can bring to another culture and, as such, it values the role of translation.

This year the award opened up to a collaboration with Montclair State University by inviting two students to translate excerpts from the winning Italian books into English. Oscar Guevara-Perez, who graduated in Italian and Spanish in 2018, translated Luciano Funetta’s excerpts from his novel Il grido.

Domenica Russo, who is a second-year student majoring in Italian, translated a passage from Sandra Petrignani’s biography La corsara: Ritratto di Natalia Ginzburg). They attended the 2018 ceremony held in the beautiful art gallery of CIMA ( Center for Italian Modern Art) in Soho, and read the excerpts. Both students have taken classes in audio-visual and literary translation at Montclair State (with Dr. Trubiano), and Guevara-Perez has also been a student intern for opera surtitling at the Sferisterio Arena in Macerata in 2018.

The evening at CIMA (see full video) gave the students the chance to meet and talk to the winning authors, who openly appreciated the translation work in their public remarks to the audience. One of them even wrote “Thank you for making my words better” in the autographed dedication. For the students, it was also an opportunity to meet one of the presenters, Ann Goldstein (see featured image above), renowned translator of Elena Ferrante, Primo Levi, Jhumpa Lahiri, among others (Goldstein visited Montclair State University in 2015 on the occasion of an evening devoted to literature and translation called “Migrating Words”).

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