Your own work, that's the prize

Concerned that my last post may be misinterpreted as sour grapes about my city’s latest laurel-crowned translators, I write here to clarify; Ingo, Susanne & Ursel unquestionably “deserve” their prizes; who’d doubt their work was the best? My punch was not aimed at prize-winners but rather at prize-giving & prize givers.

You’ll be told that you need to reward excellence in society by granting honours, usually with a whack of cash attached. If you didn’t do this, it’s implied, excellence would remain plankton-like, swilling about the seas, it’d have no motivation to conjulate into a nice, compact two chapters &  proposal form. We’d have no excellence, no one who wanted to bring things on. We’d be back in the cave.

Is there any evidence to counter this claim? – It’s hardly possible to compare our societies with others, that give few or no prizes – because almost all societies do reward excellence.

The alternative is to hypothesise that prize-giving exists - not because literature or other arts or other areas of life wouldn’t produce wonders without it – but in order to reinforce the status of the prize-givers. As long as even a few people are still interested in what you’re doling out, your place in the pecking order is assured. When the last waverers waver away from you & ignore your prize – and ten applicants is getting close to a blanket ignorance - your podest is pulled away under your feet.

Which may lead prize-givers to take up their own, real work again, their “doing.” Perhaps it is only in our own work that there are prizes to win, which are worth winning. And worthy the winning.

A carve-up or a meritocracy? Hamburg's literary prizes.

Alongside six grants of six thousand Euro each for new German literature, a team at Hamburg's Kulturbehörde headed by Wolfgang Schömel grant three literary translation prizes of € 2500 each year. The literary translation prizes are exclusively for translations into German. I submitted an application including a sample translation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's 1930s modernist masterpiece "A Scot's Quaire", a work largely unknown in the German speaking world. Have a dip here into the novel if you're not familiar with it.

Dr. Schömel informed us per email that there were 194 applicants in total for these nine prices, including the three for translation. Of these only ten were translators. Not to have won a prize which - purely statistically speaking - you've got a one in three chance of winning is quite the opposite of inspiring.

Under "Förderpreis für Übersetzung" I understood something like supporting young talent, a prize to bring unknown translators on their way to their first proper contracts for literary translation. Not a bit of it.
Ingo Herzke, one of the winning translators, has done nearly all the German A. L. Kennedy & Allan Bennet's "The Uncommon Reader"; Susanne Höbel does, among other things, the German versions of the Graham Swift novels. Ursel Allenstein, the final winner, translates from Swedish and Danish and has a row of published translations to her credit.

So these prizes "award achievement" do they? Then you need to have a serious read of poet & satirical artist Tom Leonard's critique of prize-giving inside the literature industry which is spread, magnificently throughout his journals of the last two years.