Ross Benjamin - Wolff Prize Recipient 2010
Ross Benjamin was selected by a five-member jury as the winner of this year’s Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his translation of Michael Maars’s Speak, Nabokov (Verso, 200), originally published as Solus Rex. Die Die schöne böse Welt des Vladimir Nabokov. Mr. Onno Hückmann, Consul General of Germany in Chicago, will present the award to Ross Benjamin.
This event was recorded by Chicago Amplified and can be listened to by clicking on the link below.
2010 Award Ceremony
Attendance at this event is by invitation only.
This year’s jurors were:
Krishna Winston, Middletown, CT
Helmut Frielinghaus, Hamburg, Germany
David Dollenmayer, Hopkinton, PA
Michael Ritterson, Gettysburg, PA
Annie Wedekind, Brooklyn, NY
The jury’s statement:
“The jury for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize is pleased to award the prize for 2010 to Ross Benjamin for his translation of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov, published by Verso. The jury finds that this remarkably musical translation reads beautifully, and brings to English-speaking readers an important study of a writer of world stature whose works cry out for skilled exegesis. Benjamin’s translation is elegant, witty, even playful, doing justice to both the German original and the book’s subject. The translator reveals a sophisticated understanding of literary criticism and his own sure sense of literary style."
Ross Benjamin’s publications have appeared in The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, The Nation, and elsewhere. Additional translations include Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion (Archipelago Books, 2008), Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew (Melville House, 2008), Joseph Roth's Job (Archipelago, forthcoming, 2010) and Thomas Pletzinger's Funeral for a Dog (W.W. Norton & Company, forthcoming, 2011). He spent 2003-04 in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar. Ross Benjamin is presently at work on a novel about the Harlem Resaissance. 
For more information on Ross Benjamin, visit his website at: www.rossmbenjamin.com
