Hayden Toftner Prize Recipient 2022

"Asal Dardan’s novel, "Reflections of a Barbarian", is a bittersweet testimony of second generation dislocation. It charts the experience of a child of immigrants trying to navigate the shoals of memory, family lore, the inscrutable lives of her parents, and her own understanding of how she fits into a society fundamentally different from the one that shaped the previous generations.

Hayden Toftner’s translation, in turn, recreates the narrator’s voice in all its immediacy, successfully conveying its alternating tones of pragmatism and nostalgia for a world she has not known. Dardan’s sentences are sinuous and lithe, conveying much emotional and contextual information without ever feeling weighty. Toftner captures that ease and litheness in a tone that slips between the casual and formal, elegantly reordering the clauses of the original sentences in order to communicate the author’s nuanced narrative with ease. The reader is gradually, almost imperceptibly drawn into the narrator’s mind, and this translation renders that process effectively and persuasively. 

In addition to treating Dardan's prose with a natural fluidity, Toftner also skillfully handled the poem by Thomas Brasch that opens the novel and returns to shape the conclusion of the first chapter. The jury congratulates Hayden Toftner for rising to these numerous challenges, thereby earning this year’s Gutekunst Prize."

"In her essay “Spitzweg,” included in her book Betrachtungen einer Barbarin, Asal Dardan reflects on her upbringing in Germany as the daughter of Iranian parents who were forced to flee their homeland during the revolution in 1979. She discusses the blending (and occasional clash) of cultures that she experienced, and while translating this text I wanted to engage with the same mixing in my attempt to faithfully convey the range of cultural influences on Dardan’s childhood. I viewed the tranquil paintings of Carl Spitzweg, I imagined myself in the Cologne neighborhood of Höhenberg, and I listened to the wistful songs by 1970s Iranian pop stars like Ebi and Googoosh. But these allusions that enrich the text also present a challenge for translation, especially as this selection was my first major translation project. For instance, I found myself grappling with how to render “Biedermeier” and the connotations of stuffy, bourgeois sensibilities that the era carries. Furthermore, these cultural encounters point to the incomplete and fluid process of recollection that underlies Dardan’s writing and that makes her flight from Iran “a story, not an experience.” In my translation I sought to mirror the structure of Dardan’s sentences — sometimes fragmentary, sometimes flowing — as much as they mirror the nature of her own memory."