Agata Orzeszek and Ernesto Rubio have won this Monday the National Award for Best Translation, corresponding to the year 2024, for the Spanish version of The books of Jacob of the Polish Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, while Mercedes Corral has won the National Award for the Work of a Translator.
The jury gathered this Monday announced these awards, each of them endowed with 30,000 eurosas stated in the note issued by the Ministry of Culture.
They recognize Mercedes Corral for “an outstanding and extensive career spanning four decades and for the literary quality with which she has been able to imbue, with talent and effectiveness, excellent translations from French and Italian with the right narrative tone and the necessary dose of passion”.
In addition, Mercedes Corral, who is called a translation activist, stands out “for its exceptional work in promoting reading among the youngest, showing and bringing children closer to the world of languages ​​and the complicated task of its professionals.”
Corral (1954) has a degree in Hispanic Philology and has been a literary translator from Italian and French since 1985. In addition, since 2006 she has directed the activity The adventure of translatingwith the aim of showing children the world of languages ​​and translation.
He has translated, among others, Dino Buzzati, Natalia Ginzburg, Elio Vittorini, Italo Svevo, JMG Le Clezio, Agnès DesartheRomain Gary, Marchioness Colombi, Machiavelli, Georges Simenon and Bernard-Henri Lévy.
For its part, the jury has proposed Agata Orzeszek and Ernesto Rubio’s translation of the work The books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk “the admirable way in which the enormous challenges posed by translation are resolved which is considered the magnum opus of the Polish Nobel Prize winner, a milestone of enormous contribution to our culture and our language.
Furthermore, the jury noted that “the translators, Agata Orzeszek and Ernesto Rubio, have known how to weave with excellence the complex and multifaceted text by Olga Tokarczuk, with countless layers and a difficult style, but lyrical, without losing the richness of the original, at the same time that they convey the language of 18th century Poland without falling into anachronisms.”
Orzeszek was born in Warsaw (Poland) in 1953, although he has Spanish nationality. She has a degree in Spanish Neophilology from the University of Warsaw with a thesis titled Sense and Form of The tree of science by PÃo Baroja and she has been a full professor at the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation of the Autonomous University of Barcelona from 1999 until her retirement in 2013.
For his part, Ernesto Rubio (1975) is a translation project manager, Polish/English-Spanish/Catalan literary and audiovisual translator and has a degree in English Philology from the University of Valencia.
Both translators regularly collaborate and are responsible for the translations of works such as East of the Arbatby Hanna Krall; The evil of the shamanby Jacek Hugo-Bader; and Bucharest. Dust and Bloodby Malgorzata Rejmer, among others
