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The Kayden Translation Awards is given to honor the memory of Eugene Kayden, a translator in his own right, to promote the translation of texts that would help promote the exchange of knowledge and research in a variety of fields. It is awarded biennially and will be given in recognition of an outstanding creative or scholarly translation in the fields of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

 

This year Suzanne Magnanini, Associat Professor and Chair of the French and Italian Department, has been awarded the first Biennial Kayden Translation Award for her translation of Straparola’s The Pleasant Nights!

 

The two judges for the award have thus described Suzanne’s work:

 

Judge 1: "It’s a monumental work of a translator and scholar. The book is accompanied by the scholarly introduction, bibliography and index, which is proper for the publication of such a classical work in the genre of literary fairy tales  as Straparola’s two-volume collection of literary tales.  Suzanne’s masterful translation makes this 16^th-century masterpiece accessible and funny for the contemporary reader. While bringing Straparola’s text closer to the present-day perception, Suzanne preserves the stylistic peculiarities of the original, thus conveying the “aroma” of the gallant baroque prose […] The availability of this book in English thanks to Suzanne Magnanini’s heroic labor of love, radically expands the canon of the European classics in English, which is a significant event by itself. It goes without saying that it is hard to find a better candidate for the first Kayden Translation Award.  Prof. Magnanini’s translation will set a high standard for the future iterations of this prize.”

 

Judged 2: "Suzanne Magnanini is certainly deserving of the Kayden Award for translations. She has contributed a new and complete translation of this important work, a diverse collection of favole containing an early record of literary fairy tales in a European vernacular. […] Magnanini highlights gender in several important ways: the querelle des femmes among narrators within the source text; Straparola's recasting of the gender associations of fairy tales by having young, educated women narrate them in the context of a salon; and the impact of his work on women writers in France a century later who adopted it as a model for their own writings against the grain. As a scholar working on gender and translation in a field far removed from Magnanini’s, […] I found her insights about the way that these tales and their framing narrative both challenge and reinforce gender norms illuminating.”