PIN – Maria Nicola is the winner of the third edition of the Biennial Mario Lattes Prize for Translationtranslator of the novel The plains by the Argentinian Federico Falco, published in Italy by the Sur publishing house. Created by the Bottari Lattes Foundation in collaboration with the Castello di Perno Association and the University of Turin, for the 2024 edition it was decided to dedicate the award to the Spanish-American language.
The experts Monica Bedana, Gina Maneri and Vittoria Martinetto, who in this third edition make up the specialist Jury, explain: justifying the awarding of the Prize: “The translator has distinguished herself for a stylistic rendering of great sensitivity and elegance, finding, in absolute respect of the author’s dictation, the most suitable solutions to return a text rich in technicalities and elaborate descriptions of a naturalistic scope. The resulting Italian language is crystalline, never clouded – in the syntactic constructions or in the lexical choices – by sediments of the source language. Loyalty to the original text and usability by readers therefore find, in this translation, a happy meeting point, and highlight the translator’s full adherence to the intimate stylistic code of Federico Falco. The quality of this work is a further confirmation of the long and solid professional trajectory of Maria Nicola, who for decades has contributed to the diffusion of Spanish-language literature in Italy also with her fervent intellectual curiosity”.
In a first phase, the finalist texts were selected by the permanent Jury, composed of Anna Battaglia, Melita Cataldi, Mario Marchetti, Antonietta Pastore.
The Other finalists in the competition were Alberto Bile Spadaccini with The Great Burundún-Burundá is dead by Jorge Zalamea (Colombia, published by Arcoiris), Ilide Carmignani with Mourning by Eduardo Halfon (Guatemala, published by il Saggiatore), Raul Schenardi with Between your frozen fingers by Francisco Tario (Mexico, published by Safarà) and Giulia Zavagna with Call me Cassandra by Marcial Gala (Cuba, published by Sellerio).
The awards ceremony was held at Castello di Perno, in the heart of the Langhe. On this occasion the translators and the jurors of the Award were involved in a round table coordinated by Stefania Soma, aka Petunia Ollisterin the presence of a curious and attentive audience, including a group of Foreign Languages and Literatures students of the University of Turin, who interacted and discussed with the experts.
The experts in contemporary Hispanic-American language, who in this third edition make up the specialist jury, are Monica Bedana, who since 2017 has directed the Italian branch of the School of the University of Salamanca in Turin, Gina Maneri, translator and teacher at the Civica Scuola Interpreti e Traduttori Altiero Spinelli in Milan, and Vittoria Martinetto, teacher of Hispanic-American Language and Literature at the University of Turin, who is responsible for the translations of some of the works of, among others, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges.
The biennial Mario Lattes Award for Translation is organized by the Bottari Lattes Foundation in collaboration with the Castello di Perno Association and the University of Turin, with the contribution and support of the Municipality of Monforte d’Alba, the support of Banca d’Alba and Fondazione CRT and with the patronage of Confindustria Cuneo and the Union of Municipalities of the Langa and Barolo Hills.
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