For Immediate Release
March 10, 2023
When the Society of Authors announced the winners of the 2022 Translation Prizes on February 8, 2023, the prestigious John Florio Prize was awarded to Nicholas Benson and Elena Coda for their translation of My Karst and My City and Other Essays by Scipio Slataper.
“The scholarship and athleticism required to render this many-textured project into tonal English is nothing short of staggering,” say the judges. “My Karst and My City is a masterwork of epic proportions, and a necessary reminder that academic translation can be linguistically vital as well as culturally important.”
The Society of Authors’ Translation Prizes recognize outstanding translations from works in various languages including French, German, Italian, Spanish, and more. The John Florio Prize is a biennial award for full-length Italian works translated into English that are of literary merit and general interest.
My Karst and My City by Scipio Slataper is a fictionalized, lyrical autobiography, translated in its entirety by Nicholas Benson and Elena Coda. It offers a unique example of an Italian modernist narrative, one that is influenced both by Slataper’s collaboration with the Florentine journal La Voce, and by the Germanic and Scandinavian literature that he absorbed while living in Trieste. My Karst and My City adds a new voice and a different dimension to our understanding of European modernism.
The Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library Series makes available to English audiences groundbreaking works by Italian authors who have made significant literary, philosophical, or historical contributions. It includes works by authors already recognized in Anglo-American culture but currently unavailable in English (Aretino, Bruno, Machiavelli, Pirandello, Verga); works that promote Anglo-Italian dialogue (Aretino, Florio, Leone Ebreo, Leopardi, Nievo, Platina, Serao); works largely unknown in English (Andreini, Artusi, Beccaria, Galliani, Goldoni); works by Italian humanists who have influenced Anglo-American letters (Alberti, Petrarch, Piccolomini, Della Porta); works by internationally influential Italian theorists and essayists (Bobbio, Bodei, Cafiero, Cattaneo, Croce, Gobetti, Salvemini); and select works by non-Italian authors who have significantly shaped Italy’s image in the world (Douglas, Heine, Montesquieu, de Sade, Stendhal, Twain).
University of Toronto Press (UTP) is one of the largest university presses in North America, publishing landmark scholarship since 1901. Each year UTP releases over 200 new scholarly, course, and general interest books in both print and ebook format and over 45 journals. In addition, UTP manages the distribution for over 200 publishers and imprints in Canada, the US, and around the world, with warehouses in Toronto, Ontario and Buffalo, New York. UTP also runs all of the University of Toronto Bookstores across the three main campuses, serving over 95,000 students and 15,000 faculty. For more information, please visit utorontopress.com.