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THOMAS RESCHKE - PRIZE WINNER 2001
In cooperation with the Europäisches Übersetzer-Kollegium in Straelen, the Stiftung Kunst und Kultur des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen - the Foundation for Art and Culture of the Land North Rhine-Westphalia -, awarded the prize for literary translation, endowed with DM 50 000, for the first time in June 2001. The "Übersetzerpreis der Stiftung Kunst und Kultur des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen 2001" - The Translator Prize of the Foundation for Art and Culture of the Land North Rhine-Westphalia 2001 - was awarded to Thomas Reschke.
An independent jury of literary translators had the task of selecting an outstanding achievement from translations submitted by 56 applicants in 17 languages. The prize also acknowledges the translator's complete works.
JURY STATEMENT
Meeting in Straelen 16 - 17 March 2001, the jury awarded this prize to the translator Thomas Reschke, living in Berlin, for his rendering of the novel "Der Meister und Margarita" by Michail Bulgakow.
At the same time, the prize expresses the well-deserved appreciation of Reschke's extraordinarily comprehensive oeuvre of literature translated from Russian. The German version of Bukakow's novel is part of a 13-volume edition of his work, almost entirely translated by Reschke. Since it was first published in 1968, Reschke has reworked the translation several times. It is a mature, stylistically brilliant translation, which required the firm grasp of several levels of language and a highly creative verbal imagination, making this 20th-century masterpiece of world literature accessible to a large group of readers in the German-language region.
In his 45 years of translating, Reschke devoted himself to linguistically demanding, complicated texts preferably by critical Soviet authors who contributed to the destalinisation.
MEMBERS OF THE JURY
Irmela Brender, Joachim Meinert, Helga Pfetsch, Maja Pflug and Helmut Scheffel
In cooperation with the EUK Straelen the
awards the Übersetzerpreis
