Stone upon Stone
Johnston's translation of Stone upon Stone (Kamień na Kamieniu), marks the first time that a work by the acclaimed 80-year-old writer has been rendered into English.
The prize, which was founded in 1963, is open to book-length translations into English from any language.
The judges described the novel, which was originally published in 1984, as “a passionately colloquial and abundantly rich account of life in a small Polish village during the darkest decades of 20th century Eastern Europe,” shot through with “clarity, humour, and emotional candour.”
The panel reflected that Johnston had done “a truly remarkable job rendering this beautiful novel into English.
“His translation is pitch-perfect, seamless and extraordinarily precise. Johnston shows breathtaking versatility and enables us to hear, sense, and feel the narrator's whirlwind monologue across diverse characterizations, story-lines, tones, and dramatic modalities.”
The book was published by Archipelago Books, a small non-profit publishing house from Brooklyn specializing in literature from non-English speaking countries.
Prolific translator Bill Johnston is a professor at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, and former director of its Polish Study Center.
He has previously translated works by the Romantic poet Juliusz Slowacki, the novelists Boleslaw Prus and Stefan Zeromski, the avant-garde playwright and prose writer Witold Gombrowicz as well as contemporary Polish authors (Andrzej Stasiuk and Magdalena Tulli).
Several years ago he received the ‘Found in Translation’ Award, sponsored jointly by the Polish Cultural Institutes in London and New York, the Krakow-based Polish Book Institute and W.A.B. Publishers of Warsaw (for the translation of New Poems by Tadeusz Rozewicz).
Past winners of the PEN Translation Prize include Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh. They received the prize jointly in 1996 for View with a Grain of Sand by the Nobel Prize winning poet Wisława Szymborska. (mk/nh)