Inger Johansson wins Romanian Cultural Institute's translation award

Inger Johansson has won the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) award for translation for the Swedish translation of Mihail Sebastian's The Correspondence of Marcel Proust, published by Bokförlaget Faethon.

The volume was published in 2024 with support from the ICR through the Translation and Publication Support program. The award was presented during the Iași International Literature and Translation Festival (FILIT).

The award was decided by a jury comprising writer, literary critic, and professor Cosmin Ciotloş, literary critic and professor Paul Cernat, and translator George Volceanov.

In the selection process, the jury considered criteria such as the lexical and stylistic difficulty of the translated work, the book's impact in the target space, and the translator's portfolio.

"Ms. Inger Johansson has demonstrated that she is a formidable expert on the work of Mircea Cărtărescu (she is among the very few translators who have dared to translate The Levant into a foreign language), but also on recently canonized authors, such as Max Blecher, and has shifted, in her prodigious career as a literary translator, between successful authors of the moment and authors whose posterity has perpetuated unaltered by time. Among the latter is another favorite author of Ms. Inger Johansson, namely Mihail Sebastian," the jury's motivation reads.

Inger Kristina Johansson is the president of the Literary Translators of the Swedish Writers' Union, has a Master of Arts in Romanian Philology from Lund University, and has translated more than 25 titles from Romanian into Swedish, including works by Max Blecher, Mircea Cărtărescu, Paul Celan, Gianina Carbunariu, Horia Lovinescu, Norman Manea, Gabriela Melinescu, Ioana Nicolaie, Mihail Sebastian, and Nichita Stănescu.

The award for the best translation of a Romanian book into a foreign language, established in 2022, aims to recognize translators' efforts to disseminate Romanian literature worldwide. At its first edition, the award went to translators Marian Ochoa de Eribe and Eta Hrubaru for the translation into Spanish of the volume Anthology of Poetry by Mircea Cărtărescu. In 2023, the award was won by translator Sean Cotter for the translation of the novel Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu. In 2024, the prize was awarded ex-aequo to the translator Bruno Mazzoni for the Italian translation of the volume Variations on a given theme by Ana Blandiana, and to Steinar Lone for the Norwegian translation of Cărtărescu's Solenoid.