 I'm Annie Fisher, the Vice President of the American Literary Translators Association. I'm excited to open this video commemorating the shortlist and winner of the 2020 Italian Pros in Translation Award. 2020 marks the sixth year for the IPTA, which recognizes the importance of contemporary Italian prose, fiction, and literary nonfiction, and promotes the translation of Italian works into English. Welcome, everyone. We are excited to have you here to celebrate with us. The judges for the 2020 IPTA are Gene Bonner, Richard Dixon, and Tony Shugar, who selected the shortlist and the winner, who will receive a $5,000 prize. We will be hearing from Gene Bonner and Richard Dixon with the blurbs for the shortlisted titles, and then we will go to Tony Shugar for the announcement of the winner of the 2020 Italian Pros in Translation Award, followed by a brief conversation and reading with the winner. Please feel free to follow along in the awards brochure found in the description, and we encourage you to purchase these titles from the bookshop.org page also found in the description. When you do, you support local bookstores. Engage with us in the comments wherever you're watching, and tag us at littranslate on Twitter and use the hashtag ALTA43. And now I'll turn over to our judges. During the 2020 Italian Pros and Translation Award shortlist in no particular order, Beyond Babylon by Ejibah Shago, translated from the Italian by Aaron Robertson, and published by Two Lines Press, Ejibah Shago's sprawling modern epic of a novel tells us the story of two half sisters, and in the process drops us into contemporary Rome, a fascinating city of immigrants and refugees. Others may see the eternal city and Italy through an entirely new lens, the lens of people who have escaped all kinds of tragedies, in the case of one sister, Argentina's dirty war, to remake their lives in a new place. While weaving an engrossing story, Shago, who is of Somalian descent, touches on myriad controversial issues facing Italy, and not only, including colonialism, racism and sexism. Such a brimming polyglot novel provided no end of challenges to translator Aaron Robertson, who provides an accessible English version of Shago's witty, frank Italian. And The Bishop's Bedroom by Piero Chiara, translated from the Italian by Jill Foulston, and published by New Vessel Press. In this sophisticated and at times moody murder mystery, two men meet up and post for Northern Italy and become friends as they sail around Lake Maggiore. The author, Piero Chiara, has expertly combined with the late John Gardner, considered fictions two main storylines. A stranger comes to town and a man goes on a journey. The stranger in this case is the owner of a small sailing vessel. While the man who goes on the journey is a wealthy villa owner, whose accounting of his wartime adventures in Africa doesn't quite add up. Or is that the case? Chiara keeps us guessing and reading with the combination of the stranger and the journey resulting in tragedy and heartache. The novel is eminently readable, thanks to the spare and accurate in everything from mood to diction translation by Jill Foulston, who matches Chiara's peerless knowledge of winds, tides and other nautical concerns that pepper the narrative. Wolf's Table by Rosella Pastorino, translated from the Italian by Lea di Yanesco, published by Flat Iron Books. Set in the final stages of World War II, this novel is inspired by the real life experience of a German woman who is conscripted to taste dishes to be served to Adolf Hitler. Rosa Sauer's parents are dead, her husband is fighting on the eastern front and she is sheltering with his parents when the SS come knocking at her door. She and a handful of women, her fellow food tasters, are forced to eat food that someone might have poisoned. Lea di Yanesco well renders the intensity of the original text, capturing the drama of the women's plight, their tensions, anxieties and despair, and has a fine ear for dialogue that flows smoothly and compellingly. Ithaca Forever, Penelope Speaks, a novel by Luigi Malerba, translated from the Italian by Douglas Grant Heiss, published by University of California Press. Odysseus' return to his wife Penelope after his 20-year absence is masterfully retold in this intriguing novel that prized open the gaps in Homer's narrative. When she really failed to recognise him when he appeared before her dressed as a beggar, Malerba's interpretation highlights Odysseus' vanity and Penelope's resentment when she realises his first interest is to test out her fidelity. He has been fighting wars and seeking adventure while hers has been a life of solitude, a marriage on hold. Douglas Grant Heiss brilliantly captures the voices of the returning Victor and his emotional inadequacies and of the long-suffering wife who isn't prepared to go along with his games. And this year's winner is I Am God by Giacomo Sartori, translated from the Italian by Frederica Randall, Restless Books. God has an existential crisis and falls in love with the unlikeliest of humans. Why, he asks, with nine billion to look after, should I go for a geneticist who also happens to be a fanatical atheist? Being all-powerful is losing its appeal, but would life as immortal be any better? Through the eyes of our omniscient narrator, we look at the immensity of human insignificance. As he meditates on beauty, goodness, environment, the cosmos, and our miserable attempts at religion. Sartori's deliciously absurd humor is magnificently translated by Frederica Randall, who captures his mocking voice with great ingenuity, delivering well-honed one-liners with impeccable timing and all the skill of a stand-up comic. Perhaps that skill in translating both humor and absurdity, two sides of the same coin, was an especially useful asset in her work as a political journalist. She wrote about her own work as a translator. Quote, I like to work on fiction and non-fiction that's just this side of untranslatable. Books that challenge what non-Italians know about Italian life, or challenge what we think constitutes a memoir, a novel, a work of history, unquote. It is tempting to see her translation work as a continuation of journalism, by other means, in the aftermath of her death on May 12th. The nation published an appreciation of her work as the papers, quote, Longtime Rome Correspondent, a mordantly funny, never in the least dispassionate observer. An acute chronicler of the post-war death spiral of Italian democracy, unquote. Frederica Randall covered Italy, a country that's just this side of untranslatable, as a journalist and as a translator. Translation being a form of journalism and journalism being a form of translation. She did both with great and uncommon mastery. The year is an excerpt from I Am God. God is not the sleepy old fart that many believers imagine. Let's get that straight. He likes to keep up with what's going on in the cosmos. He intervenes when he needs to, although intervention doesn't necessarily mean throwing a giant tantrum or staging a biblical scale massacre. There are also moments when these can go on for several million years, during which he just loafs around in his, as it were, slippers. Mostly when nothing much is happening. When the stars are living out there, adamantine life cycles, the galaxies evolving as galaxies will, and even on the subatomic level, all is going according to plan. When trying as hard as I might to come up with something to do, I can think of nothing that can't be done tomorrow. I won't say I sleep, God never sleeps, but my condition isn't much different from that of a bear and hibernation or a brumating snake. Let's just say I take things easy. But then, bang, everything shifts and suddenly I have a thousand pastiferous problems to resolve, millions of things to look after. Rush over here, race over there, put out that, dam up this, patch up the other. I can barely keep on top of it all. And things have gotten distinctly worse since that appalling bungler, homo sapiens, started making all kinds of trouble. War, epidemics, slaughter, genocide, annihilation. Not only collective disasters, but a myriad of individual emergencies. Women starving to death, children mistreated, children put in terrible danger and subjected to agonizing torture. Nine billion individuals, no matter how irresponsible they are, are still nine billion in need of a hand. Sometimes I feel more like a social worker than God. Hardly that high-handed hotlet head the Bible talks about. And now we will hear from Federica Randall's son, Tomaso Juker. My name is Tomaso Juker. I'm Federica Randall's son. I'm speaking today on her behalf because very sadly she passed away earlier this year in May and so it can't be with us to celebrate this wonderful award. I wanted to start by just simply thanking everyone involved in this process. I'm really grateful to have this platform to just say a few words on my behalf and also on my father's behalf. We're extremely pleased that obviously that my mother's received this award. It's a huge honour and a great way for us to remember her and her work. My mother would have obviously been over the moon to receive this prize, but at the same time she had a fear of public speaking. And so I think in some way she wouldn't be too displeased about the fact that I get to give this small sort of speech on her behalf. When I started thinking about what I might want to say to you in these short few minutes, I started thinking about my mother, the translator. And I realised that when I did that I couldn't actually... I thought of my mom as a translator, it didn't immediately come to me. And that's partly because in a professional sphere I immediately think of my mother as my mother, the journalist. And that's what she was for me and for everyone for many years, reporting on the latest and most exciting art and literary trends in the world, particularly Italy, attending the Biennale di Venezia every year. And it was only later in her life that she really got involved and interested in translating and part of that was sparked by a tragic and sad accident that she suffered about 15 years ago, which made it much harder for her to move around. But my mother really saw the silver lining to that and the translation became a vehicle for her to escape that whole small event that happened to her. And so she became more and more interested in translation during the years and I think what she really appreciated about it was the challenge. So she obviously liked the challenge of finding the right way to represent someone else's words when going from one language to the other. So not just the literal translation of words, but also what the actual meaning of them in the original language. And this was something that she was immensely talented at doing. But the other part of the challenge for her was actually finding those hidden gems, those books or pieces that no one else had thought or bothered to translate previously. And that I think drove her just as much as the actual perfectionist in her in trying to sort of get the translation just right. And so Jacomo Sartori's I Am God fits that perfectly. It was something she was immensely proud of having found and she she's sold value in immediately and felt that everyone else should as well. So really poured her heart and soul into into into translating the book and also promoting it and trying to get it out there. And so I think this this award is is immensely fitting for her to receive this award for for that for that particular translation. And I just hope that you enjoy reading the book just as much as she enjoyed translating it.