The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) has honored Jenny McPhee with the 2024 Italian Prose in Translation Award for her recent translation of Elsa Morante's Lies and Sorcery (NYRB Classics 2023). Since 2015, ALTA has awarded the Italian Prose in Translation Award to outstanding works of translation of Italian to English.
This year’s winner was announced at the Awards Ceremony held on October 26 during ALTA’s 47th annual conference, ALTA47: Voices in Translation, in Milwaukee, WI. In their remarks, this year's judges praised McPhee's virtuosic rendering of a formidable text:
"At last, Jenny McPhee has beautifully restored this decadent, sprawling novel by a giant of Italian literature. An infamously pared-down version was all we had of the novel in English until now, perhaps since Morante’s impressive range of voices, tones, and forms requires its own kind of sorcery—difficult to achieve at all, let alone in a book of this scope and length. Yet McPhee renders the baroque glitter of Morante’s language and the muscle beneath its dry, smooth coils. The rhythm of her translation dances—backwards and in heels, without a misstep—across nearly eight hundred pages, through melodrama, romance, poetry, picaresque humor and psychological suspense. Thanks to McPhee, Lies and Sorcery now has the English version it deserves."
Jenny McPhee is a translator and the author of the novels The Center of Things, No Ordinary Matter, and A Man of No Moon. She is the director of the Center for Applied Liberal Arts at New York University and lives in New York.