The Dutch Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds is awarding the 2012 Martinus Nijhoff Prize to translator and author Frans Denissen. He receives the 35,000 Euro prize for his translations of Italian literature into Dutch. Denissen published his first literary translation from Italian in 1982; 2011 saw the publication of his translation of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s De leerschool van het lijden (La cognizione del dolore)
In the intervening three decades, Denissen translated amongst other things Boccaccio’s Decameron, prose from respected 20th-century authors such as Leonardo Sciascia, Curzio Malaparte and Umberto Eco and the poetry of Cesare Pavese.
The jury praises Denissen’s ‘precise knowledge of Italian in all its argots, registers and dialects’.
The award ceremony will take place during the national translation event ‘Nederland Vertaalt’ (The Netherlands Translates) on 25 February 2012.