Nov. 4 – On Thursday November 13, the Suga Atsuko Suga Prize will celebrate the best translations in Japan. The event kicks off at 6:30pm in the Umberto Agnelli auditorium of the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo, which organized the award. As of this year, the prize serves as a recognition for translated works from Italian to Japanese. The prize is dedicated to Japanese writer Suga Atsuko (Hyogo 1929 -Tokyo 1998), a famous translator and Italianist. The prize is a continuation of the Pico della Mirandola Award, which hasn’t been awarded since 2007. The competition entries were published between January 2012 and June 2014; they have been examined – as stated on the website of the IIC – by a panel of experts chaired by Wada Tadahiko (Professor of Italian Studies at the Graduate School of Global Studies of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) and includes: Okada Atsushi, Kimura Eiichi, Shibata Motoyuki, and Yomota Inuhiko. The awards ceremony will see the participation of Domenico Giorgi, the Italian Ambassador to Japan. Suga Atsuko studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. She later moved to Italy, where she focused on Italian literature and worked as a translator of famous Japanese authors (such as Tanizaki Junichiro, Inoue Yasushi, and Kawabata Yasunari). The anthology “Modern Japanese Storytellers” (1964) was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to present to the Italian public a vast panorama of Japanese fiction from the 20th century. After returning to Japan in 1971, she taught Italian literature and comparative literature while also translating Italian novels, holding the delicate role of mediator between two cultures. (Gil)
