Marie-Cécile Fauvin, winner of the Inalco-Vo/Vf 2024 translation prize

The prize was presented to her on October 6 at the festival Vo/Vf by Olivier Mannoni, literary translator and director of ETL (École de traduction littéraire), in the presence of the prize's initiators, Nathalie Carré and Marie Vrinat-Nikolov (Inalco).

With a degree in Classics, Marie-Cécile Fauvin worked as a teacher before devoting herself to editing and translating modern Greek. In 2013, she was awarded a scholarship from the Petros-Haris and Ouranis foundations to further her training as a translator of Neohellenic literature in Athens.

She has translated Heureux soit ton nom (Quidam éditeur) and Été dans les corps, été dans les cœurs (éd. Desmos) by Sotiris Dimitriou, one of the greatest living Greek authors. She has also translated Niki by Christos Chomenidis (éditions Viviane Hamy - European Novel Prize 2021), collections of poems: Citron of Silence by the hieromon Symeon, Seconds by Yannis Ritsos, La Crypte by Épaminondas Gonatas, published by érès/Po&psy; and Entre la vague et le vent by Georges Séféris, published by la tête à l'envers.

An initial reading of the translations had enabled pre-selection of five works, which were briefly presented at the award ceremony.

• L'Impératrice de Pierre - 1 by Kristina Sabaliauskaite, translated from Lithuanian by Marielle Vitureau (Editions Table Ronde)
• Gorge d'or by Anni Kytömäki, translated from Finnish by Anne Colin du Terrail (Editions Rue de l'échiquier)
• Heureux soit ton nom by Sotiris Dimitriou, translated from Greek by Marie-Cécile Fauvin (Quidam éditeur)
• Bonne nuit mes doudous by Nikitas Papakostas, translated from the Greek by Clara Nizzoli (éditions do)
• Le Passe-Partout by Masako Togawa, translated from the Japanese by Sophie Refle (Denoël)

summary

1943. War rages in Epirus. The village of Povla, a breath away from the Albanian border, is looted and burned. Alexo sets off with a group of women to barter copper and carpets for food across the demarcation line - a journey of encounters and misencounters. Alexo's sister Sofia finds herself cut off from her family for decades when a Stalinist regime is installed in Albania and the country is hermetically sealed off. Humiliation, imprisonment and deportation were the lot of the Greek community in Communist Albania. In the winter of 1990, Shpejtim, Sofia's grandson, undertakes the perilous journey across the mountains to reach the "mother country", and discovers a Greece other than the one he had dreamed of.

The Inalco Translation Prize - Vo/Vf Festival

Endowed with 2500 euros, this prize is designed to highlight the quality of a translator's work, as well as the richness of literature that is sometimes still little known to the general public because it is often less widely distributed. The competition is open to prose texts (short stories or novels) published in the three years prior to the award ceremony. Works translated by Inalco members or students are not eligible. 

Through this initiative, Inalco wishes to highlight its expertise in translation, as well as the recognition of the work of the translator and his or her publisher in the dialogue between the world's literatures.