For 75 years, it has been our privilege to champion Jewish literature and its power to captivate international audiences.
Today marks an important milestone in this journey, with the launch of our inaugural Freudenheim Translation Prize.
Celebrating outstanding translations of books on Jewish life, culture, and ideas, we are delighted that Boyd Tonkin will lead this new chapter as our prize chair.
And who better to introduce the prize than Boyd Tonkin…
Sometimes a single word makes all the difference. When the English religious reformers John Wycliffe and, later, William Tyndale translated the Book of Genesis, both agreed that the angelic messenger stops Abraham from sacrificing Isaac with an injunction to spare the “child”. In 1611, however, the committee of scholars that oversaw King James’s translation had another idea for the Hebrew na’ar. Now the verse read: “Lay not thine hand upon the lad.” That simple, unforgettable formulation – one of thousands in the King James Version – resonated down the centuries. During the First World War, the poet Wilfred Owen despairingly invoked it (in “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”) to denounce a generation of bloodthirsty patriarchs who flouted the divine command and “slew half the seed of Europe, one by one”.
Translations may have long afterlives across space and time. They can live on in the minds and mouths of people who – like the millions of English-speakers who unwittingly quote the naturalised Hebrew and Greek of the 1611 Bible every day – never give a thought to the art. Or craft. Or mystery. However we categorise what literary translators do, they deserve more than anonymity and invisibility. This century, a number of awards have begun to raise their profile – and honour their calling – in the Anglosphere. The Freudenheim Translation Prize will make a precious addition to that company. It will enrich the unfolding dialogue between peoples, cultures, ages and subjects that translation has always, crucially, helped to convene. As for translators, they deserve all the rewards we can give to ensure that their vocation amounts to more than just a “labour of love” (a Tyndale coinage), especially as untried AI services now claim to usurp their role. Thanks to this prize, the true art of translation will continue to go – as, in 1535, Miles Coverdale’s rendering of Psalm 84 put it – “from strength to strength”.