Sabrina Nouri-Moosa wins the Inalco-Vo/Vf 2021 Translation Prize

The Inalco-Vo/Vf 2021 Translation Prize is awarded to Sabrina Nouri-Moosa for her translation from Persian from Afghanistan of Khosraw Mani's Death and His Brother, published by Actes Sud in October 2020.

Sabrina Nouri-Moosa is a graduate of Celsa-Sorbonne Université. She has already translated several novels from Persian into French, such as Les mille maisons du rêve et de la terreur, Terre et cendres and Le retour imaginaire by Atiq Rahimi (all published by P.O.L) but also Perdus dans la fuite by Assef Soltanzadeh (Actes Sud, 2020).

Ceremonial speech by Marie Vrinat-Nikolov

I have great pleasure in presenting the 2021 prize to Sabrina Nouri for her translation from Persian of Afghanistan of Khosraw Mani's Death and His Brother (Actes-Sud 2020).

To translate Khosraw Mani, a young Afghan writer living in exile in the Paris region, is to translate an imaginative and metaphorical style of writing, always in suspense between the real and the imaginary. always at first sight detached, interweaving the words of numerous narrators (men, women, children, trees, dogs...) to better bring out, without sentimentality, without misery, the tragedy of death, the violence of death in Kabul, the fragility of life, the fragility of us humans. It means following the sometimes seemingly tranquil, more often anxious, hurried rhythm of a fragmented narrative that starts from a horrific event (in this case, a rocket that falls on the house of a young man who has just left it to join his lover in a Kabul café) and then branches off, diverges, converges, abolishing the perception of time in which past, present (which never ends) and future merge into one.

What readers liked, in particular, and I'll take the liberty of quoting a few extracts from the reviews we received:
"A very fine novel that takes us to Kabul in a surprising way: the reader is invited to take an active part in reconstructing the image through the various narratives led by vivid writing that is often highly ironic but also poetic. "
"A roundabout way of evoking in detail the difficult situation of this city."
"A way of talking about exile and literature too (it's a story born in one night from a narrator exiled in Paris)."

All this, we readers who don't read La mort et son frère but its translation, owe in large part to Sabrina Nouri, who knew how to move us by writing in French this rhythm, this orality. The expert we commissioned to analyze the text, written in Persian from Afghanistan and translated into French, insisted on this orality:
"This writing down of the oral in the original does not lead to an impoverishment of style, on the contrary. For Khosraw Mani, orality is synonymous with subtlety. And when it comes to translating this interaction, the transition from oral to written is doubled by the transition from one language to another. The quality of the translation is indisputable, coming as it does from the pen of Ms. Sabrina Nouri, a distinguished translator of Afghan literature. The use of colloquial language seems obvious: the author wants to remain faithful to the expression of rage and/or despair. This use gives the text a particular color, a mixed style. The translator renders the latter, reproducing its dosage, intensity and spontaneity."

Thank you and bravo to you, dear Sabrina!"

Death and His Brother by Khosraw Mani

In the award-winning novel, Afghan author Khosraw Mani traces the story of a tragedy through a collective narrative. A man leaves his home to find his beloved. Ten minutes after he leaves, a rocket destroys his house and kills four members of his family. Thirty points of view, and as many protagonists, relate this tragedy. From dawn to late at night, the voices of Kabul tell stories of love, corruption, remorse, sex, massacres, losses, gains, lies, cruelty, friendship... A day in a corner of the world where death is just an anecdote barely commented on, quickly forgotten. (Livres hebdo - 4/10/2021)

Born in Kabul in 1987, Khosraw Mani grew up in Afghanistan. With a degree in political and legal sciences from Kabul University, he has been living in Paris as a political refugee since 2015. La Mort et son frère is his sixth novel, the second to be translated into French after Une petite vie (Intervalles, 2018).

(re)See the award ceremony for the Inalco Translation Prize 2021, in the presence of jury members Nathalie Carré and Marie-Vrinat-Nikolov (October 3, 2021, Festival Vo/Vf)

The Inalco Translation Prize - Festival Vo/Vf, le monde en livres

Endowed with up to 1,000 euros, this prize is designed to highlight the quality of a translator's work, as well as the richness of literatures that are sometimes still little known to the general public because they are often less widely distributed. The competition is open to prose texts (short stories or novels) published in the three years preceding the award ceremony (2016-2018 for the 2019 edition). 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. Inalco is particularly grateful to Mr. Jacques Lalloz, an Inalco graduate (Japanese, 1970), who helped finance the prize.