Robert E. Hegel, the Liselotte Dieckmann Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature in Arts & Sciences, will receive the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work from the Modern Language Association of America (MLA).
Hegel, also a professor emeritus of Chinese language and literature at Washington University in St. Louis, will receive the prize for his translation of “The Heroic Adventures of Qin Shubao,” from “Forgotten Tales of the Sui” by the Suzhou dramatist and writer Yuan Yuling 袁于令 (1599–1674). The story follows Qin Shubao, a seventh-century military hero and scion of a line of righteous generals, as he seeks to establish himself through military prowess — and to earn the weapons inherited from his famous forebears.
“Robert E. Hegel’s graceful, funny, precise translation … brilliantly transposes the original’s detailed, technical language, preserving Yuan Yuling’s ironies and authorial autocommentary,” writes the MLA selection committee. “This superb translation renders into English a work marvelous in itself and bound to change how the history of the novel, long imagined a European form, is told.”
The Modern Language Association works to strengthen the study and teaching of languages and literature. The Scaglione Prize was established in 1987 by Aldo Scaglione, a professor of literature at New York University, in honor of his late wife, Jeanne Daman Scaglione. During World War II, as the Catholic headmistress of a Jewish kindergarten in Brussels, she worked with Belgian and Jewish resistance units to hide thousands of Jewish children and to save many Jewish men from deportation.
Hegel will be awarded the Scaglione Prize Jan. 9 during the MLA’s annual convention in Toronto. Read more on the MLA website.
