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The Horst Frenz Prize Citations 2012

2012 Prize Winner:

Be it known that Spencer Scoville of the University of Michigan is the winner of the 2012 Horst Frenz Prize for the best presentation by a graduate student at the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association, which, in 2012, was held in Providence, Rhode Island.

Scoville’s “Reading Russian in the Nahdah: Khalil Baydas as Translator” is a fascinating, seminal study, a clear and articulate exploration of the translation decisions made by Palestinian author and critic Khalil Baydas, in his translation of Pushkin’s novella Kapitanskaia Dochka. Scoville shows how Baydas converted Pushkin’s ironic and skeptical depiction of the military into a Arab nationalist romance, “domesticating” the protagonists by converting their Russian names into something familiarly Arabic, and “foreignizing” the antagonists by preserving the un-Arabic sound of their names, transliterated from the Russian. Scoville also indicates that Baydas used Pushkin’s novella to emphasize moral values in a novel where Pushkin was more ambivalent.

The American Comparative Literature Association takes pride in making this award to Spencer Scoville, and congratulates him on his outstanding achievement.

2012 Frenz Prize Committee:
Eugene Eoyang, Lingnan University and Indiana University (Chair)
Virginia Jackson, Tufts University
Pericles Lewis, Yale University