IAS alumni Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky won the MLA Translation Prize

The Modern Language Association`s nineteenth Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work has been awarded to IAS alumna, Oksana Maksymchuk, former Writer in Residence at IAS CEU in 202-2021, currently visiting lecturer for English at the University of Chicago; and IAS CEU alumnus, Max Rosochinsky, former Junior Thyssen Fellow at IAS CEU in 2019-2020, for their translation of Marianna Kiyanovska’s The Voices of Babyn Yar, published by Harvard University Press.

The Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University congratulates its alumni on their extraordinary achivement.

The committee’s citation for Maksymchuk and Rosochinsky reads:

Hovering between pandemonium and the unspeakable, Marianna Kiyanovska’s The Voices of Babyn Yar channels bits of everyday observation, fragments of thoughts, and the horrors of mass execution from among the historically voiceless—the tens of thousands of Jews and others massacred on the outskirts of Kyiv in 1941—into an incantatory tour de force. In a translation that nudges close to the linguistic breaking points of the original, while retaining the fullness of its poetic registers and plethora of references to Ukrainian, Jewish, Soviet, and Western contexts, the seasoned translatorscum-poets Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky draw attention to an extraordinary work within the literary canon of the Holocaust.