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Breon Mitchell, director of Indiana University’s renowned Lilly Library, has been awarded the Modern Language Association of America's ninth Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for an Outstanding Translation of a Literary Work.

Mitchell, also a professor of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature in the IU College of Arts and Sciences, received the honor for his translation of The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

“This award is particularly meaningful to me because it comes from my professional colleagues who combine a deep interest in literature with theoretical concerns about the nature and place of literary translation in intellectual history,” Mitchell said. “I’m very grateful to them.”

A past president of the American Literary Translators Association, Mitchell has received numerous national awards for literary translations, including the American Translators Association's Ungar German Translation Award, the association's Translation Prize, and the Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award.

“In his overlapping roles of librarian, curator, and scholar, Breon possesses incredible knowledge and unique experience that is passed on to students, fellow academics, and the general public,” said Brenda Johnson, Ruth Lilly Dean of the IU Libraries. “We are extremely fortunate to have such a talented and valued colleague working with us. I know I join my library colleagues in congratulating Breon on this significant award.”

The Scaglione Prize will be presented Jan. 7 during the association's annual convention in Los Angeles. The prize is awarded each even-numbered year for a translation into English of a book-length literary work. The Modern Language Association of America, established in 1883, is the largest and one of the oldest of American learned societies in the humanities. It exists to promote the advancement of literary and linguistic studies.

The selection committee's citation for Mitchell's translation expressed that it gives the reader “brilliant solutions to vexing problems” while marking the 50th anniversary of the original publication of Günter Grass's classic novel.

“This meticulous work . . . accomplishes precisely what one hopes for in a retranslation: it brings us closer to both source and target languages,” reads the citation. “Mitchell makes us aware that even good work, such as Ralph Manheim's respected earlier translation, bears improvement, as great consistency, coherence, and tempo are achieved throughout the entire volume in rendering its obsessive drumming theme. The translator's afterword, where Mitchell explains carefully and concisely all the ‘tools of the trade’ available to 21st-century translators, performs an enormous contribution to the field by lifting the curtain on the translator's craft and making clear to readers the huge challenges at hand.”

A few years ago, Mitchell and Günther Grass shared the stage in a discussion on the challenges of translation of Grass' work. A video clip from that discussion is online at YouTube.