*Photo: Quest-France
The Spanish-Peruvian writer and Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa and his French translator, Albert Bensoussan, were awarded the Diálogo Prize on February 27 by a Spanish-French association in Paris.
Bensoussan, who has a long career as a translator of major Latin American authors, accepted the award on behalf of himself and Vargas Llosa, who is currently in Peru.
During the event held at the Spanish Embassy, Bensoussan stated,“To translate is to convey.” He added that translation multiplies genius and that the translator always occupies a subordinate position, since he or she comes afterward and has neither created nor experienced the storm raging inside the author’s mind.
The translator was born into a family of Sephardic origin in Algeria in 1935 and has devoted many years of his career to translating works by authors such as Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, Zoé Valdés, and Alfredo Bryce Echenique for the French market.
French writer Pierre Assouline introduced the award winner and, somewhat ironically, referred to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in the late 15th century, many of whom settled in North Africa. According to Assouline, the writer and translator Bensoussan is “the best gift the Catholic Monarchs ever gave France.”
In a message read by Assouline, Vargas Llosa said: “As I have said many times, I would not be the writer I am, nor would my work be the same, without the influence of French literature.”
It is worth noting that the author of *Conversation in the Cathedral*, who won the Nobel Prize in 2010, was elected to the French Academy last year—marking the first time that an author who does not originally write in French has become a member of this institution, founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu.
