Domen Kavčič wins the Sovret Award for translating Yoko Tawada's six-voiced novel

Translator Domen Kavčič has won this year's Sovret Award, the oldest and most prominent prize of the Slovenian Literary Translators' Association, for his translation from Japanese of Yoko Tawada's novel Scattered All Over the Earth, published in Slovenian as Razkropljeni po zemlji by Beletrina.12

Inventing a language twice

The novel has six first-person narrators, each with their own language and colour of speech, Kavčič said. Its heroine, Hiruko, travels Europe in search of another native speaker of Japanese and invents a language of her own, Panska.3

The jury said Kavčič repeated the author's process of taking language apart and rebuilding it, but with means suited to Slovenian, while keeping the novel's humour, lightness and its many sound effects.1

The shortlist

Also nominated were Polona Glavan for Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Maja Ropret for Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead, among others. Kavčič said he hoped readers would discover Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German, and that he would like to translate the rest of the trilogy.13