The Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary Work has been awarded to Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms for their version of Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind, published by Yale University Press. The prize is named after Aldo Scaglione, a distinguished scholar in the field of comparative literature, and his wife Jeanne (née Daman), who was honoured as one of the Righteous among Nations for saving the lives of Jewish children during her early career as a Catholic schoolteacher in Nazi-occupied Belgium. The Scaglione awards ceremony will take place on 7 January 2017 in Philadelphia during the annual convention of the American Modern Language Association. 

The Modern Language Association of America, awarding the prize, wrote the following:

In their translation and edition of Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind, Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms manage to convey differences in register and dialects from German into English and ingeniously resolve slips and wordplay that “blend pathos with humor,” as they phrase it. The various paratexts are helpful and sound. The translation is aesthetically nuanced and distinguished, and the imbedded poetry is carefully crafted. This monumental volume of scholarship and literary translation brings Kraus’s epic masterpiece in full to English-language readers a century after its publication.