A hearty congratulations to our department's own Jody Enders, Distinguished Professor of French and Theater, for winning the prestigious Lois Roth Award for Translation from the Modern Language Association for her book, Immaculate Deception and Further Ribaldries (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). The prize is awarded annually for a translation into English of a book-length literary work and will be conferred to Prof. Enders at the MLA Annual Convention in Philadelphia on January 5, 2024.
The selection committee praised Enders's masterful translations of medieval French farces, noting that she "not only researches, compiles, edits, annotates, and translates [the farces] into contemporary English," but that she goes one step further by "adapting them for performance with stage notes and suggestions for accompaniment."
The committee continues its praise, writing that thanks to Enders, "these works, which have lain in relative obscurity for more than 700 years, now sizzle with provocative prompts for classroom critical debates on contemporary culture."
Immaculate Deception expertly blends Enders's scholarly expertise in medieval French literature, public speaking, and theater studies, and puts on a veritable master class in"technical translation prowess, scholarly rigor, and guffaw-inducing creative humor that capture the timbre of these uncomfortably entertaining plays," according to the committee.
In the translation, Enders takes on weighty matters like power, promiscuity, and abuse, and renders them at once hilarious and profound. The committee continues: "[She] is undaunted by the significant translation challenges of situational jokes, euphemisms, and puns, which recur at every turn."
The Lois Roth Award is Professor Enders's second MLA book prize; she was previously awarded the Aldo and Jean Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies for her book Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (1992).