The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is presenting its eighteenth Lois Roth Award for a translation of a literary work to Paul Reitter, who directed the Humanities Institute from 2012 to 2017. Prof. Reitter is now an ASC Distinguished Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures here at The Ohio State University. He received the award for his translation of Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, published by Princeton University Press.

The Lois Roth Award is awarded annually for a translation into English of a book-length literary work. From 1999 until 2016, the prize was offered biennially, alternating years with the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work. The two prizes are now both offered annually. The members of the selection committee were Yvonne Fuentes (Univ. of West Georgia); Jacques Lezra (Univ of California, Riverside); Sherry Roush (Penn State Univ.); Patricia A. Sieber (Ohio State Univ., Columbus), chair; and Amy D. Wells (Univ. de Caen Normandie).

The selection committee’s citation for Reitter’s translation reads: Paul Reitter has produced the first English translation to be based on the final German edition of Kapital revised by Karl Marx himself. In this version, one of the most influential nineteenth-century thinkers becomes refreshingly readable. The legacy of Marx, who would die stateless, strikes the reader as more compelling than ever in today’s ultracompetitive global world with a message for scholars across subdisciplines. Through decades of research, Reitter has carefully parsed Marx’s writing within the personal and societal contexts from which it emerged. Reitter’s translation is a marvel, endowed with an exceptional scholarly apparatus and a rendering in English that is admirably precise.