Dave Haan sends the link that informs the English readers that Ross Benjamin has won the Wolff translation award for Michael Maar's _Speak, Nabokov_:
http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=2670

The text that opens with a click is short: "Just got an e-mail from the Goethe Institut in Chicago announcing that Ross Benjamin has been awarded this year’s Wolff Translation Prize. Here’s the official press release:
The jury for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize is please to award the prize for 2009 to Ross Benjamin for his translation of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov, published by Verso. The jury finds that this remarkably musical translation reads beautifully, and brings to English-speaking readers an important study of a writer of world stature whose works cry out for skilled exegesis. Benjamin’s translation is elegant, witty, even playful, doing justice to both the German original and the book’s subject. The translator reveals a sophisticated understanding of literary criticism and his own sure sense of literary style.
Congrats, Ross! And Speak, Nabokov sounds fascinating:
On the eve of the controversial, posthumous publication of The Original of Laura, Michael Maar follows his critically acclaimed The Two Lolitas with a revealing new perspective on Vladimir Nabokov’s life and work. Hunting down long-hidden clues in the novels, and using the themes that run through Nabokov’s fiction to illuminate the life that produced them, Maar constructs a compelling psychological and philosophical portrait. Characteristically graceful and engaging, Speak, Nabokov offers a vital new perspective on the twentieth-century master. Ross will be officially honored at the annual Wolff Symposium in Chicago, which will take place on June 21st and 22nd.

Independently of the merits of Maar's original ( which are not slight, as I was led to understand), Ross Benjamin seems to have achieved something else, in parallel, when he mingled Maar's original erudiction to his own "understanding of literary criticism and his own sure sense of literary style."

Is it possible to produce a successful translation when it is not simply a mirror reflection of the original, by operating a non-distortive reversion from one language into another and nevertheless remaining faithful to it, by creating an echo that amplifies the initial "skilled exegesis"? 
These are rather uninformed and naive questions to raise, but the note seems to imply that one may not lose a dot when one is impeded to read a work in its original language and has had no access to its underlying culture and cotidian life (the translator will be transposing everything in our stead).   Anyway, I'm doubly handicapped here, because my native language, culture, century and times are neither German nor American. No matter if I should read the announced work either in German or English...

What an interesting note Dave Haan offered to the Nab-List. I wonder why this news, Ross Benjamin's success, hasn't spurred other American Nabokovians to write in the List.