Congratulations to Professor Robert E. Hegel, who was awarded the Modern Language Association of America (MLA)’s twenty-first Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work for his translation of The Heroic Adventures of Qin Shubao from Forgotten Tales of the Sui by Yuan Yuling 袁于令 (1599–1674).

Professor Hegel, long recognised for his scholarship on Ming–Qing vernacular fiction, is currently Liselotte Dieckmann Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Language and Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. The selection committee’s citation for him reads:

Robert E. Hegel’s graceful, funny, precise translation of The Heroic Adventures of Qin Shubao brings into vivid English an abridgement of Yuan Yuling’s important historical novel, Forgotten Tales of the Sui, an expansive seventeenth-century work about the eponymous seventh-century military hero. The translation brilliantly transposes the original’s detailed, technical language, preserving Yuan Yuling’s ironies and authorial autocommentary. Helpful introductory materials, notes, and an appendix guide the reader along Shubao’s path; Hegel’s “Translator’s Afterthoughts” carefully place the work in a rich cultural context that will be largely unfamiliar to nonspecialists. This superb translation renders into English a work marvelous in itself and bound to change how the history of the novel, long imagined a European form, is told.

The Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work, first presented in 1993, is awarded annually for a translation into English of a book-length literary work under the auspices of the MLA’s Committee on Honors and Awards. The fund honors the memory of Professor Aldo Scaglione’s late wife, Jeanne Daman Scaglione, who worked with Belgian and Jewish resistance units to find hiding places for two thousand children and to rescue many Jewish men from deportation. Discover more on the MLA website.

The Heroic Adventures of Qin Shubao, published by the Research Centre for Translation as a Renditions Book in 2024, portrays the chivalrous Qin Shubao, the scion of a line of righteous generals, as he tries to establish himself in a perilous world and, through military prowess, earn the weapons inherited from his famous forebears. The book is available from the CUHK RCT Bookstore.