Join us as we count down to ALTA41: Performance, Props, and Platforms with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose long- and shortlisted titles! We will be featuring the titles in alphabetical order, moving first through the longlisted and then the shortlisted titles, alongside blurbs penned by our judges for the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. This year’s judges for poetry are Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Jennifer Feeley, and Sawako Nakayasu, and this year’s prose judges are Esther Allen, Tess Lewis, and Jeremy Tiang.

For quick reference, you may find the NTA longlists here, and the NTA shortlists here. Today we’re shining the spotlight on Dandelions, shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Prose:

Dandelions
by Yasunari Kawabata
translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich
(New Directions)

Ineko has been diagnosed with “somagnosia” or “body-blindness” and her mother and lover have just left her at an insane asylum. As they walk away they can hear a temple bell in the distance and they know Ineko is ringing it. Kawabata’s final masterpiece—begun half a decade before he won the Nobel Prize in 1968 and left unfinished by his 1972 suicide—follows the conversation as mother and lover wander through late afternoon and into the night. Michael Emmerich’s flawless prose echoes out like the bell from the asylum as the narrative plummets along the knife-edge that divides things seen from those unseen.