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 Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems, longlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry:

Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems
by Hirato Renkichi
translated from the Japanese by Sho Sugita
(Ugly Duckling Presse)

The speed of the future – a one-hundred-year-old future, from the 1920s – gushes forward in these feverish, thunderous poems by the Japanese Futurist poet Hirato Renkichi. Sho Sugita’s translation highlights the frenetic energy and restless forms tumbling out of Hirato’s exuberant vision of poetry. This edition combines Hirato’s posthumous Selected Poems with fifty-nine previously uncollected poems, unearthed through Sugita’s own editorial efforts – making this a more complete version than exists even in the Japanese. The book does not assimilate easily into the Anglophone landscape; rather, it is an invaluable contribution to a growing and renewed discussion on global Modernism.