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 Swallowing Mercury, shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Prose:

Swallowing Mercury
by Wioletta Greg
translated from the Polish by Eliza Marciniak
(Transit Books)

The dank, claustrophobic atmosphere of rural 1980s Poland is brilliantly evoked in Wioletta Greg’s debut collection, which balances on a knife-edge between the comforting and sinister. Beautiful, sensual images and details populate these stories of childhood, dizzying in their intensity and deployed with consummate skill. As the narrator grows older and innocence gives way to experience, mirroring the transformation of the country itself, the prose toughens and the wider world begins to intrude. Eliza Marciniak’s translation finds an earthy,expressive vocabulary that perfectly suits the headstrong protagonist and the rough-hewn world she lives in. A dark, fractured fairy tale.