Join us as we count down to ALTA42: Sight and Sound with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose long- and shortlisted titles! We will be featuring the titles in alphabetical order alongside blurbs penned by our judges for the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. This year’s prose judges are Bonnie Huie, Charlotte Mandell, and Jeffrey Zuckerman. This year’s judges for poetry are Anna Deeny Morales, Cole Heinowitz, and Sholeh Wolpe.

For quick reference, you may find the NTA longlists here, and the NTA shortlists here. Today we’re shining the spotlight on Prose NTA shortlisted title In Black and White:

In Black and White
by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki
translated from the Japanese by Phyllis I. Lyons
(Columbia University Press)

This rare murder mystery by one of Japan’s modernist literary greats playfully captures a writer’s love-hate relationship with the demands of his craft, with the professionalism of art, with literary coteries, with deadlines and procrastination, and with money. It’s constructed with the hand of a master who, free from the pressures of self-seriousness, weaves a pun into the title, humor into unexpected places, and metafiction into the narrative at every turn. Phyllis I. Lyons’s translation captures the tone and all the tricks, making for a true page-turner down to its final moments, which conjure the paranoia of a writer living in a military-police state to chilling effect.