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 longlisted title Lost Time:

Lost Time
by Józef Czapski
translated from the French by Eric Karpeles
(New York Review Books)

On the surface, this book is a series of lectures on Proust given by the Polish artist and officer Józef Czapski to his fellow-officers in a Soviet prison camp. Scratch the surface, though, and you find an extraordinary meditation on memory (Czapski lectured without any book to consult); on the profound, life-changing effect books can have on their readers; and on life itself, whose beauty and mystery can be hidden in the misery of a prison camp, but can come alive in the mind of one who remembers. The translation by Eric Karpeles (the author of Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time) is extraordinary in its scholarship and attention to detail.