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 Poetry NTA longlisted title Through Naked Branches:

Through Naked Branches: Selected Poems of Tarjei Vesaas
by Tarjei Vesaas
translated from the Norwegian by Roger Greenwald
(Black Widow Press)

Internationally acclaimed for his novels, Tarjei Vesaas was also one of Scandinavia’s most accomplished poets. Drawn from his six volumes of poetry, this collection introduces English-speaking audiences to a quietly attentive, hauntingly evocative lyricism that defies conventional, image-driven notions of modernism. Rooted in the rhythms of Norway’s oral tradition and directly formed by the variations of the country’s natural landscape, Vesaas’s language testifies to the intimate solidarity between the human and the non-human. Exquisitely translated, and preceded by a penetrating critical introduction, Through Naked Branches speaks to us like a strangely familiar inner voice through Greenwald’s plangent, lapidary English.