Join us as we count down to the ALTA43: In Between awards ceremony with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose longlisted 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 judges for prose are Amaia Gabantxo, Emmanuel D. Harris II, and William Maynard Hutchins. This year’s judges for poetry are Ilya Kaminsky, Lisa Katz, and Farid Matuk.

The awards ceremony will air on October 15, 2020 on ALTA’s Crowdcast page: you can register to attend the NTA in Prose announcement here, and the NTA in Poetry announcement here. Find the full list of longlisted titles here.

Today we’re shining the spotlight on NTA in Poetry long- and shortlisted title Room in Rome:

Room in Rome
by Jorge Eduardo Eielson
translated from the Spanish by David Shook
(Cardboard House Press)

Some works don’t begin or end in the dissolution of translation—which, rather than being poetry’s unfortunate devolution, is its origin and life force. Finding their fingers already tingling to touch that loose weave, poets like Jorge Eduardo Eielson can fling their attentions out across poems long or short, and return having woven the unexpected into the prosaic. David Shook’s translation allows English readers to notice how the knots in Eielson’s weave gather dread, rage, linguistic self-awareness, and, somehow, joy.