Join us as we count down to the ALTA44: Inflection Points 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 prose judges are Jennifer Croft, Anton Hur, and Annie Janusch. This year’s judges for poetry are Sinan Antoon, Layla Benitez-James, and Sibelan Forrester.

The winning translators will receive a $2,500 cash prize each. The awards will be announced at ALTA’s annual conference, ALTA44: Inflection Points, which this year is being held jointly online and in-person in Tucson, AZ. The virtual awards ceremony will be aired on Saturday, October 16, at 5:00pm PT. To attend, register via the virtual conference platform (there is also a free ticket option that includes public events like this one.)

Join us as we shine the spotlight today on this NTA longlisted title, along with a citation penned by the judges:

Difficult Light
By Tomás González
Translated from Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg
(Archipelago Books)

Difficult Light is a story of living while waiting for inevitable loss to occur. A father holds vigil, waiting for word that his adult son has been able to die by assisted suicide; decades later, the father, a painter, finds himself revisiting his grief as he faces his own impending vision loss. Andrea Rosenberg’s translation makes palpable a parent’s horrible predicament of not wanting their child to suffer, while also not wanting to live without their child. But Rosenberg’s translation is also notable for the lucid, compassionate tone it strikes in capturing the ordinary moments and conversations that permeate life, whether at its height or at its end.