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:

My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems
By Yi Lei
Translated from Chinese by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi
(Graywolf Press)

Respected as a revolutionary voice in Chinese poetry, Yi Lei leapt into themes of female sexual desire and longing in a time when unmarried couples living together was still illegal in China, as detailed in her 1987 “A Single Woman’s Bedroom.” The poems of My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree strike a lovely balance between sound and image. Their pleading voice is memorable, driving home this idea of yearning both within the city, and in nature, as reference to Whitman places her in conversation with poets of the natural world. Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi’s translation creates very smooth poems in English that feel grounded in the poet’s sensibilities. Smith notes her intention “to build a similar spirit or feeling for readers of American English” so that “certain details were to shift or be replaced with others rooted in this culture,” and the result is a collection of poetry which feels whole and seamless, wonderfully rich in its contradictions: “Desire is dead, long live desire.”