Join us as we count down to ALTA41: Performance, Props, and Platforms with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose long- and shortlisted titles! We will be featuring the titles in alphabetical order, moving first through the longlisted and then the shortlisted titles, alongside blurbs penned by our judges for the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. This year’s judges for poetry are Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Jennifer Feeley, and Sawako Nakayasu, and this year’s prose judges are Esther Allen, Tess Lewis, and Jeremy Tiang.

For quick reference, you may find the NTA longlists here, and the NTA shortlists here. Today we’re shining the spotlight on The Invented Part, longlisted for the National Translation Award in Prose:

The Invented Part
by Rodrigo Fresán
translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden
(Open Letter Books)

A wild, exuberant, shaggy-dog romp through culture high and low, The Invented Part spins at high velocity around an ostensibly simple plot: an aging and disheartened writer pins his hopes on breaking into the Large Hadron Collider outside of Geneva so that he can merge with the God particle and, once he is “accelerated and particular,” become absolute consciousness and rewrite reality. The breadth and depth of references and allusions Fresán has at hand are stunning, as is Will Vanderhyden’s ability to capture the author’s stylistic inventiveness and variation.