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 Italian Chronicles, longlisted for the National Translation Award in Prose:

Italian Chronicles
by Stendhal
translated from the French by Raymond N. MacKenzie
(University of Minnesota Press)

Travelers suffering from a surfeit of ecstasy are diagnosed with “Stendhal syndrome” in reference to the intensity of the writer’s reaction to Italy, where he found a beauty he would spend his life translating for French readers. Between 1833 and 1839, Stendahl wrote four prefaces to what he hoped would be a forthcoming complete anthology of his shorter Italian-themed works. That collection has only now been assembled, annotated, and translated by Raymond N. MacKenzie, in a consummate performance of the complex chiaroscuro of these operatically thrilling tales, several of which appear in English for the first time here.