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 Hackers, shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry:

Hackers
by Aase Berg
translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson
(Black Ocean)

The hard, jagged edges of Aase Berg’s postfeminist language are at once minimal, futuristic, scrappy, and hag-like – impatiently hacking away at long-failed systems of patriarchy and capitalism and other systems equally in need of eradication at the molecular level. Johannes Göransson’s translation is appropriately queer, and a tremendous success: it leaves the reader with nowhere to hide. It’s an unsettling book for exactly these times – as troubled as we are by what it uncovers, in some terrifying and lucid way, Berg and Göransson suggest, through this work, to love only if we love fiercely – and we do need that.