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 I Remember Nightfall, shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry:

I Remember Nightfall
by Marosa di Giorgio
translated from the Spanish by Jeannine Marie Pitas
(Ugly Duckling Presse)

Prominent Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio conjures up an off-kilter nocturnal world where the unearthly becomes mundane and the impossible becomes possible. These poems are sensuous, enchanting, delicate, and beautiful, as well as disorienting, unsettling, chilling, and macabre. The remembered gardens of her hallucinatory nightmarescapes are infested with sinister flowers, suffocating tulle, rotting corpses, crazed flora and fauna, the cloying perfume of flowers and fruits, and various supernatural beings. No one or nothing is to be trusted. Jeannine Marie Pitas’s haunting English translation captures di Giorgio’s peculiar syntax, deceptively simple language, and urgent rhythms.