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 Old Rendering Plant, shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Prose:

Old Rendering Plant
by Wolfgang Hilbig
translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole
(Two Lines Press)

The narrator of this slender but forceful book recalls a childhood spent in thrall to an old coal plant repurposed as a slaughterhouse in which animal fat is rendered. Forbidden to go near it, he nonetheless returns day after day, uncovering in each foray a bit more of the reality his community refuses to acknowledge but that nonetheless pervades the region as insistently as the stench from the plant. In sensuous, exuberant, but unsettling prose, Hilbig distills these childhood memories into an elixir that has more than a hint of toxicity. Isabel Cole Fargo’s translation sinuous, supple translation beautifully capture the original’s ominous tone.