Join us as we count down to ALTA42: Sight and Sound with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose long- and shortlisted titles! We will be featuring the titles in alphabetical order alongside blurbs penned by our judges for the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. This year’s prose judges are Bonnie Huie, Charlotte Mandell, and Jeffrey Zuckerman. This year’s judges for poetry are Anna Deeny Morales, Cole Heinowitz, and Sholeh Wolpe.

For quick reference, you may find the NTA longlists here, and the NTA shortlists here. Today we’re shining the spotlight on Poetry NTA shortlisted title Architecture of a Dispersed Life:

Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poems
by Pablo de Rokha
translated from the Spanish by Urayoán Noel
(Shearsman Books)

Celebrated in his native Chile and a cult poet throughout the Spanish-speaking world, the great poetic and political radical Pablo de Rohka is virtually unknown to Anglophone readers. With this career-spanning volume, translator Urayoán Noel gives English-speaking audiences a generous first taste of this groundbreaking experimentalist in all his registers—from the folk surrealism of the 1920s to the epic decolonial denunciations of the1960s. At once cosmopolitan in scope and deeply rooted in the culture of rural Chile, de Rokha’s intensely metaphorical vision, freeform prosody, dark irony, and fierce political commitment mark a watershed in Latin American vanguard poetics.