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 longlisted title Negative Space:

Negative Space
by Luljeta Lleshanaku
translated from the Albanian by Ani Gjika
(New Directions)

Translated with grit from the Albanian by Ani Gjika, Negative Space is a robust selection of Luljeta Lleshanaku’s poetry derived from Almost Yesterday (2012) and Homo Antarcticus (2015). Lleshanaku offers the infrastructure of a life not grounded in a location, but in a body that interacts with things like clothes, suitcases, doors, windows, a city, strangers, life and language.  For Lleshanaku, just as we inhabit a body given to us by others, others name us, others decide the self’s language. Thus, poetry, like pleasure, is not given or pre-established, but taken, like a thief.