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 Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania: 

Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania
by Adam Mickiewicz
translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston
(Archipelago Books)

In the early 1830s, fleeing the most recent wave of armed insurrections that destroyed the centuries-old lifeways of his native Poland in the space of a generation, Adam Mickiewicz penned the 450-page verse novel that would be hailed as Europe’s last great national epic. Presented here for the first time in modern English, Johnson’s translation of Pan Tadeusz masterfully captures the exceptional beauty and disarming directness of Mickiewicz’s rhymed couplets. With its riveting narrative propulsion, intertwining plotlines, effortless ironic wit, and lovingly detailed portraits of a bygone gentry, Pan Tadeusz invites comparison with the best works of Byron or Pushkin.