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 Prose NTA longlisted title The Taiga Syndrome:

The Taiga Syndrome
by Cristina Rivera Garza
translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana
(Dorothy, a publishing project)

The Taiga Syndrome proceeds in dreamlike fragments, a hallucinatory investigation that slowly reveals that the narrator is in the taiga, is a detective, has been asked by a man to seek out a woman who’s run away with another man. They may have been infected with “the taiga syndrome”—a suite of anxiety attacks culminating in a need to escape, which is impossible in an inhospitable biome that stretches out for hundreds of miles. Maintaining tension with every successive sentence, where words and details become precious gems that might offer a clue—or, better yet, an escape—is an acrobatic feat, and it is stunning to see how Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana manage to immerse us so thoroughly in this sparse thicket of mere words originally constructed by the Mexico-born, Houston-based Rivera Garza.