Join us as we count down to the ALTA43: In Between awards ceremony with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose longlisted 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 judges for prose are Amaia Gabantxo, Emmanuel D. Harris II, and William Maynard Hutchins. This year’s judges for poetry are Ilya Kaminsky, Lisa Katz, and Farid Matuk.

The awards ceremony will air on October 15, 2020 on ALTA’s Crowdcast page: you can register to attend the NTA in Prose announcement here, and the NTA in Poetry announcement here. Find the full list of longlisted titles here.

Today we’re shining the spotlight on NTA in Poetry longlisted title The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice:

The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice: A Tiny Homeric Epic
by an unknown author
translated from the Ancient Greek by A.E. Stallings
(Paul Dry Books)

A. E. Stallings’s translations are always a masterclass in music-making. Here, she offers us a lively, crisp version of a classic text: we meet the mouse named Crumbsnatcher, killed by the reckless frog King Pufferthroat, starting a war between species. This age-old parable is well known, but Stallings’s charming and often hilarious version makes it come to life via word choice and rhyming couplets. Translators should know at least one language well, preferably their own, W. H. Auden suggested. Stallings, a virtuoso of English prosody, gives us yet another example of how it is done.