2017 Lucien Stryk and IPTA Shortlists Announced

Among ALTA’s (American Literary Translators Association) many activities, it gives out translation prizes at its annual conference – this year to be held in Minneapolis, Oct. 5 – 8, 2017. The shortlists for two of these have just been announced: the Italian Prose in Translation Award (IPTA), and the Lucien Stryk Prize, given for a work translated from an Asian language. Each prize comes with a $5000 purse. The winning translations will be announced at the conference, as well as Twitter (@LitTranslate) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/literarytranslators).

Behold the lists!

2017 Lucien Stryk Prize shortlist:

Cheer Up: Femme Fatale

By Kim Yideum

Translated from the Korean by Ji Yoon Lee, Don Mee Choi, and Johannes Göransson

(Action Books)

The question isn’t, Kim Yideum appears to say, “what’s real?”—it’s “what’s present?” And what’s present is everything: flowers, fetuses, phantasms, time, trash, and history. In Kim’s poems, the erasures (of war, occupation, exploitation, political murders) and the scrubbed efficiencies of contemporary South Korea get filled up and haunted by rank matters, recalcitrant ghosts. Her canny translators treat this plenum as the site of glorious excess: Ji yoon Lee, Don Mee Choi, and Johannes Göransson’s English makes this book buzz with pleasures, terrors, and anxieties. Their tools are narrative verve, incantatory force, and a generous reception of the strange. In the absence of absence, we’re made to (re)cognize a world we can’t transcend: “Instead we’ll be swallowed up … we’ll be earnestly consumed.”

Night-Sky Checkerboard

By Oh Sae-young

Translated from the Korean by Brother Anthony of Taizé

(Phoneme Media)

Oh Sae-young writes nature poetry and politically engaged poetry–often at the same time. His elegy for a landscape that has been irretrievably altered at the hands of humans elides with one for the people who have been damaged by the onslaught of industrialization and globalization as much as the land around them. An unpicked gourd after a frost is a businessman dangling from a rope in his office after a similar freeze in the stock market, a disposable paper cup is a laid-off worker, and a protester on a crane the last leaf on a tree. A translator might be tempted to smooth over these blunt metaphors in parts of the work, but Brother Anthony does not flinch from the unvarnished comparisons, and his direct, simple language reveals its power in more complicated passages where this valorized nature can only be described in terms of the civilization displacing it, as when a farmer’s irrigation canals are described in terms of an electrical grid, or a meandering waterway in spring becomes writing itself.

Not Written Words

By Xi Xi

Translated from the Chinese by Jennifer Feeley

(Zephyr Press)

Jennifer Feeley’s superb translation captures all of the creativity, intellect, and playfulness in the verse of premier Hong Kong poet Xi Xi. In these skillfully wrought and daring poems, Feeley employs all the tools of the English language, including unforced end and internal rhyme, alliteration, wordplay, and references that run the gamut from nursery rhymes and fairy tales to fine art to contemporary politics. In deceptively lighthearted poems such as “Excerpt from a Feminist Dictionary,” the verse rings as powerfully in the English as it does in the original Chinese. This translation is essential reading, providing a window into the rich literature of Hong Kong and the larger Sinophone world.

 

2017 IPTA Shortlist:

Distant Light

By Antonio Moresco

Translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon

(Archipelago Books)

Eva Sleeps

By Francesca Melandri

Translated from the Italian by Katherine Gregor

(Europa Editions)

Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy

By Sergio Luzzatto

Translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall

(Metropolitan Books)

We Want Everything

By Nanni Balestrini

Translated from the Italian by Matt Holden

(Verso Books)

For more information on the shortlisted books see the official shortlist announcements for the Lucien Stryk Prize and IPTA on the ALTA blog.

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