Join us as we count down to ALTA41: Performance, Props, and Platforms with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose long- and shortlisted titles! We will be featuring the titles in alphabetical order, moving first through the longlisted and then the shortlisted titles, alongside blurbs penned by our judges for the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. This year’s judges for poetry are Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Jennifer Feeley, and Sawako Nakayasu, and this year’s prose judges are Esther Allen, Tess Lewis, and Jeremy Tiang.

For quick reference, you may find the NTA longlists here, and the NTA shortlists here. Today we’re shining the spotlight on My Lai, longlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry:

My Lai
by Carmen Berenguer
translated from the Spanish by Liz Henry
(Cardboard House Press)

Since the 1970s, Chilean poet Carmen Berenguer has been in the US on a number of occasions – this circumstance led to her writing the book Mi Lai (in Spanish), itself a document of cultural and aesthetic translation, even before Liz Henry’s excellent translation of its many forms and styles into English. Where the political and personal merge and refract, Berenguer’s keen observations of USAmerican language, art, music, and television – with 1960s counter-culture, feminism, Iowa, and the Chilean military dictatorship woven through it all – undergird a powerful book that helps us better consider the implications of being “American.”