November 11, 2023—The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) announced the winners of the 2023 National Translation Awards (NTA) in Poetry and Prose on November 11th at an Awards Ceremony as part of ALTA’s annual conference, ALTA46: The Place of Translation. The Awards Ceremony featured this year’s prize judges announcing the winners, and short readings from the winning translators. The conference was held November 8th-11th in Tucson, AZ and was the first fully in-person conference hosted by ALTA since 2019. 2023 marks the 25th year for the NTA, and the 9th year to award separate prizes in poetry and prose. The winner received a plaque from presenting judge Heather Green, and a short reading followed by the translator from the winning text.
Winner: 2023 National Translation Award in Poetry
The Threshold
By Iman Mersal
Translated from Arabic by Robyn Creswell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
This is what the judges had to say about the winner:
Robyn Creswell writes that the poet Iman Mersal, “Egypt’s—indeed, the Arab World’s—great outsider poet” finds her politics “not in the public square or at the checkpoint, but rather in the realm of sexual relations, commonplace idioms, and hierarchies of power that are more durable because mostly unacknowledged.” It is in his straightforward, lyrical rendition of such scenarios that the translator succeeds. An abiding skepticism animates The Threshold, of collective identities, political mobilization, modernization, family relations, and much more. In the title poem, “one long-serving intellectual screamed at his friend / When I’m talking about democracy / you shut the hell up.” “CV,” which catalogues the conspicuous absence of wasted days and empty hours, ends by defining the vita’s relationship to life itself as “proof that the one who lived it / has cut all ties to the earth.”
About the winner
Robyn Creswell teaches comparative literature at Yale University and is the author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Cullman Center, and the American Academy in Berlin. His translations include Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Tongue of Adam, Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell and Notes from Prison, and Iman Mersal’s The Threshold. He contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books.
[Image description: Robyn Creswell at the American Academy in Berlin.]
“ALTA is incredibly proud to recognize Nguyễn An Lý and Robyn Creswell for their masterful translations from Vietnamese and Arabic respectively, in this the 25th year of the National Translation Award,” said ALTA’s Executive Director Elisabeth Jaquette. “We are also pleased that, thanks to a generous gift from an ALTA member, the prize amounts have been increased to $4,000 each, starting this year. We celebrate these two winners, as well as all the translators, authors, and presses on this year’s shortlists and longlists, who expand the landscape of literature available in English. As readers, and as members of a global community, we are all richer for their skill and artistry.”
This year’s judges for poetry were Pauline Fan, Heather Green, and Shook. The winning translators received a $4,000 cash prize each. The longlists, comprising 24 titles total, were announced on September 1, 2023, and the shortlists, comprising 12 titles total, were announced on October 11, 2023.
About the National Translation Awards: The NTA is awarded annually in poetry and in prose to literary translators who have made an outstanding contribution to literature in English by masterfully recreating the artistic force of a book of consummate quality. The NTA, which is administered by American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), is the only national award for translated fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction that includes a rigorous examination of both the source text and its relation to the finished English work.
The 2024 National Translation Award submissions portal will be opened in January 2024.