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 long- and shortlisted title The Last Innocence / The Lost Adventures:

The Last Innocence/The Lost Adventures
by Alejandra Pizarnik
translated from the Spanish by Cecilia Rossi
(Ugly Duckling Presse)

The directness and lucidity of these translations of multilingual Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik present her work to us with its enigmas intact. For example, take “Ashes,” in which the sky described by the poet is then claimed to be watching her, and the atmosphere owns emotions and a face, which one might expect to belong to the speaker: “Night splintered into stars / it watched me stunned / the air scatters hatred / its face beautified by music.” Pizarnik has often been translated into English, but Rossi’s work avoids verbosity, is less Latinate, and is better suited to Pizarnik’s minimalism, which then requires the reader’s thought.