The NTA Countdown to ALTA44: Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me

The NTA Countdown to ALTA44: Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me

Join us as we count down to the ALTA44: Inflection Points 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 prose judges are Jennifer Croft, Anton Hur, and Annie Janusch. This year’s judges for poetry are Sinan Antoon, Layla Benitez-James, and Sibelan Forrester.

The winning translators will receive a $2,500 cash prize each. The awards will be announced at ALTA’s annual conference, ALTA44: Inflection Points, which this year is being held jointly online and in-person in Tucson, AZ. The virtual awards ceremony will be aired on Saturday, October 16, at 5:00pm PT. To attend, register via the virtual conference platform (there is also a free ticket option that includes public events like this one.)

Join us as we shine the spotlight today on this NTA longlisted title, along with a citation penned by the judges:

Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me
By Choi Seungja
Translated from Korean by Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong
(Action Books)

Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong do an excellent job of rendering Choi Seungja’s punchy lines without holding back any of their bold and brash melancholy. Seungja, herself a translator from German and English, was also the first woman poet to publish in Literature and Intellect, and feels most alive when she is shattering polite expectations. Criticized for being too brutal for what people thought a woman writer should be, Seungja’s poems in Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me can often surprise, but her vocabulary never feels gratuitous, only truthful. Though there is much despair in these poems, their bold declarations make for a thrilling read, and the ringing calls readers in.