The 2014 National Translation Award Longlist

The American Literary Translators Association, which is finally really trying to get its shit together in terms of its public and web presence, just announced the 15-title longlist for this year’s National Translation Award.

If you haven’t heard of the NTA, here’s all the necessary info: this is the sixteenth year the award is being given out; in contrast to the BTBA, it’s the “only national award for translated fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction that includes a rigorous examination of the source text and its relation to the finished English work”; the finalist judges are Barbara Epler (Publisher, New Directions), Elaine Katzenberger (Publisher, City Lights), and Jessica Cohen (renowned translator from the Hebrew); the winning translator will receive $5,000; and the finalists will be announced in October, with the winner being announced at the ALTA conference in Milwaukee from November 12-15.

Here’s the full longlist!

Poems of Consummation by Vicente Aleixandre
Translated from the Spanish by Stephen Kessler
(Black Widow Press)

Cavafy: Complete Plus by C.P. Cavafy
Translated from the Greek by George Economou
(Shearsman Books)

The Dark by Sergio Chejfec
Translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary
(Open Letter Books)

Theme of Farewell and After-Poems by Milo de Angelis
Translated from the Italian
by Susan Stewart & Patrizio Ceccagnoli
(The University of Chicago Press)

Life’s Good, Brother by Nazim Hikmet
Translated from the Turkish by Mutlu Konuk Blasing
(Persea Books, Inc.)

Distant Lands: An Anthology of Poets who Don’t Exist by Agnieszka Kuciak
Translated from the Polish by Karen Kovacik
(White Pine Press)

A Treatise on Shelling Beans by Wiesław Myśliwski
Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston
(Archipelago Books)

Between Friends by Amos Oz
Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

The Girl with the Golden Parasol by Uday Prakash
Translated from the Hindi by Jason Gruenbaum
(Yale Univeristy Press)

The African Shore by Rodrigo Rey Rosa
Translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray
(Yale University Press)

Four Elemental Bodies by Claude Royet-Journoud
Translated from the French by Keith Waldrop
(Burning Deck)

Light and Dark: A Novel by Natsume Soseki
Translated from the Japanese by John Nathan
(Columbia University Press)

Crossings by Habib Tengour
Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker
(The Post-Apollo Press)

An Invitation For Me to Think by Alexander Vvedensky
Translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky & Matvei Yankelevich
(New York Review Books)

A Schoolboy’s Diary by Robert Walser
Translated from the German by Damion Searls
(New York Review Books)