Announcing Winners of ALTA 2017 National Translation Awards

The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) has announced the winners of the 2017 National Translation Awards (NTA) in Poetry and Prose! Congratulations go out to Daniel Borzutzky for translating Valdivia, by Galo Ghigliotto (co·im·press, 2017); and Esther Allen, for her translation from the Spanish of Zama,  by Antonio di Benedetto (New York Review of Books, 2017). (Zama, as you moviegoers may know, has just been adapted into a stunning film by director Lucrecia Martel.) More about Poetry winner Valdivia:
 

Words from the judges: In Valdivia, a haunting fusion of history, dreamscape, and memory, Chilean Galo Ghigliotto’s speaker offers a complex vision of his provincial birth city as the site of famous battles, a devastating 1960 earthquake (with its ensuing floods), and eerie, otherworldly phenomena amid the scenario of domestic violence that plagued his own family.  Written as a series of forty-three poems tellingly presented out of sequence, Valdivia serves as a sort of poetic catharsis for these afflictions which, embedded in reality, can scarcely pull clear of the imagination.  Daniel Borzutzky vividly renders this melding of fact, fiction, and the vagaries of recollection in a lucid and precise English.

Read more at ALTA!