Monique Ilboudo, Iman Mersal, and Ananda Devi are on the shortlists for the US National Translation Awards 2023 announced on Wednesday, October 11, 2023.
The National Translation Award 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. Established in 1998, the NTA is the only prize for a work of literary translation into English to include an evaluation of the source language text. 2015 was the first year in which the NTA was awarded separately in poetry and prose.
The shortlists for the poetry and prose awards for this year were announced on October 11 with the following writers of African descent making the list;
Poetry
- The Threshold, Iman Mersal Translated from Arabic by Robyn Creswell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Judge’s citation: 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.”
- When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me, Ananda Devi Translated from French by Kazim Ali, Deep Vellum/Phoneme | HarperCollins India
Judge’s citation: In When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me, the night speaks “with a blade / That slices / Into the places of certainty.” Mauritian writer Ananda Devi, a major figure in Indian Ocean letters, considers how language perpetuates or resists abuses of power; without poetry, words can “die a slow death,” “squandering our voices our votes our convictions.” Kazim Ali’s musical and somehow intimate performance of Devi’s work brings forth a vital poetry in English, “words that do what words are supposed to do that is to say sowing doubt and harvesting nonsense whipping up passions and extending the thrill folding infinity in quarters and scratching at the surface all this yes yes.”
Prose
- So Distant From My Life, Monique Ilboudo Translated from French by Yarri Kamara, Tilted Axis
Judges citation: So Distant from My Life asks us to reckon with what we think about when we think about queerness, NGOs, white saviors and, perhaps most of all, what it means to leave—and then to come back, and come back, and come back again. Early on, Ilboudo’s resourceful protagonist declares himself in possession of a “vagabond mind” that leaps like “a young goat released from its tether”, and Yarri Kamara’s translation perfectly channels this thrilling, erratic energy. Her vivid prose alternately leaps and tiptoes, like a reckless goat scaling a cliff face, immersing us in a narrative as gripping as it is precarious.
Yarri Kamara said, “So Distant From My Life has made it to the shortlist!”
The winners will be revealed at an awards ceremony in the USA on Saturday, November 11.
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