Professor Julia Sanches and Alumna Tracy K. Smith ’97 Longlisted for National Translation Award

Adjunct Assistant Professor Julia Sanches and Writing alumna Tracy K. Smith '97 recently made the longlist for the 2021 National Translation Award. Sanches was longlisted for her prose translation of Natalia Borges Polesso's Amora: Stories (Amazon Crossing, 2020). Smith and co-translator Changtai Bi made the poetry longlist for My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2020) by Yi Lei. 

Hosted by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) for its 23rd year, the National Translation Award (NTA) is awarded annually to outstanding literary translations in both poetry and prose. The NTA is the only national translation award that includes “a rigorous examination of both the source text and its relation to the finished English work.”

This year’s prose longlist was selected by a panel of three judges, including 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 each receive a monetary prize of $2,500.

Amora: Stories, which was translated from the Portuguese by Sanches, follows 33 short stories and poems that capture the nuances of love between women. In praise of the book, Kirkus Reviews states, "Borges Polesso explores the depths of amorous relationships between women young and old, married and single, out and closeted, independent and cripplingly co-dependent—but first and foremost, in love."

Bitch Media also praised Amora: Stories, saying, “Love is what threads these 33 stories together—self-love, love for other women, and a love for a freedom that only truth can bring…real, vulnerable, and full of twists you’ll never see coming.”

Julia Sanches is the author of more than a dozen translations from the Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan into English. Her translations and writing have appeared in Granta, LitHub, The Paris Review Daily, and The Common, among others. She has received support for her work from the PEN Heim, PEN Translates, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Sanches sits on the Council of the Authors Guild, where she advocates for fairer terms for literary translators.

My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems, translated from the Chinese by Smith and Changtai Bi, also came out to high praise. Chinese poet Yi Lei’s posthumous collection boldly delves into topics of women's erotic desires, critique of oppressive law, and contemplations of beauty in the natural world. Jhumpa Lahiri writes of the collection: “Yi Lei’s astonishing poems, steeped in disquiet and desire, are at once aching and incendiary. Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi have coaxed them into English respectfully, inventively, and gorgeously.”

Tracy K. Smith is a professor and the Chair of Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is the author of the memoir Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015) and four books of poetry: Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018); Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011), which received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; Duende (Graywolf Press, 2007), recipient of the 2006 James Laughlin Award; and The Body's Question (Graywolf Press, 2003), which won the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. From 1997 to 1999, Smith was a Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. Smith is also the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, and a Whiting Award. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States.

The recipients of the 2021 National Translation Award in Prose and Poetry will be named during ATLA’s annual conference, ALTA44: Inflection Points. The virtual awards ceremony will be aired on Saturday, October 16, 5:00 pm PT.