We are delighted to share that Boyd Tonkin’s wonderful review of Saadat Hasan Manto’s The Dog of Tithwal, translated from the Urdu by Khalid Hasan and Muhammad Umar Memon, was published today in The Wall Street Journal. Tonkin takes care to situate Manto within his cultural moment and examines many inimitable threads of Manto’s profound contribution to literature. You can find the review here, and read an excerpt below:

We’re delighted to share that groundbreaking Mozambican writer, Paulina Chiziane, has won this year’s Camões Prize. The Portuguese Culture Minister, Graça Fonseca, announced that “the jury unanimously decided to award the prize to Mozambican writer Paulina Chiziane, highlighting her vast production and critical reception, as well as the academic and institutional recognition of her work.”

The Camões Prize for literature in Portuguese was established by Portugal and Brazil with the purpose of distinguishing an author “whose work contributes to the projection and recognition of the literary and cultural heritage of the common language.” Chiziane is the first African woman to win the Camões prize.

Paulina Chiziane was born in 1955 in an area of Mozambique in which communication with the white colonizers was forbidden. In her mid-twenties she devoted herself to writing and became the first Mozambican woman with a published novel. When handed this title, however, she says she is not a novelist; “I am a storyteller . . . take my inspiration from tales around the campfire, my first art school.” Her works explore themes of race, polygamy, colonization, and cultural change in her country.

In 2016, Archipelago published Chiziane’s The First Wife, translated into English by David Brookshaw. For the London Review of Books, Sheila Heti wrote, ” . . . the people who will change Chiziane’s country (or any country) need love stories like The First Wife, which admit that no new freedoms are gained without seemingly pointless suffering . . . Chiziane’s prose alternates between a dramatic, high-octave style . . . and a terse and humorous frankness. She cites the Portuguese poet Florbela Espanca as her most important influence, and there is something similar in the way both writers are able to express the peaks of emotion, while never forgetting the part of the self which evaluates oneself.”

Read more about Paulina Chiziane and the Camões Prize here.

We’re thrilled to share that Geoffrey Brock has won the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry for his translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti‘s Allegria! The National Translation Award, which is administered by the American Literary Translators Association, is the only national award for translated fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction that includes a rigorous examination of both the source text and its relation to the finished English work. This year’s judges for poetry are Sinan Antoon, Layla Benitez-James, and Sibelan Forrester.

“I will buy any book of poetry that Brock has translated,” the poet Ilya Kaminsky wrote of Allegria. “It is especially clear here, in the pages of Allegria, where the shortish lines test the translator’s ability to deliver nuance with light touch, precision, and almost Mozartian grace . . . This book will give you ‘a momentary stay against confusion.’ It is a beautiful gift.”

The jury wrote, “Ungaretti’s first book-length collection of poems appeared almost a century ago. It transformed modern Italian poetry and announced the arrival of a unique voice in world poetry . . . The slender poems celebrate life, inflecting its light, memory, and mystery, and seizing the eternal from the seemingly ephemeral in vivid and striking imagery. This elegant translation preserves Ungaretti’s economy and his pursuit of poetic purity.”

Famed for his brevity, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s early poems swing nimbly from the coarse matter of tram wires, alleyways, quails in bushes, and hotel landladies to the mystic shiver of pure abstraction. These are the kinds of poems that, through their numinous clarity and shifting intimations, can make a poetry-lover of the most stone-faced non-believer. Ungaretti won multiple prizes for his poetry, including the 1970 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He was a major proponent of the Hermetic style, which proposed a poetry in which the sounds of words were of equal import to their meanings. This auditory awareness echoes through Brock’s hair-raising translations, where a man holding vigil with his dead, open-mouthed comrade, says, “I have never felt / so fastened / to life.”

Geoffrey Brock is the author of three books of poems, the editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, and the translator of numerous books of prose, poetry, and comics, most recently Last Dream by Giovanni Pascoli (World Poetry Books, 2019) and Allegria by Giuseppe Ungaretti (Archipelago, 2020). His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas, where he founded The Arkansas International.

You can find more information about the ALTA and Brock’s award here.

We’re thrilled to share that Maja Haderlap — writer, poet, and translator from German and Slovenian — has won the 2021 Christine Lavant Prize for her extensive body of work! The prize honors a writer “who, like Christine Lavant, combines high aesthetic standards with a humane attitude and a socially critical view in their literary work.”

The jury wrote that Haderlap’s selection was “a tribute to one of the most important Austrian writers . . . In the centre is her novel Engel des Vergessens, 2011, (Angel of Oblivion), a story about a Slovenian-Carinthian family which presents the battle of Carinthian Slovenians against National Socialism and the humiliation that Slovenians in Austria were and are partly still exposed to.”

Tess Lewis’ translation of Angel of Oblivion, Haderlap’s autobiographical novel, was published by Archipelago in 2016. Malcolm Forbes of The National wrote that Angel of Oblivion is “a hymn to remembrance – one urging us to salvage and safeguard the shards of our past from the tide of history.”

distant transit, Haderlap’s collection of poems newly translated by Tess Lewis, is forthcoming with Archipelago in 2022. As Haderlap writes about a Slovenia transformed through linguistic assimilation and border violence, language comes to her as a confidant, but it takes many other shapes as well, even flying at her face like a flock of birds. In these poems, the material tendencies of language play out at the fraught border between Austria and Slovenia, and in Tess Lewis’ quicksilver translation, where “sentences must disrobe / begin to roam, learn to swim / not lose the memory that nests in / their bodies, a secret nucleus.”

In 2018, Haderlap was awarded the Max Frisch Prize of the City of Zurich. The jury wrote that her “poetry and prose combine poetic brilliance with explosive political power.”

Born into the Slovenian-speaking minority of Carinthia, Maja Haderlap’s writing brings alive the specter of linguistic assimilation and ethnic cleansing at the border between Austria and Slovenia. She studied German language and literature at the University of Vienna and has a PhD in Theatre Studies. Haderlap has published volumes of poetry and essays in Slovenian and German. She was awarded the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis and the Rauriser Literaturpreis for Engel des Vergessens (Angel of Oblivion).

More information about the Christine Lavant Prize can be found here, and in German here.

On Friday, April 16 at 8:00PM EST, Prairie Lights hosted a virtual conversation with Andrea Bajani and Nick Flynn. They discussed Bajani’s novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris. You can watch a recording of the event here!

Andrea Bajani is the author of four novels and two collections of poems. His novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins, has brought him a great deal of attention. In just a few months, the book won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize and the Lo Straniero Prize. He lives in Houston and teaches at Rice University.

Nick Flynn is a formidable contemporary American poet, playwright, and memoirist. His work is often praised for its swift, lyrical expression and fractured narrative structures. Flynn has been published in fifteen languages, and has won two PEN prizes for his memoir and poetry writing. He has also received fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation; The Fine Arts Works Center; and the Library of Congress, among others. He now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and his daughter, Maeve.