Translated Work By Iman Mersal, Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi Make ALTA Longlists

SEPTEMBER 5, 2024 — A work translated from Arabic made both of the twelve-book longlists announced today by the American Literary Translators Association for the 2024 National Translation Awards: in prose and poetry.

The book that made the prose longlist — which was judged by Philip Boehm, Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Will Forrester, Joon-Li Kim, and poupeh missaghi — was Iman Mersal’s Traces of Enayat, translated by Robin Moger and published by And Other Stories (UK) and Transit Books (US).

You can read an excerpt on ArabLit.

And on the poetry longlist — judged by Kazim Ali, Ronnie Apter, and Mary Jo Bang — was Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi’s A Friend’s Kitchen, translated by Bryar Bajalan with Shook, and published by The Poetry Translation Centre.

You can also read an excerpt from A Friend’s Kitchen on ArabLit, as well as a filmpoem based on “A Book of Sorrows.”

Of Traces of Enayat, the judges said:

In Traces of Enayat, Iman Mersal becomes a detective in search of the Egyptian author Enayat al-Zayyat. Mersal, through Moger, guides us into many archives of an almost-forgotten past—from oral histories to personal journals to library materials to Cairo’s architectural bodies to ultimately a tombstone. A captivating labyrinthine archive itself, made in front of our eyes, Traces of Enayat is not just about Enayat, but also about Mersal and many other women, including us readers, who are all part of the tissue of a continuous literary life across time and place.

 And in their statement about A Friend’s Kitchen, the judges said:

This translation of a contemporary Sudanese poet, marries the concision of the short lyric with the lush and ornate tradition of Arabic lyric poetry. Imagistic and sometimes surreal, this combination is exciting precisely because it is perhaps rarer in American and English poetry. Poems like “Panic Attack,” “My Corpse in the River,” and “From the Book of Erasure” demonstrate the juxtaposition of sense and sound these combination of dictions and registers offers. Political and personal simultaneously, A Friend’s Kitchen is an intimate space in which the troubles and dangers of the world reveal themselves.

The shortlists for the NTA will be announced on October 10th, and the winners will be announced on October 26th at an Awards Ceremony as part of ALTA’s annual conference, ALTA47: Voices in Translation, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. The winning translators will receive a $4,000 cash prize each.

You can find the complete longlists on the ALTA website.