Here are the shortlists for the 2024 National Translation Awards in poetry and prose.

By Literary Hub

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October 10, 2024, 10:00am

Today, the American Literary Translators Association announced its shortlists for the 2024 National Translation Awards, which celebrate “literary translators who have made an outstanding contribution to literature in English by masterfully recreating the artistic force of a book of consummate quality.” Prizes will be awarded in both poetry and prose.

“Our judges had the very difficult task of narrowing down this year’s submissions to these two shortlists of impressive translations, ranging from the intimate to the epic in scale,” said Corine Tachtiris, ALTA’s Vice President, in a press release.  “In a year where AI is dominating the headlines, these translations all attest that AI will never be able to replace the artistry, nuance, and risk that characterizes the work of human translators.”

The winners, who will each be awarded a prize of $4,000, will be announced in a ceremony on October 26th.

In the meantime, here are the shortlists:

Prose:

Mathias Énard, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild
Translated from French by Frank Wynne
New Directions (US), Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK)

Tezer Özlü, Cold Nights of Childhood
Translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely
Transit Books

Yu Miri, The End of August
Translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles
Riverhead Books (US), Tilted Axis Press (UK)

Marosia Castaldi, The Hunger of Women
Translated from Italian by Jamie Richards
And Other Stories

Juan Gómez Bárcena, Not Even the Dead
Translated from Spanish by Katie Whittemore
Open Letter Books

Cheon Myeong-kwan, Whale
Translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim
Archipelago Books (US), Europa Editions (UK)

*

Poetry:

Pierre Alferi, And the Street
Translated from French by Cole Swensen
Green Linden Press

Balam Rodrigo, Central American Book of the Dead
Translated from Spanish by Dan Bellm
FlowerSong Press

Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, A Friend’s Kitchen
Translated from Arabic by Bryar Bajalan with the poet Shook
The Poetry Translation Centre

Ovid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Translated from Latin by C. Luke Soucy
University of California Press

Ulrike Almut Sandig, Shining Sheep
Translated from German by Karen Leeder
Seagull Books

Ostap Slyvynsky, Winter King
Translated from Ukrainian by Vitaly Chernetsky and Iryna Shuvalova
Lost Horse Press

Read the 1934 Nora Neale Hurston essay that inspired next year’s Met Gala theme.

By Emily Temple

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October 10, 2024, 9:17am

The Met Gala is being literary again. On Wednesday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition, which also traditionally serves as the Met Gala theme: “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.”

First of all, according to Vogue, the exhibition draws from Barnard professor Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, and “will feature garments, paintings, photographs, and more—all exploring the indelible style of Black men in the context of dandyism, from the 18th century through present day.” Miller will also be a guest curator for the show.

“Dandyism, for the unacquainted, is an exuberant attention to dress,” writes Vogue‘s Nicole Phelps.

In advance of [Wednesday’s] announcement, Miller said another definition is “dressing wisely and well.” She described Black dandyism as “a strategy and a tool to rethink identity, to reimagine the self in a different context. To really push a boundary—especially during the time of enslavement, to really push a boundary on who and what counts as human, even.” The history of Black dandyism that the exhibition showcases will “illustrate how Black people transformed from being enslaved and stylized as luxury items, acquired like any other signifier of wealth and status, to autonomous self-fashioning individuals who are global trendsetters.” If, as Miller has argued, the Black dandy originates in the space between hyper-visibility (on the red carpet, say) and invisibility (in establishment institutions like The Met), this show is poised to address that.

The exhibition, Phelps tells us, will be “arranged by 12 characteristics of Black dandyism, an organizational principle informed by a 1934 Zora Neale Hurston essay, “The Characteristics of Negro Expression.” The sections will tell the story of the Black dandy’s evolution over time via not just garments and accessories, but a range of media that includes drawings, paintings, photographs, and film excerpts.” If you, like us here at Lit Hub, enjoy doing the extra credit reading, you can find Hurston’s essay here.

Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, and Anna Wintour will co-chair, with LeBron James as honorary chair. The specific dress code has yet to be announced.

[h/t The Cut]

Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

By Emily Temple

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October 10, 2024, 7:26am

Today, the Swedish Academy awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature to Han Kang, “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. In 1993 she made her literary debut as a poet, and was first published as novelist in 1994. In 2016, she broke out into the English-speaking literary world with Deborah Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian, originally published in 2007, which Daniel Hahn called “a bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader’s diet,” and which won the International Man Booker Prize. (It also made Lit Hub’s list of the best debut novels of the decade.)

Kang, according to the Academy, “confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.”

(Did you bet correctly? Someone out there must have…)

Read an excerpt from Kang’s most widely-read book in English, The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, here.

Read Han Kang on violence, beauty, and the (im)possibility of innocence, in conversation with Bethanne Patrick, here.

Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach

Threatened with eviction, a Brooklyn comic shop raised almost $90K to stay open.

By James Folta

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October 9, 2024, 1:14pm

Image from Desert Island’s fundraiser.

Here’s some good news to brighten your Wednesday: after being threatened with eviction, beloved indie comic shop Desert Island raised nearly $90,000 in three days to keep the shop in business.

The outpouring of support from Desert Island’s community of shoppers, fans, and artists is a testament to how essential the shop has become. The 16-year-old store and its owner Gabe Fowler are an oasis in New York for comics, art, events, and weird, beautiful window displays.

Recently the Brooklyn store’s landlord alerted Gabe that the liquor store down the street wanted to buy out Desert Island’s lease, offering to pay more in rent. The landlord gave the store a deadline to match that higher rent, or vacate.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Desert Island 🏝️ (@desertislandcomics)

But in just a few days, Desert Island was able to raise more than enough money to keep the shop open. The funds will go towards a renewed lease, or moving and building out the shop in a new location — I would also feel a bit shaky about sticking with this landlord.

And as a fun wrinkle, Gabe added on the GoFundMe page that “with money in excess of our goal, we’ll edit and publish a free comics anthology in which all the artists get paid.” That’s community, baby!

It’s a happy ending, and we wish Desert Island many more years of business. And with rents going up everywhere, there’s never been a better time to visit your local comic shop: Desert Island in Brooklyn, The Million Year Picnic in Cambridge, Floating World in Portland, The Beguiling in Toronto, Atomic Books in Baltimore, or Secret Headquarters in LA. Support your local shops!

Mary Bennet is getting her own show.

By Brittany Allen

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October 9, 2024, 11:53am

The bookish sister, under-regarded in every film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, is finally getting a new lease on life. A new BBC adaptation will pay special attention to Mary’s journey.

As The AV Club reported, “To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the beloved miniseries, the network has commissioned a new spin-off of Jane Austen’s novel called The Other Bennet Sister. Based on the book of the same name by Janice Hadlow, the series follows the adventures of Mary Bennet, the somewhat uptight and moralizing middle sister of the Bennet family.”

This is great news for Mary stans, who’ve been waiting centuries to see justice done to their favorite Regency grump. Ours has been a hard faith to keep. Not least because the author is the origin of all that Mary shade.

To name one of several snide dismissals, of her ball-killing piano concert Austen snidely wrote, “Mary’s powers were by no means fitted for such a display.” And of course one wonders why Jane didn’t have Mary and Mr. Collins hit it off, when the marriage stakes were so dire.

After all, they’ve gotta be the only two people in the world to share an affinity for Fordyce’s Sermons. 

It’s true that in the original text, the middle Bennet sister is rendered as self-serious and pedantic. But she’s also the only one who likes to read, and the only one who scoffs openly at the superficial rites her marry-or-die social life demands.

Mary’s not the cool sister. She’s not the fun sister. She’s not the sweet sister. But she is principled and devoted. In these ways she has more in common with modernist heroes like Dorothea Brooke, or even a Daria Morgendorffer.

Her commitment to marching to the beat of her own metronome is especially heroic, given her precarious financial future.

The Mary phenomenon may be analogous to the Carrie/Miranda conundrum, in that the grumpier Ms. Bennet is probably the more realistic character. As the BBC noted, “While we dream of being Lizzy, in reality most us are more like Mary.”

Hadlow’s novel likewise engages this kind of reparative reading, but it also “gives Mary Bennet the epic love story nobody predicted for her.” Which, cool. Though I’d be just as excited to read a book where my good sis malcontents around in the background, ruining balls forever.

It’s unclear which path the new series will take. Written by Sarah Quintrell and  commissioned for the BBC with Cardiff-based indie Bad Wolf, the show will be released as a ten-part-drama. Dates TBD.