Translations from Vietnamese, Arabic and Tamil are among finalists for National Translation Awards

Fiction originally written in Vietnamese, Polish and French and poetry in German and Arabic are among this year’s finalists for National Translation Awards.

On Wednesday, the American Literary Translators Association announced lists of six finalists in prose and poetry, with winning translators in each category receiving USD 4,000.

In prose, nominees include Thuan’s novel “Chinatown”, translated from Vietnamese by Nguyn An Ly; Mikolaj Grynberg’s “I’d Like to Say Sorry, But There’s No One to Say Sorry To”, translated from Polish by Sean Gasper Bye; and Monique Ilboudo’s “So Distant from My Life”, translated from French by Yarri Kamara.

The other prose finalists are Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s “Spadework for a Palace”, translated from Hungarian by John Batki; B. Jeyamohan’s “Stories of the True”, translated from Tamil by Priyamvada Ramkumar; and Sheela Tomy’s debut novel “Valli”, translated from Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil.

The late Nobel laureate Nelly Sachs’ “Flight and Metamorphosis”, translated last year from German by Joshua Weiner with Linda B. Parshall, is a finalist for poetry; along with Phoebe Giannisi’s “Cicada”, translated from Greek by Brian Sneeden; and Wong May’s translation from the Chinese for the compilation “In the Same Light: 200 Tang Poems for Our Century”.

Nominees also include Iman Mersal’s “The Threshold”, translated from Arabic by Robyn Creswell; Venus Khoury-Ghata’s “The Water People”, translated from French by Marilyn Hacker; and Ananda Devi’s “When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me”, translated from French by Kazim Ali. Winners will be announced on November 11.