NYRB is pleased to announce that Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think, edited and translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, additional translation by Matvei Yankelevich, is one of five books shortlisted for this year’s National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).
The judges’ announcement is as follows:
“Vvedensky is a marvel: a poet too little known in Russia, and not known at all in the English-speaking world, is revealed as a major 20th-century world poet—wonderful, wonderfully strange, and haunting. The alchemical translation, with its shifty rhymes and non-rhymes, intense images and absent logic, knits and unknits reality before the reader’s eyes, walking not a line so much as a live wire.”
To see the rest of the shortlist, visit the ALTA website.