 I'm Annie Fisher, the Vice President of the American Literary Translators Association. I'm excited to open this video commemorating the long list, short list, and winner of the 2020 National Translation Award in Poetry. 2020 marks the 22nd year for the NTA and the sixth year that the award is conferred separately in poetry and prose. The NTA is the only award in the United States to include a rigorous examination of the long listed translations against the originals. We are grateful for the crucial work of our anonymous expert readers. Welcome everyone, we are excited to have you here to celebrate with us. The judges for the 2020 NTA in Poetry are Ilya Kaminsky, Lisa Katz, and Fareed Matuk, who judged over 60 titles this year to select the long list, short list, and winner who will receive a $2,500 prize. We will be hearing from Lisa Katz with the blurbs for the short listed titles, and then we will go to Fareed Matuk for the announcement of the winner of the 2020 National Translation Award in Poetry. Followed by a brief conversation and reading with the winner. Please feel free to follow along in the awards brochure found in the description, and we encourage you to purchase these titles from the bookshop.org page also found in the description. When you do, you support local bookstores. Engage with us in the comments wherever you're watching and tag us at littranslate on Twitter and use the hashtag Alta43. And now I'll turn over to our judges. This is a short list for the National Translation Award in Poetry for 2020 in no particular order. I'd like to apologize for any mispronunciations I make of names and long words, and mainly to offer my congratulations to these fine poets and translators. Hysteria by Kim Edom, translated by Jack, Jake Levine, So Say Un, and Heji Choi from Action Books. One of the co-translators of this good-humored and confrontational book notes in the afterward that the style of Korean poet Kim Edom is intentionally excessive and irrational. Her speaker is a hipster who makes brash statements about quotidian experiences that may occur in any crowded city. In the title poem, a woman being groped on the subway imagines her revenge. Quote, I want to kill the motherfucker if only I could go down to the sandy beach on the Red Coast moonlit there beside the cool waters I would lay him down, if only unquote. Kim Edom turns her glance on her specifically Korean milieu as well. It's an intriguing, illuminating volume. The Last Innocence, The Lost Adventures by Alejandra Pisarnik, translated by Cecilia Rossi, Ugly Duckling Press. The directness and lucidity of these translations of multilingual Argentine poet Alejandra Pisarnik present her work to us with its enigmas intact. An example, Ashes, in which the sky described by the poet is then claimed to be watching her and the atmosphere owns emotions and a face which one might expect to belong to the speaker. Quote, night splintered into stars, it watched me stunned, the air scatters hatred, its face beautified by music. Pisarnik has often been translated into English. Rossi's work avoids verbosity and is less Latinate than others and more suited to Pisarnik's minimalism, which then requires the reader to think. The Winter Garden Photograph by Reina Maria Rodriguez, translated by Christine Dykstra with Nancy Gates Madsen from Ugly Duckling Press. Rodriguez's poetry is both lyrical and investigative, captivating and thoughtful. It is interested in metaphysics, but also able to deliver the philosophical ideas in precise, elegant language. Dykstra and Gates Madsen have done an excellent job in bringing Rodriguez's prosodic nuances into an English that is as fresh as it is delicate. This book, perhaps more so than any other collection published this year, captures the inner workings of the human mind. The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice, a tiny Homeric epic, translated by A.E. Stallings from Paul Dry Books. A.E. Stallings translations are always a masterclass in music making. Here, she offers us a lively and crisp version of a classic text. We meet the mouse named Crumb Snatcher, killed by the reckless frog, King Puffer Throat, starting a war between species. This age's old parable is well-known, but A.E. Stallings' charming and often hilarious version makes it come to life by a word choice and rhyming couplets. Translators should know at least one language well, preferably their own. A.E. Stallings, a virtuoso of English prosody, gives us yet another example of how it is done. Room in Rome by Jorge Eduardo Ilson, translated by David Schuch from Cardboard House Press. Some works don't begin or end in the dissolution of translation, which, rather than being poetry's unfortunate devolution, is its origin and life force. Finding their fingers already tingling to touch that loose weave, poets like Jorge Eduardo Ilson can fling their attentions out across poems long or short and return having woven the unexpected into the prosaic. David Schuch's translation allows English readers to notice how the knots in Ilson's weave gather dread, rage, linguistic self-awareness, and somehow joy. Tell Me Kenyalang by Kula Grassi, translated by Pauline Fan from Sir Comfort's books. Translator Pauline Fan, in collaboration with poet Kula Grassi, offers an English version of Tell Me Kenyalang that complicates national categorizing schemes of world literature. Grassi intersperses verse written in Mele with phrases of Kaya and Kelibit, just two of the languages spoken by different ethnic and cultural groups residing in the nation state of Malaysia. Allowing some Kaya and Kelibit to remain untranslated. Fan and Grassi give readers rich multilingual evocations of multi-ethnic storytelling, ceremonial songs, ritual incantations, and dream weaving. But this is no museum. Fan's translation renders the pulse of a living poet's contemporary, generative attention to contemporary, generative moments, offering us a text that is narrated, alive. And this year's winner of the National Translation Award in Poetry is Hysteria by Kami Idoom, translated by Jake Levine Soson and Heji Choi, published by Action Books. I'd like to welcome Jake, Son, and Heji to turn on their cameras now. Thanks for joining us and congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. So we agreed to have a quick conversation. We wish we could spend more time together talking about your wonderful work. But to start us off, could one of you speak to what drew you to Kami Idoom's work into Hysteria in particular? I think initially, for me, what I enjoyed about Hysteria when I started working on it was this obvious quality of irreverence and one-dimensionality almost. The poems are very explicit about both of those qualities, almost insistent. And at the end of one of the poems, just rehearsal, the lines are like, I'm single-layered, there's no me inside me. And also, when we interviewed Kami Idoom, that was something that she felt very strongly about. So I think that was the initial job. But as we got into the translation process, I started thinking, that's not quite right, that despite the explicit insistence on flatness, that there are many places in these poems where the ambiguity is really rich in a productive way. And that's part of why translation took so long to sift through these layers that the poem is insisting isn't there, and to determine how to get that across in English. And even the irreverence or the Hysteria, that's there, but at the same time, there's also this subdued under-the-surface quality. And in the first poem, which is about a server getting her order wrong, there's a big emotional reaction to that that reads as Hysteria, but the external reaction to that is almost nothing. And so I think there's an interesting balance between what is being proclaimed to be there and what is actually there. And even after the more obvious surface level attraction of Hysteria fades, I think I'm left with questions about why it was necessary to insist upon a certain flatness. What situation is the speaker responding to where flatness is advantageous or even necessary? That's great. I hope we can touch on that in a couple of the other questions. You mentioned it was a long process. What were some of the challenges and rewards you encountered in working as a team of three translators? I think the most rewarding moments were when we were on call to talk about a part of a poem, especially in situations where no one had the answer. And we could throw things around and it felt like it was valuable to me in the sense that it felt very permissive. I would have an idea and I'd be like, well, that's not good or that's too wild. And then I would throw it out and almost as a joke and then we would sort of pick up on it. And even if we didn't use it, it would start a conversation about what's appealing about that that was eventually useful. Yes, we do have different cycles of motivation and sometimes when we come back to it to discuss it together, we don't remember exactly what we were thinking at the moment when we were very excited about the poems. But I think when we do come back and have these discussions in a very engaging way, we try to justify our choices to the other translators. And in that process, we have to verbalize our thinking and I think it's a good learning experience and the externalization of your thinking process is very helpful. On that note, maybe the three of you can comment, what are your hopes for the next 10 or 15 years of Korean literature and translation in the US or in the English speaking world? I know that Son and I just translated a poet where we have a book coming out in like a month, Kim Min Jong. Heiji has been working on a book for a few years now that's coming out in the spring by Moon Bo Young. I think right now, in particular, is maybe the most exciting moment for English translation of Korean literature. Not that Korean literature didn't always have great writers, but right now there are so many young great translators. And so there are a lot of those translators are just now coming out with their first translated book. And so I think the future is like super, super, super bright. Maybe like, you know, Korean a Korean book of translation from Korean all in year and year and year. Yeah. That's wonderful. Do you do you want to add anything to that thoughts for where Korean literature might go in English? Kind of just have like a personal hope that like the genres that are being translated will also expand. Like I think like within poetry, like there is this like expansion of like what counts and what is supported and celebrated. I want to translate web comics so badly. So that's sort of like the project that I'm hoping to work on that I hope lots of people will be like interested in working on as well. I think we all we all also like have discussed maybe this is like an aside question but also discuss like how difficult it is for us to love like the K-pop phenomenon. And kind of in a way it's really important that all these like punk rock great poets are being translated from Korean to give people like an alternative view of like a different kind of culture because K-pop takes up so much of the attention and space. I think at the same time, like the reason Korean poetry also garnered so much attention is because of K-pop and other areas where Korea is, you know, very powerful right now and poetry is just kind of like piggybacking on that success. That wave. I think I think they're picking backing on us. On hot day in particular on community poetry. We're responsible for BTS. We play a role. And I'm not inflammatory. No, we can, we can maybe conclude the conversation. Congratulations to you all. Thank you for your work. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Hysteria. I want to rip you apart with my teeth. I want to tear you to death on the speeding subway. Hey, you groping. Hey, hey, hands off. I feel like I'm ripping like I'll tear apart any second I want to scream throw fit. But I take my hand and push it deep into my gut. Breathe. Deep. Don't fucking touch me. I said stop leaning on me. You're driving me nuts. What the fuck? The leather in my body begins to strain. Is it a fox or a wolf? I'm about to pop. Flowing blood like a lunar halo, blood stains that bleed through blue sheets. You think that's instinctual? Because of the full moon? Shut your mouth. Truth-speaking woman, if you know the truth, keep it to yourself. This is the gospel of filthy humans. Periodic bleeding, stomach cramps, I won't stop. I'm complicated as hell, but people try and try to get inside. I'm an insider me, not an outsider. You mumble even in your sleep. Sudden hemorrhaging, blood flowing, a world with a big door. Closing, opening, repeat, repeat. A wheel that stops and stops as it turns. I need a U-Route. I need to get out. I need a heavy-duty MaxiPad. What to do with this past-out fucker? With his hand in my coat, this fucker is talking in his sleep like he's reading a scribbled letter. I want to kill the motherfucker. But what if he's my lover? If only I could pick him up by the back of his neck with my teeth. I would leap off this train and sprint over the tracks. I would head to the darkest part of the night, my wild hair flapping. If only I could go to the sandy beach on the Red Coast Moonlit. There, beside the cool waters, I would lay him down. If only.