 I'm Annie Fisher, the Vice President of the American Literary Translators Association. I'm excited to open this video commemorating the longlist, shortlist, and winner of the 2020 National Translation Award in prose. 2020 marks the 22nd year for the NTA and the 6th 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 longlisted 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 and prose are Amaya Gabbancho, Emmanuel Harris, and William Hutchins who judged nearly 240 titles this year to select the longlist, shortlist, and winner who will receive a $2,500 prize. We will be hearing from Emmanuel Harris with the blurbs for the shortlisted titles and then we will go to Amaya Gabbancho for the announcement of the winner of the 2020 National Translation Award in prose, 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 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 Lit Translate on Twitter and use the hashtag ALTA43 and now I'll turn over to our judges. And here are the 2020 National Translation Award in prose shortlisted titles. Beyond Babylon by Ijaba Shego, translated from Italian by Aaron Robertson, two lines press. Beyond Babylon is a polyphonic trans-oceanic fragmented family epic spanning three continents with the Mediterranean Sea at its core. The blue mass that defines the Somali-Italian relationship, the Mari nostrum, both a grave and a passage to hope. Through half sisters Mar and Zura, Ijaba Shego explores the history of Italian colonialism and the uneven pie relations that define it. It's a story of migration and identity of the so-called marginal condition. Marginal through race, gender, religion, and language. It is also a great Italian novel in the biggest sense of the word. Aaron Robertson navigates the polyglotic nature of the text wonderfully, letting the rhythms of Italian and the sounds of Somali, Arabic, and American swim across this trend of translation. The Chef, a Cook's novel by Marie Indaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump, Alfred A. Noff. The translator informs us that Chef C-H-E-F-F-E is a new word in French meaning a female chef. The novel by French Senegalese Indaye definitely parlays the language of culinary tonight with the subtleties of non-verbal communication between a businesswoman and her challenging daughter. The enchanting text that results and covers the histories behind an otherwise very public chef and her personal realities. A Couple of Solace, a comic play from 17th century China by Li Yu, translated from Chinese by Zhen Shen and Robert E. Hegel, Columbia University Press. In translating this delightful 17th century Chinese novel, Zhen Shen and Robert E. Hegel have used their meticulous scholarship to create a lively comedy in which a young scholar and a young actress out with her parents and corrupt government officials. The translator's critical apparatus is as thorough as it is unobtrusive. God's Wife by Amanda Michael Appaloo, translated from Greek by Parisa Felicia Barbeto, Darkly Archive Press. Amanda Michael Appaloo's God's Wife is a metaphysical, philosophical, post-modern novel. The question of existence is key to it. Writing and the idea of bringing oneself into being are built and deconstructed in a narrative that examines notions of love, creation, femininity, and faith. Like Penelope, God's Wife can only make and un-make, weave and un-weave, and in the process make right herself. Patricia Felicia Barbeto definitely reflects Michael Appaloo's evocative prose and playful wandering moods. Optic Nerve by Maria Gainesa, translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, Catapult. This engaging work from Argentina provides a self-portrait of the first person narrator through an analysis of our interactions with quite different works of art. The translator achieves a narrative intensity that does not drag or become pretentious. Zulaika by Guseel Yahina, translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden, One World. The harsh and desolate land of Soviet area Siberia forms the backdrop of Yahina's first novel, an ambitious narrative capturing the strength of the human spirit. Zulaika discovers the means to survive an abusive husband and a cruel mother-in-law and a story wrought with imagery and discovery. Hayden's powerful yet sensitive translation incorporates songs and legends from Russia and tartar sayings into a seamlessly captivating epic tale. What at first glance appears geographically distant becomes intimate, relatable, and in many ways triumph. The winner of this year's national translation award in prose is The Chef by Marie Indiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump, and published by Alfred A. Knopf. And now I would like to invite Jordan to join me on the stage, should speak, in this virtual stage. Hello Jordan and congratulations. Thank you very much Amaya, how are you? I'm good, I'm very good. How are you doing? Oh fine, fine, fine. I'm delighted and thrilled and etc, but apart from that, fine. Well, we love your translation, we love your book. This is a very special novel. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came to translate it? There's a very long version of that story, but essentially I've been, I've been a fan of Marie Indiaye since the early 1990s, and it took me a long time to sort of get around to translating her, that was sort of in the early 2000s, I guess, I started translating her. After a few false starts, I tried and just hated what I did and so I just gave up and then I tried again, eventually found a publisher for something that I'd done, the wonderful Two Lines Press. They asked me to do more and but those were sort of Indiaye's slightly older books, her more recent books were being translated by Others Than Me and published by Knopf. And so when La Divine came out a couple of years ago, I found an old connection who I thought would be able to get me into, to get me connected to somebody at Knopf and they did and I begged and pleaded to let them, to let me please translate that novel and they did. And then when this one came out, I went back to them again, I said there's another Indiaye, I begged and pleaded and they were actually a little hesitant because this is a, as you say, an unusual novel. But in the end they did and so the rest is not quite history, but it's how that book got published. And the world is a better place for you. We love the book, All of Us Three Judges and what we remarked upon was the style of the book and how you navigated those tensions within the language. Because it seems, at least it seems to me that the lead character, the chef, is this sort of unknown entity and we only get a version of her through the narrator who, you know, is sometimes adoring of her and at times, you know, he hates her and he has this, you know, complicated relationship with the character. So we get this version of the character and at the same time, while there is this kind of sense of the character being withheld because she only exists behind this other narrator and we don't quite understand whether this narrator hates or loves her or what, you know, he loves her obviously, but there's also something else that's kind of like a little bit of a mystery. And so I wanted to ask, you know, how did you navigate this tension within the language which is very compellingly written in your translation, this tension that is inherent to the story, but also I think inherent to the language? Yeah, thanks, it's a really good question. I mean, to me, I have a boring answer for all questions of this sort, which is that the only thing that works for me is to keep me thinking what you're doing all the time. I do a first draft, I do a second draft, I do a third draft, I go back, I will compare it to the original, I revise backwards. Very importantly, I get my wife to read out loud while I've, the translation out loud while I follow along in French. There is this continual, no matter what translation you're doing, there's this continual balance that you have to strike between the words that you have to deal with, the words that are available to you and the words that are available to the text, and you've got to be continually rethinking those words and then also rethinking the person who's speaking them. In this case, it's easier in a way because there's one person, he's a mysterious person, but there is only one person. And so you can sort of imagine who is this person, who is this strange person who has this obsession with the chef and then his first doesn't tell us all sorts of interesting things and then slowly later they come out. And so you get to you with a really constant revisiting and diving back into the translation and the text, you can slowly, hopefully find some way to work it out so that the words of the two narrations can somehow be made congruent. But as any translator knows, that's a nice thought, 95% of the time it's not working, right? You made it work in this book. It's really good. What's your next project? Let me see. Actually coming out this fall, I have another in the iBook that time of year, and then also a book by Skolastik Mukwesonga, a Rwandan writer who I've been translating. I also have been working actually with a colleague of mine. She's doing the editing and I'm doing the translating of a collection of fairy tales written by women in France in the early 18th century. So that's a change for me. And also working on a novel by Eric Chouviard, an old friend of mine, old favorite of mine, and an older book. I'm looking actually for a new project. So and I want my new project to be somebody I haven't translated before. Maybe hopefully somebody who's never been translated. That's my dream. Although if if another in iBook comes out, I will leap on it. Make an exception for her. Wonderful. And the next thing that I want to ask you is I want to ask you if you would please read us a little passage from the book. So this is about the chef's love of cooking and her feeling inhabited by the spirit of cooking and what happens when that spirit isn't inhabiting you? When you didn't feel it or when you felt it but found no pleasure in it and looked on the dismembered animals, the dirt-crusted vegetables, everything hiding the secret of its tastes and waiting gravely, unhelpfully for you to figure out what to do with it. Then an enormous weariness and nausea might make you wish you could just run away, the chef said, and never again feel yourself bound up with that dead stinking flesh, the entrails, the fat, the tedious labours, the inevitable filth, and the pain of all those human and animal by way of human ineliquent mindless food made its way from kitchen to table, the animal shrieks, the human's exhaustion. You wanted to run away as far as you could when that monotonous misery hit you full force when the cool ecstasy of creation wasn't protecting you, said the chef with her little oblique smile. And sometimes I did and I thought I was freeing myself but of course I always came back, said the chef because I was even unhappy or freed from the trials of cooking then enduring them and I didn't often have to endure them whereas when I was far away from them I suffered all the time, no two ways about that. I could never be happy for long outside my kitchen, the chef used to say, and then added quickly and dutifully, except with my daughter, and we both knew it wasn't true or at least I did, just as I knew the chef felt obliged to invent and to trumpet a joyful motherhood, not for herself, not out of pride, but in hopes of convincing her daughter, wherever she was, she was never with her, as if such words repeated year after year might in the end impregnate the air her daughter was breathing someplace in this world and disarm her forgetful but rankerous heart, her heart that preserved no memory of the love she'd been given that kept rigorous track of every perceived slight. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much, we are the recipient of this award this year, congratulations. Thank you. And I'm looking forward to your next translation. All right, thank you.