As part of their annual conference, ATSEEL held their award ceremony just this past Friday in Austin, TX at the AT&T Conference Center on the University of Texas Campus. (Which was a pretty swanky building. Maybe ALTA will end up having their conference there someday . . .)

Anyway, here’s a picture of Kaija after she won:

And here’s an image of the citation for the award:

This year’s AATSEEL Award for Best Literary Translation into English goes to Kaija Straumanis for High Tide, her translation of Inga Ä€bele’s Latvian novel Paisums. The judges—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Vitaly Chernetsky, and Joanna Trzeciak Huss—read and reviewed 38 books published in 2013 and 2014. After careful deliberation High Tide rose to the top. Spanning nearly four decades and told in reverse chronological order, Ä€bele’s High Tide is a bracing, honest, existentialist exploration of the protagonist Ieva’s psyche and the constellation of emotional presences in her life. The novel takes us backward in time from post-Communist Latvia through the time of the Awakening and ultimately to the Communist period. What impressed the judges about Kaija Straumanis’s translation is the lyrical quality of the lines. This is a novel that reads like poetry. Logic is given a long leash in a prose that is evocative and electric. Ä€bele’s is a performative prose in which words call for one another, and Straumanis succeeds in finding the words that both issue and answer that call. But just as resonant as the language of the novel, is the depth of the emotions it portrays and elicits. In one of High Tide’s most powerful and moving passages, we are given access to the thoughts of Ieva’s grandmother, deprived of her voice by Alzheimer’s. Her deepest desire is simply to feel the warmth of a human body. In “The Attack”—the chronologically, thematically, and structurally central part of the book—a western journalist issues a verdict on Eastern and Central Europe, that when the Iron Curtain fell there was nothing behind it, no literary masterpieces hidden in drawers, no sacred resources. This novel is one long counter to this verdict. The sacred resources of Eastern Europe are lives deeply lived, felt, and shared, a set of which crisscross in these pages, and are brought to us through two women, the writer and the translator. Indeed, there are moments in this book when one feels completely connected, when it is as if “in a brief flash, you realize that you understand the author, the main character, and the life of the translator. For a second all three of these persons unite in you.”

Congrats to Kaija for winning this award. It’s especially cool that this was her thesis project at the U of R. I’m sure that for years and years she will continue to introduce English readers to more excellent books from Latvia.

To celebrate this award (which isn’t really Kaija’s first, but is the first for one of Open Letter’s books!) from now until Sunday, January 17 at midnight, we’re offering for 30% off. Just click that link and use HIGH TIDE at checkout.

¹ AATSEEL is the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.

This isn’t on the yet, but it was shared on the listserv, so I’m deciding that it’s public knowledge.

I’ll say more about the book in a minute, but first, I encourage you to click on that link above and see the competition that Kaija was up against. In terms of translators, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Marian Schwartz, Sean Cotter, Bill Johnston, Ross Ufberg, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Eugene Ostashevsky, and many more were finalists. Basically the cream of the crop when it comes to Eastern European and Slavic translators!

And the other authors! Books by Dostoevsky, Marek Hlasko, Vasily Grossman, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Tolstoy, are all on the list.

To be honest, I have no idea how this award is judged—based on the translation alone, or a combination of book and translation like the BTBAs. Either way, it’s amazing that Kaija and Inga won!

In terms of here’s our jacket copy:

Told more or less in reverse chronological order, High Tideis the story of Ieva, her dead lover, her imprisoned husband, and the way their youthful decisions dramatically impacted the rest of their lives. Taking place over three decades, High Tide functions as a sort of psychological mystery, with the full scope of Ieva’s personal situation—and the relationship between the three main characters—only becoming clear at the end of the novel.

One of Latvia’s most notable young writers, Ābele is a fresh voice in European fiction—her prose is direct, evocative, and exceptionally beautiful. The combination of strikingly lush descriptive writing with the precision with which she depicts the minds of her characters elevates this novel from a simple story of a love triangle into a fascinating, philosophical, haunting book. 

It’s also worth noting that this was Kaija’s MA thesis here at the URochester, which makes this all that more special, I think.

Everyone should send Kaija a congratulatory email, and purchase a If you buy it through out website, use the code “BookSeason” at check out and you’ll receive 40% off!

This is turning into a great week for Open Letter, our books, and our staff!