I would like to thank the judges for selecting Alejandra Pizarnik’s Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 for this year’s Best Translated Book Award for poetry. (It was 2 AM in Switzerland when I heard the news. I was up late doing my Portuguese homework.) Heartfelt gratitude to my brilliant editors at New Directions—Tynan Kogane, Jeffrey Yang, and Barbara Epler—for everything they did to bring this book into the world. Thank you, as well, to Ana Becciu and Mónica de la Torre, for their commitment to Pizarnik’s poetry, and to Mieke Chew for accepting the award in my absence. And, finally, thank you, Chad and everyone at Open Letter, for doing the remarkable work you do on behalf of literature and/in translation.

There are always those books that obsess you and won’t let you go. Alejandra Pizarnik’s devastating work is like that. I was 20 years old when I entered her tortured world (the lilacs, the dolls, the cadavers and gardens and crows). Sometimes, what begins as an obsession will flourish into an impulse to translate. That impulse becomes a full creative act, akin to writing a novel or gathering the pieces for a poetry collection. It was never my conscious ambition to become a literary translator, but like Pizarnik, I am the daughter of immigrants and have been translating and interpreting since childhood, so nothing could feel more natural, more grounding. Her writing teemed with an urgency that resonated deeply and that practically demanded my advocacy. It felt like a relentless kinship. What’s more, the desire to find an English for these vibrant, harrowing poems came from an almost tactile artistic need. The result is that I grew up while translating Pizarnik. The experience was exhilarating, often brutal. Our minds got very close; our languages matured together; and her solitude inhabited and changed me. As I translated and revised, I was often the same age as Alejandra when she was writing collections like Diana’s Tree and A Musical Hell. Soon I will be older than she was when she died, and that feels like uncharted territory. It’s at once thrilling and terrifying to receive a prize for something that has been a part of my life like this.

The book’s title comes from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch called De keisnijding (1494; Prado Museum, Madrid), which, in English, is known interchangeably as The Cure for Folly or Cutting the Stone or The Extraction of the Stone of Madness. This work depicts trepanation, a medieval surgical technique believed to relieve various diseases, like migraine, and to remove madness, which was believed to manifest as a tumor in the skull. I opted for the gerund extracting in the title in order to convey the actual process depicted in Bosch’s piece, which in a way parallels Pizarnik’s process of creation.

César Aira once said that Alejandra Pizarnik “was not only a great poet, she was the greatest, and the last.” To hear from readers and writers who have been changed and wrecked by this book has been an extraordinary privilege. I am grateful to the BTBA for this opportunity to share Pizarnik’s work.

—Yvette Siegert
May 2017

Museo del Prado.

With four books on the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist, Margaret Jull Costa had pretty good odds that one of her projects would win the prize. This is the first time Jull Costa, Robin Patterson, and Open Letter Books have received the award.

According to BTBA judge Jeremy Garber (Powell’s Books), “Though it took longer than 50 years to finally appear in English, Lúcio Cardoso’s Chronicle of the Murdered House was well worth the wait. Epic in scope and stunning in its execution, the late Brazilian author’s 1959 masterpiece is a resounding accomplishment. Thanks to the translational prowess of Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, Cardoso’s saga of familial scheming and salacious scandal deservingly comes to an even wider audience.”

Fellow judge Mark Haber (Brazos Bookstore) adds “Chronicle has hints of Dostoyevsky, Garcia Marquez and William Faulkner, yet the DNA is wholly Cardoso’s, who was not only a friend, but a mentor to Clarice Lispector. This novel is not only beautifully written and strangely profound, but a joy to read. The dramas of a prestigious family in a provincial Brazilian jungle, complete with gossip, backstabbing, cross-dressing and suicide attempts all take place beneath a single roof. There’s a fully-formed universe in this run-down mansion rotting away in the woods. Chronicle of the Murdered House is a novel about family, trust, madness, betrayal, human nature, all heavy themes really, yet handled with aplomb. . . . its translation feels long overdue.”

Extracting the Stone of Madness is the fourth collection of Alejandra Pizarnik’s to be translated by Yvette Siegert, but the first to win the Best Translated Book Award. It is published by New Directions—who has won the BTBA on three past occasions, twice for fiction, once for poetry—and collects all of Pizarnik’s middle and late works, including some posthumous pieces.

Judge Emma Ramadan (Riffraff Bookstore) said, “The judges were extremely impressed by Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translation of Abdellatif Laâbi’s In Praise of Defeat, but ultimately chose Yvette Siegert’s translation of Alejandra Pizarnik’s Extracting the Stone of Madness as this year’s poetry winner. It’s a book screaming and barking with jagged solitude and beautiful pain, each poem’s broken melody attempting to fill a void we can all see lurking. Yvette Siegert perfectly inhabits Pizarnik’s tortuous, vivid world and allows us to do the same.”

For the sixth year in a row, the winning books will receive $10,000 each (split equally between the authors and translators) thanks to funding from the Amazon Literary Partnership. Over this period, the Amazon Literary Partnership has contributed more than $120,000 to international authors and their translators through the BTBA.

“By sharing new voices with English-language readers, the Best Translated Book Awards highlight literary excellence from around the globe while also shrinking the world a bit, fostering empathy through storytelling,” said Neal Thompson, Amazon’s Director of Author and Publishing Relations. “The Amazon Literary Partnership is proud to continue its support of the diverse voices of BTBA’s international authors and their translators.”

Nine judges served on this year’s fiction jury: Trevor Berrett (The Mookse and the Gripes), Monica Carter (Salonica World Lit), Rachel Cordasco (Speculative Fiction in Translation), Jennifer Croft (translator, co-founder of the Buenos Aires Review), Lori Feathers (Interabang Books), Jeremy Garber (Powell’s Books), Mark Haber (writer, Brazos Bookstore), George Henson (World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today, University of Oklahoma), and Steph Opitz (Marie Claire).

The poetry jury was made up of: Jarrod Annis (Greenlight Bookstore), Katrine Øgaard Jensen (EuropeNow), Tess Lewis (writer and translator), Becka McKay (writer and translator), and Emma Ramadan (translator, Riffraff Bookstore).

Past winners of the fiction award include: Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman; The Last Lover by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen; Seiobo There Below and Satantango, both by László Krasznahorkai, and translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet and George Szirtes respectively; Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston; and The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal.

In terms of the poetry award, past winners include: Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas, translated from the Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan; Diorama by Rocío Cerón, translated from the Spanish by Anna Rosenwong; The Guest in the Wood by Elisa Biagini, translated from the Italian by Diana Thow, Sarah Stickney, and Eugene Ostashevsky; Wheel with a Single Spoke by Nichita Stănescu, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter; and Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura, translated from the Japanese by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander.

The entry below is by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, who is one of the founding editors of a journal of political research, literature, and art at Columbia University. She previously served as editor in chief of the Columbia Journal and blog editor at Asymptote and Words Without Borders.

by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert (Argentina, New Directions)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 92%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 37%

Had Poe lived to read Alejandra Pizarnik, she would have given him nightmares. Revered by writers such as Octavio Paz, Roberto Bolaño, and César Aira—the latter calling her “the greatest, and the last” poet—Pizarnik is one of the most important contributors to twentieth-century Argentine poetry. Known for her lyricism and concession to misery, Pizarnik wrote of terror, suffering, estrangement, and death, but also of love and tenderness. She wrote seven books of poetry and one book of prose before ending her life at age 36 in 1972.

Extracting the Stone of Madness, published by New Directions and unbearably, stunningly translated by Yvette Siegert, comprises all of Pizarnik’s middle to late work, as well as a selection of posthumously published verse. A reader unfamiliar with Pizarnik’s life and work might flip through the first couple of pages and find her poems gentle, romantic even. Lines like “May your body always be / a beloved space for revelations” and “Only you can turn my memory / into a fascinated traveler, / a relentless fire” could fool anyone. It doesn’t take many minutes of reading, however, before the romance turns into a bitter longing (“You speak like the night. / You announce yourself like thirst”) followed by a violent absence (“The wind had eaten away / parts of my face and my hands.”)

Upon finishing this initial section, Works and Nights (1965), the first-time Pizarnik reader might feel as if they are somewhat prepared for section two, Extracting the Stone of Madness (1968). They are not.

The title poem references a circa 1494 painting by Hieronymus Bosch titled The Cure of Folly (or The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, or Cutting the Stone) depicting a surgical intervention in which a hole is drilled deep into the skull of a “fool”—a medieval practice once believed to relieve mental disorders.

The bad light is near and nothing is real. When I think of all that I’ve read of the spirit — when I closed my eyes, I saw luminous bodies turning in the mist, on the site of tenuous dwellings. Don’t be afraid, no one will come after you. All the grave robbers have gone. Silence, always silence; the gold coins of sleep.

I speak the way I speak inside. Not with the voice intent on sounding human, but with the other one, the one that insists I’m still a creature of the forest.

—from the poem “Extracting the Stone of Madness”

In this phenomenally eerie section, Pizarnik’s poems turn into feverish dreamscapes occupied by solitary women dressed in blue or red, fetuses of scorpions, mirrors, lilacs, and sorcery. Similar motifs extend into the next section of the book, A Musical Hell (1971), which references another painting by Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights. This title poem refers to the “hell” panel of Bosch’s famous triptych, depicting musicians playing on instruments that are simultaneously used for torture.

Like in Bosch’s hell, the horror in Extracting the Stone of Madness is inescapable. Every Pizarnik poem is a step down a phantom staircase, an insomniac descent leading to the final text of the book: a poem that was found written in chalk on a blackboard in the poet’s workroom after her suicide.

So why should anyone read this disturbing piece of literature, let alone award it with one of the finest translation prizes in the U.S.? Because Pizarnik’s poetry, and Siegert’s rendition of it, is inescapable: not due to its terror, but due to its mastery.

The two winning books (for poetry and fiction) will be announced at

Following that, we will be gathering at 5pm at on 92 West Houston St. Anyone interested in celebrating the BTBA and all the authors and translators who published books last year should definitely come out for this.

OK, here are the six poetry collections still in the running for the $10,000 in cash prizes (half to the author, half to the translator):

by Rocío Cerón, translated from the Spanish by Anna Rosenwong (Mexico, Phoeneme)

by Suzanne Doppelt, translated from the French by Cole Swensen (France, Litmus Press)

by Vénus Khoury-Ghata, translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker (Lebanon, Curbstone)

by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert (Argentina, Ugly Duckling)

by Lev Rubinstein, translated from the Russian by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky (Russia, Ugly Duckling)

by Farhad Showghi, translated from the German by Rosmarie Waldrop (Germany, Burning Deck)

Check back at 10:30 to find out which titles make the fiction shortlist!