Paraguayan Sea is an epic poem in story form about a woman from Paraguay, living in a beach town in Brazil, reflecting on her experiences with two lovers, an old man and a younger one, and using those experiences as a way to delve into the physical, sensual, and spiritual elements of existence. The book is originally written in Portunhol (a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese spoken along the border of where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay touch) and Guarani, a native language of Paraguay. The English translation maintains much of the Guarani, with a generous glossary in the back, and is inventively interspersed with “Frenglish,” a combination of Québécois French and English. Erin Moure, in her translator note, wrote that she kept Guarani a part of this translation because she, “decided to trust Bueno’s own admonition that Guarani is essential to the text, for Guarani bursts out of his text at every seam, even the most infinitesimal, and its epistemologies and relations are crucial.” In so doing, Moure created a text that is accessible to an English readership, but brings us to Guarani instead of having it diminished and rendered invisible. In this translation, it asserts its own necessity and though we may lose the way it interacts with Spanish and Portuguese, in geographically relevant rhythm, the resonances that emerge from the act of creating another hybrid language offer their own linguistic charms.

by Wilson Bueno, translated from the Portunhol and Guarani to Frenglish and Guarani by Erin Moore (Brazil, Nightboat Books)

by Ursula Andkjaer Olsen, translated from the Danish by Katrine Øgaard Jensen (Denmark, Broken Dimanche Press)

by Hirato Renkichi, translated from the Japanese by Sho Sugita (Japan, Ugly Duckling Presse)

by Ana Ristović, translated from the Serbian by Steven Teref and Maja Teref (Serbia, Zephyr Press)

by Eleni Vakalo, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich (Greece, Ugly Duckling Presse)

Featuring a blend of contemporary writers and modern classics, of writers from cultures around the world, and of a variety of stylistic approaches, these shortlists have something for everyone.

On the fiction side of things, there are books from eight different countries and six languages, ranging from Taiwanese author Wu He’s Remains of Life to the postmodern machinations of Guðbergur Bergsson’s Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller to Romina Paula’s August. Two other titles of note are Compass by Mathias Énard, which is a finalist for the 2018 Albertine Prize, and Old Rendering Plant by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, which won this year’s Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize.

The poetry finalists are also quite diverse, featuring books from six different countries, including Greece (Before Lyricism by Eleni Vakalo) to Japan (Spiral Staircase by Hirato Renkichi) to Brazil (Paraguayan Sea by Wilson Bueno).

Winners from both categories will be announced Thursday, May 31^st as part of the New York Rights Fair at the Metropolitan Pavilion (125 West 18^th St.). The announcement will be preceded by a panel starting at 4:30 on “Translated Literature Today: A Decade of Growth.” They will also be announced simultaneously at .

Thanks to grant funds from the Amazon Literary Partnership, the winning authors and translators will each receive $5,000 cash prizes. Three Percent at the URochester founded the BTBAs in 2008, and over the past six years, the Amazon Literary Partnership has contributed more than $140,000 to international authors and their translators through the BTBA.

Past winners of the fiction award include: Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson; 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: Extracting the Stone of Madness by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert; 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.

This year’s fiction jury is made up of: Caitlin Baker (University Book Store, Seattle), Kasia Bartoszyńska (Monmouth College), Tara Cheesman-Olmsted (), Lori Feathers (), Mark Haber (writer, ), Adam Hetherington (author), Jeremy Keng (reader, freelance reviewer), Bradley Schmidt (translator), and P.��T. Smith (The Scofield).

The poetry jury includes: Raluca Albu (BOMB), Jarrod Annis (), Tess Lewis (writer and translator), Aditi Machado (poet and translator), and Emma Ramadan (translator, ).

* * *

For more information, visit the official site and the official and follow the award on

Also, check out Three Percent for Why This Book Should Win posts for each of the remaining sixteen finalists.

of Hirato Renkichi, translated from the Japanese by Sho Sugita (Japan, Ugly Duckling Presse)

The seventh statement in Hirato Renkichi’s “Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement” reads:

Intuition must replace knowledge; the enemy of Futurist anti-art is concept. “Time and space have already died, and we already live in the absolute.” We must quickly take risks, advance in defiance of danger, and create. There, within the chaos before our eyes, only humanistic activities remain while trying to intuitively feel the supreme rhythm (God’s instinct).”

Renkichi began writing poetry in 1912, roughly around the time Eliot wrote his Prufrock and Gertrude Stein her Tender Buttons. But we shall not compare Renkichi to them. We shall also not call him Japan’s Marinetti even though he was, avowedly, influenced by him and indeed quotes him in his “Manifesto.”

It is a mistake, I think, to turn non-Western writers into counterparts of Western ones to whom they bear, if slight, if profound, resemblance. Because even as early twentieth-century Japan is flush with jazz clubs and the writers then were reading American and European avant-gardes (as Eric Selland so usefully describes in the afterward to this gorgeous, letterpress-bound book), Renkichi’s politics and aesthetics emerge in the context of a distinctly Japanese form of cosmopolitanism in its ultramodern industrialized urban centers.

The image I have of Japanese cities from Renkichi’s poems, Selland’s afterword, and Japanese films is rather different—

An animal of irritated electricity

—from the American city (or sleepy town with many cars and exorbitant rents) in which I currently live. The image is perhaps best captured by the title of the poem, “Ginza, Color, Light, Reverberation, Stench, Curiosité, Éphémère,” from which comes the following excerpt:

On the artery of the underground

applying pressure on the mouth of the iron pipe

Cataract cataract cataract

Cataract of water cataract of gas

Cataract of a transparent amber poison

Reverberation of a great flood

Facing afar

tant tant nombreuse curiosité . . . . . .

tant tant nombreuse curiosité . . . . . .

Go, go

Above the paved road

Inside the crowd

On the elevated railway piercing through the roof

On the spiral staircase of a department store

At the circus

At the run-down bar

At the Russian coffee shop

In front of the power plant at midnight

Go, go

Inside every conceivable clamor

The Spiral Staircase’s astonishing catalog of sensations does a weird thing to my brain. It does an even weirder thing to my brain when I think the thoughts that run through them, this fierce and desperate insight into a world in flux to which—aha!—we belong. (From the translator’s introduction: “[Renkichi’s] vision of Futurism was an all-consuming Deus absconditus of the machines—ready to transform all the -isms into a unified theory he called dōitsu hyōgen (“expression of one-ness” or “amalgamated expression”).

Maybe the weird thing being done to my brain is . . . hope?

I want greenness! I want greenness!

The tentacles incessantly raising overhead in all directions—

Many things move me, but this book moves me differently. Its alien philosophies make me see outside of myself and participate in a delicious sort of extroversion that would never otherwise, by nature or nurture, be mine.

For the gift of this translation, we must thank Sho Sugita who has to contend not simply with the very dissimilar workings of Japanese and English, but also Renkichi’s extraordinary range of formal techniques, allusions, multilingualisms, and visual poetics that enact his sense of the world, his jouissance, his magnanimity.

Hirato Renkichi died in 1922, when he was only twenty-nine years old. His Collected Poems are now part of Ugly Duckling Presse’s Lost Literature series and they are essential reading.

As you may already know, the BTBA finalists will be officially unveiled tomorrow, Tuesday, May 15th at 10am Eastern over at . (And the winners will be unveiled on Thursday, May 31st following the 4:30 pm panel on “Translated Literature Today” at the  and at The Millions.)

As always, the first person to guess all ten fiction finalists on their first try by emailing me at chad.post [a] rochester.edu will will a year’s subscription to Open Letter Books. Here’s the longlist, and here are some clues:

• There are 7 different publishers represented on the shortlist;
• Authors originate from 8 different countries;
• These authors represent 6 different languages;
• Only 1 author has passed away;
• Using both the author’s names and book titles, the only letter that doesn’t make an appearance is Q;
• The average page length of the finalists is 306.7;
• Of the finalists, 3 of the books were published in their original language before 2010;
• Including authors and translators, there are 9 women and 11 men on the shortlist.

There you go! Speculate away! Lobby for your favorites on Twitter (#BTBA2018)! Get ready to argue tomorrow when the ten titles (and six poetry collections) are unveiled!

* * *

Speaking of poetry, I’m willing to give out a subscription if you can name all six of these books on your first try as well.

The clues aren’t as inventive here (I’m technically on a conference call as I write this, so . . . ), but there are also far fewer books on the poetry longlist.

• The finalists hail from 6 different countries (a first in BTBA history?);
• The finalists are all translated from different languages (wow);
• Only one press has two books on this list of finalists.

Good luck!

Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry, translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman (China, White Pine Press)

“Iron Moon” is an anthology of Chinese migrant  worker poetry that transports the reader from the comfort of the page to the complex machinations of 21st century industry.

by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, translated from the Danish by Katrine Øgaard Jensen (Denmark, Broken Dimanche Press/Action Books)

What’s a translated book got to do to survive?

If you live in the world I—curious judge, irritated poet, hungry editor—live in, you might think, as I do, that a translated book survives by its ability to say: I got you and that’s why: you get me.

And you might also think, as I do: why must we get each other so? What is this desire, from literature, for solace?

And then you might get to a place of wondering, as I am: what’s a translated book got to do to live? I mean, really live. Exceed all of the reasons why someone should translate it and publish it and why it is translatable and why it could not possibly be translated. Exceed even the reasons why “we” “must” “read” “it,” all the prerequisites of our meagre but essential industry of publishing.

Because all the truly excellent books on my shelves are excellent precisely because they have nothing to do with me. They owe me nothing. But I owe them everything. And it’s my obligation to read them, learn from them, treat them as the miraculous, overpowering creatures they are.

This is the realm of excellence in which Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s translation of Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Third-Millennium Heart exists.

I would love for everyone to read this book—I am advocating for its circulation. At the same time, the book doesn’t need us to read it in order for it to be alive. We need to be alive to it.

Third-Millennium Heart is a book-length poem, a happy 200-ish pages long. It is spoken by a speaker whom we cannot fix to a particular biography or body and whose mechanisms of desire are fueled, perversely, by hegemonies of structure. But something about the voracity of this desire unsettles the structures it witnesses and absorbs: patriarchy, capitalism, culture, nature, sex—all get processed through the speaker and rewritten in a new language.

At times I think the speaker a factory for turning money (“back”) into leaves. Other times I think it’s too simple to say the speaker simply turns every hierarchy on its head—a book that did that might indeed be too simple. It’s more like there’s a mutual interpenetration of the subject and her environment. Some very complex mutations occur, so that we get, for example, the horrifically compromised “Matriarchate,” with its echoes of “matriarchy” and “market”; or the extraordinary “babel cunt” and “ivory brain” with which the speaker thinks.

“Matriarchate” is a good example of the suggestiveness of the source text, the suggestibility of the translator (to be moved by the text in the way that it moves), and also her wit. My lack of Danish doesn’t prevent me from consulting the great dictionaries of the internet and one of them informs me that the Danish for “market” is “marked” and for “matriarchy” is “matriarkat”; the word Olsen uses in her poem is “Matriarkatet” (a declension or neologism, perhaps?). In English, “Matriarchate” is an apt discovery, for it denotes matriarchy (of which it is a rarer usage) and connotes the market inside matriarchy or of matriarchy.

The Matriarchate III

You can fuck Mother Market, it won’t help anything.

Every hole seals itself.

There are ever so many things to say about this book and its two mothers, but I’ll end, simply, with what Olsen Jensen have to say in and through the palpating Third-Millennium Heart:

I take my name from my surroundings: a place so namedrunk it matches the namedrunk in me.

. . .

I am the cradle of culture: lean, lean

out of my towers.

I am exposing the structure.

. . .

The male and the female, I rub these two against each other

until everything happens, I think with babel cunt, with ivory brain

until I think babel brain, with ivory cock, and nothing inside

me will keep you from going there, where society is not, and color

your longings with RED radiance.

. . .

No one will stream through my paranoia-carcass.

. . .

Everything must stream through my paranoia-carcass.

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge and Greenlight Bookstore bookseller Jarrod Annis.��

Dark, ethereal, and sensuous, Marosa di Giorgio’s prose poems echo the haunted, half-forgotten landscapes of youth. Part meditation, part hallucinatory vision, the poems included in I Remember Nightfall are imbued with a distant strangeness that pulls the reader closer to them, beckoning through their own mystery. This is a book of dim fantasias, where the forgotten and remembered converge, where nature is alive with spirits that play with time to induce a phantasmagoric botany of memory for both the poet and reader.

by Ryszard Krynicki, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh (Poland, New Directions)

To write so that a hungry man
might think it’s bread?

bq., First feed the hungry man,
Then write so that his hunger
won’t go in vain.

          “How to Write?,” Ryszard Krynicki

Auden’s line that “poetry makes nothing happen” is not the programmatic cudgel it is often taken to be. Despite his loss of faith in poetry as an agent of concrete political change, Auden never doubted its survival or its ability to effect internal, intangible change. Ryszard Krynicki, a poet of extreme and elegant concision and occasional translator of Auden’s poetry, is a master of nuanced irony and skilled in undercutting definitive pronouncements with skepticism. In his terse poem, “At Least,” his final reservation places poetry in an ambivalently subservient position to history.

A misprint, a lapsus linguae
may change the course of history
—or at least of poetry.

And perhaps through poetry, in turn, the course of history?

The poems collected in Magnetic Point and impressively translated by Clare Cavanagh—some together with Stanislaw Barańczak—are especially tonic given the erosion of language and discourse in our tub-thumping age. The poem “Truth?” cajoles and goads the reader into examining his or her own assumptions and the self-evidence with which claims of veracity are put forward and instrumentalized.

What is the truth?
Where are its headquarters?
Where is its board of directors?
Where is its legal team?
Where are its bodyguards?
Where is its marketing?
Who are its overseers?
Who handles follow-up?
Who are its media sponsors?
How does it sell?
Has it gone public?

What are its shares going for?

Heavily censored and even banned from publication for a time, Krynicki certainly witnessed the manipulation of ‘truth’ on multiple levels. He was a prominent figure, with Barańczak and Adam Zagajewski, of the “New Wave” of Polish poetry, a group of poets who wrote against the state’s subversion of language. Unlike them, however, he remained in Poland. Although he has referred to himself “unfit for exile,” his sardonic poem “This Country” acknowledges the fact that fitness has nothing to do with exile.

In this country? Yes, I stayed in this country.
Exile comes in many shapes

and places.

Born in a Nazi work camp in Austria in 1943 to parents who were Polish peasants deported as slave laborers from Western Ukraine, Krynicki, along with his mother, was later forcibly resettled from their home in what had become the Soviet Union to former German territories awarded to Poland after the war. He compresses the geo-political maelstrom of his personal history into a three-line poem titled Folk Etymology.

I was born in Austria during the war
so my village schoolmates from Poland called me Kangaroo.
But usually for them I was Russky, Kraut, Jew.

For his classmates, indifferent to finer points of geography, Austria might as well be Australia. Their sense of superiority is captured concisely and exquisitely in the italics of from Poland since they themselves were no doubt also relocated, not from the suspect areas like the Ukraine, the Soviet Union, or the former German Reich, but from “real” Poland—justification enough to turn on the “foreigner.”

Although written under specific historical conditions, Krynicki’s poetry transcends its particular situation, raising the political to the metaphysical. You’re All Free details no less than the human condition.

You’re all free—says the guard
and the iron gate shuts

this time from the other side.

Language, connection, and communication, fragile and tentative as they are, are rare defenses against internal and external restrictions.

Selected from six poetry collections published between 1969 and 2010, Magnetic Point also includes touching love poems, poems of mysticism and spirituality, and haiku that is sparked by, as Clare Cavanagh states in her illuminating introduction, “his relentless, ethically charged attention.” Because of the richness, elusive irony, and compactness of Krynicki’s poems, it is tempting to quote them in full one after the other. I will end only by urging you to pick up a copy of Magnetic Point right away—it will help you whether or not you are in an hour of need. After all, help, like exile, comes in many shapes and places.

Poor moth, I can’t help you,
I can only turn out the light.

          “I Can’t Help You,” Ryszard Krynicki