Two Ukrainian translators nominated for prestigious American award

The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) just revealed the 2024 National Poetry and Prose Translation Award finalists. Among them are Vitaly Chernetsky and Iryna Shuvalova, who translated Ostap Slyvynsky's poetry collection "Winter King."

This is reported on the association's website.

As reported, the "Winter King" collection translators have made it onto the list in the "Poetry" category.

"These poems, written "on the edge of a precipice or on a flooding deck of a ship," come to us from a poet living in Ukraine. Although they speak on behalf of all who live with the challenge of surviving under perilous conditions, they are more than simply poems of witness since they are equally committed to marveling at the persistence of love and light despite those conditions. They arrive like bottles thrown into a faraway sea that inexplicably find their way to our shores. The message inside is hopeful, radiant, and lacerating in its brutal honesty," the jury described Slyvynsky's collection translated by Chernetsky and Shuvalova.

^{Photo: literarytranslators.wordpress.com}

The poetry collection "The Winter King" was published in 2018.

Vitaly Chernetsky is a scholar of Slavic studies, literary criticism, and translation of Ukrainian literature into English. He is also a Slavic languages and literature professor at the University of Kansas.

Iryna Shuvalova is a poet and researcher from Kyiv. In 2023, she began conducting research at the University of Oslo in Norway. She is the author of five poetry collections that have received awards.

For reference:

The National Prize for Translation of Poetry and Prose, established in 1998, is given out every year to recognize translators who have significantly impacted the growth of English literature by perfectly capturing the artistic essence of a book of exceptional quality.

The American Association of Literary Translators awards it. Since 2015, the prize has been awarded separately for prose and poetry.

This award is the only one for a literary translation into English that also thoroughly evaluates the original text. The prize is usually awarded for translations of previously untranslated modern works or first translations of older works, but important retranslations are also recognized. The winning translators and their books are presented at the annual conference of the Literary Translators Association of America.

The awards recipients, who will be announced at the annual conference for ALTA47: Voices in Translation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on October 26, will each receive a $4,000 monetary prize.

It should be noted that the book "Voices of Children" by the Charitable Foundation, containing quotes from children about the war, is currently available at bookstores in America.