The Best Literary Translations 2024

Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten much honored collections of poetry, including The Asking: New and Selected Poems (2023), two now-classic essay collections, and four volumes presenting and co-translating world poets from the deep past, including The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Komachi and Shikibu; Mirabi: Ecstatic Poems; Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women; and The Heart of Haiku. Her own work has in turn been translated into seventeen languages. A former chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, she is an elected member of The American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Noh Anothai’s translations range from classical Siamese poets to contemporary Thai authors, including several recipients of the Southeast Asian Writers (SEAWrite) Award. He has taught Creative Writing in both the American Midwest and Thailand’s Far North and lectured at the Siam Society Under Royal Patronage and Chulalongkorn University’s Center for Translation Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Track for International Writers, at Washington University in St. Louis in 2023. Wendy Call is co-editor of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide, author of No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy, and translator of three books of poems. She has been a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia and Translator in Residence at the University of Iowa, as well as a fellow of Cornell University’s Institute of Comparative Modernities and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wendy teaches creative nonfiction in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program and makes her home in Seattle, on Duwamish land, and in Oaxaca, on Zapotec and Mixtec land. Öykü Tekten is a poet, translator, editor, and archivist living between Granada and New York. She is also a founding member of Pinsapo, NY-based collective and press with a particular focus on work in and about translation, as well as a contributing editor and archivist with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. She is the translator of Selected Poems by Betül Dünder (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2023) and the co-translator of Separated from the Sun by İlhan Sami Çomak (Smokestack Books, 2022). Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is the publisher of OlongoAfrica.com. A Nigerian writer and linguist, he has authored two poetry collections, Edwardsville by Heart (2018) and Ìgbà Èwe (2021), and a multimedia dictionary of names. He is a Fulbright Scholar (2009) and a Chevening Research Fellow at the British Library in London (2019/2020). His work in language advocacy earned him the Premio Ostana Special Prize in 2016. His work has appeared in The Moth, Absinthe World Literature in Translation, International Literary Quarterly, Sentinel Poetry, Isele Magazine, Brittle Paper, Aké Review, Linguapax Review, The Guardian (UK), PEN Transmissions, etc. He can be found at www.kolatubosun.com

Co-Editors’ Introduction
Guest Editor’s Introduction: In Words and Beyond Them by Jane Hirschfield
"Near the Shrine of Saint Naum" by Najwan Darwish translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid
"From Guerrilla Blooms" by Daniela Catrileo translated from the Spanish by Edith Adams
"Hymn to Ra" by an unknown author translated from the Old Egyptian by Samson Allal
"We Will Survive" by Rolla Barraq translated from the Arabic by Muntather Alsawad and Jeffrey Clapp
"Family Portrait of the Black Earth" by Yordanka Beleva translated from the Bulgarian by Izidora Angel
"00527" by Julia Rendón Abrahamson translated from the Spanish by Madeleine Arenivar
"Graceless" by Samwai Lam translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce
"[I have a collection of powerful objects]" by Jesús Amalio Lugo translated from the Spanish by David M. Brunson
"Death, Peppermint Flavored" by Ashur Etwebi translated from the Arabic by James Byrne and Ashur Etwebi
"Our Village" by Tesfamariam Woldamarian translated from the Tigrinya by Charles Cantalupo and Menghis Samuel
"The Sea Krait" by Enrique Villasis translated from the Filipino by Bernard Capinpin
From “Ognosia” by Olga Tokarczuk translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft
"A Red Blight" by Juan Cárdenas translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis
"Deterioration" by Fatemeh Shams translated from the Persian by Armen Davoudian
"Bone" by Behçet Necatigil translated from the Turkish by Neil P. Doherty
Rune Poems from Bergen, Norway, 13th and 14th Century by an unknown author translated from the runic alphabet by Eirill Falck
"The Funeral" by Geet Chaturvedi translated from the Hindi by Anita Gopalan
"Settling: Towards an Arabic translation of the English word 'Home'" by Hisham Bustani translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie
"The Lion" by Farhad Pirbal Translated from the Kurdish by Jiyar Homer and Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse
"Joyful Mythology" by Zuzanna Ginczanka translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak Huss
"Such Love" by Yulia Musakovska translated from the Ukrainian by Olena Jennings and Yulia Musakovska
"The Snail’s Spiral" by Disney Cardoso (in collaboration with Christian Rincón) translated from the Spanish by Jeanine Legato
"Water_Miniatures: Unboxing" by Gala Pushkarenko translated from the Russian by Dmitri Manin
"A Body" by Catalina Infante Beovic translated from the Spanish by Michelle Mirabella
"From "Unstill Life with Cat" by Anna Felder translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore
"Bottle to the Sea (Epilogue to a Story)" by Julio Cortázar translated from the Spanish by Harry Morales
"First We’ll Speak Many Words About God" by Almog Behar translated from the Hebrew by Shoshana Olidort
"In the Meantime / Mientras llega" by Luis Alberto de Cuenca translated from the Spanish by Gustavo Pérez Firmat
"Bird-women" by Vito Apüshana translated from the Spanish and Wayuu by Maurice Rodriguez
"Grazing Land" by Leonidas translated from the Greek by Sherod Santos
Two Mapuche-Huilliche Poems by Jaime Huenún Villa translated from the Spanish by Cynthia Steele
"Neighbor" by Yoo Heekyung translated from the Korean by Stine Su Yon An
"[Untitled]" by Sa’eb Tabrizi translated from the Persian by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould
"The mistress of the house" by ko ko thett translated from the Burmese by the author
"The Reeling City" by Najwa Bin Shatwan translated from the Arabic by Mona Zaki
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Notable Translations Published in 2022