About the Book
The first U.S. anthology celebrating the breadth of literary translators’ work will be published on April 9, 2024. Best Literary Translations is a new annual featuring the year’s best poetry, short fiction, and essay, drawn from U.S.-affiliated literary journals and magazines.
Best Literary Translations 2024, the anthology’s inaugural volume, features both contemporary and historical poetry and prose originally written in nineteen languages – including some not commonly seen in U.S. translations, such as Burmese, Kurdish, Tigrinya, and Wayuu – brought into English by thirty-eight of the most talented translators working today. These poems, short stories, essays, and hybrid works were drawn from more than 500 nominated works published in U.S. literary journals during 2022, spanning more than eighty countries and nearly sixty languages.
The four series coeditors, Noh Anothai, Wendy Call, Öykü Tekten, and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, selected the finalists; the 2024 guest editor chose the thirty-three works appearing in the anthology: noted poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield.
She writes in her introduction to the anthology: “Each work in this book is a small act of both preservation and cross-pollination—each writer’s vision, sensibility, and concerns are, as the word ‘translation’ holds at its root, carried across. In those moments of carrying, a conjoining occurs. Both receiver and text live afterward changed; some new hybrid of experience, language, and understanding comes into being.”
Each literary work is accompanied by a short note from the translator/s, sharing their translation process or other details of how the translation came into being. As contributing translator, Izidora Angel writes in the note accompanying her short story translation, “Before…being included in anthologies such as this one, it was the journals and their editors…who gave the stories a chance. Thank you. It takes a village, truly.” The 2025 edition will be guest-edited by poet, novelist, essayist, and translator Cristina Rivera Garza.
About our Guests
Wendy Call is the author of the award-winning nonfiction book No Word for Welcome and co-editor of two anthologies, Telling True Stories and the new annual Best Literary Translations. She is also the translator of three books of poetry by Mexican authors. She has been a Fulbright Faculty Scholar in Bogotá, Colombia, Translator in Residence at the University of Iowa, and a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Translation Fellow. She lives in Seattle, on Duwamish land, and in Oaxaca, Mexico, on Mixtec and Zapotec land.
A writer and scholar, Cuban-born Gustavo Pérez Firmat is the David Feinson Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Columbia University. In 1997, Newsweek included him among the “100 Americans to watch for the 21st century,” and Hispanic Business Magazine selected him as one of the “100 most influential Hispanics” in the United States. In 2004 was named one of New York’s thirty “Outstanding Latinos” by El Diario La Prensa. Pérez Firmat has been featured in the documentary CubAmerican and in the 2013 PBS series Latino Americans.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the author of many books, among them the memoir Next Year in Cuba and the award-winning Life on the Hyphen, as well as several volumes of poetry. His writing has been published in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Daedalus, The Southern Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Baltimore Review, and other journals.