For her translation of Zuzanna Ginczanka’s Firebird (NYRB Poets), Alissa Valles has won the 2024 Book Prize for Best Literary Translation into English from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages (AATSEEL). The AATSEEL prize committee writes in their commendation for the book:
Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917–1944) was born in Kyiv, grew up in Rivne, and lived and died—killed by Nazi forces at the age of 27—in Poland. Her poetic sensibility was shaped by her simultaneous exposure to and ability to traverse Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Polish literatures, languages, and cultural contexts. (She was also a practicing translator, rendering Ukrainian and Russian avant-garde poetry into Polish.) She has emerged in recent years into Anglophone scholarship and into translation and is also being rediscovered by Polish and Ukrainian scholars and poetry-lovers as a crucial modernist Eastern European figure. Alissa Valles’s translations from Ginczanka’s Polish are bold and restrained in equal measure, conveying the poet’s sizzling verses while reflecting the formal variety of her work. The excellent translations are further enhanced by a smart, informative introduction that should satisfy the scholarly reader as well as the poetry fan: through insightful contrasts with the Romantic poetic tradition, Valles outlines the ways Ginczanka’s voice is still alive in contemporary Poland.
To see the rest of the Book Prize winners, click here.