Join us at Medicine for Nightmares (San Francisco) for a reading in celebration of the Best Literary Translations 2024 anthology. Contributing translators Armen Davoudian, Eirill Alvilde Falck, and Dmitri Manin will read their work and discuss the art of translation.
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.
Armen Davoudian is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House) and the translator, from Persian, of Hopscotch by Fatemeh Shams (Ugly Duckling Presse). He grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.
Eirill Alvilde Falck is a Norwegian-born writer and translator who lives in the United States. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review and Poetry Magazine. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she was later a Zell Fellow. She was a 2020-2022 Iowa Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa, where she completed a master’s degree in Literary Translation. While at the University of Iowa, she received the Stanley Award for International Research, for her work on translations of Edvard Munch’s journals. She is the recipient of the John Wagner Prize and the Hopwood Award, and has received support from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, the Clarion Foundation, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Eirill is the co-founder of MQR: Mixtape, an imprint of Michigan Quarterly Review.
Dmitri Manin is a physicist, programmer, and poetry translator. His translations from English and French into Russian have appeared in several book collections. Among his latest work are a complete translation of Ted Hughes’s Crow and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems into Russian. Dmitri’s Russian-to-English translations have been published in journals (Cardinal Points, Delos, The Café Review, Metamorphoses, et al), in Maria Stepanova’s The Voice Over (CUP, 2021) and in the anthology Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems (Smokestack Books, 2023). In 2017, Dmitri won the Compass Award competition. His translation of N. Zabolotsky’s landmark collection Columns came out in 2023 from Arc Publications.