Sinan Antoon’s Darwish Translation Gets ALTA Award

On Friday, the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) announced that it had honored two poet-translators, Sinan Antoon and Don Mee Choi:

Sinan Antoon received the 2012 National Translation Award for his translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence. According to ALTA, “The $5,000 prize is given annually to a translator whose work, by virtue of its quality and significance, has made the most valuable contribution to literary translation.”

Elizabeth Lowe, ALTA VP, said in a news release that Antoon’s work preserves a valuable treasure:

“Antoon’s translation won not only for the high quality of the translation from the Arabic, but also for being a translation of the last words by someone who is arguably one of the world’s most important and beloved contemporary writers.”

[ctd. here]