PEN Literary Awards longlists

       The PEN Literary Awards are doing things a bit differently this year, as they have admirably decided now also to announce the longlists for the prizes in the major categories. (They don't reveal what titles these were selected from, sigh, but still, it's better than announcing just the shortlists/winners.)
       As expected, not too many titles are under review at the complete review -- sorry, not a one from the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing category -- but there's one longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, Even Now by Hugo Claus -- and, of course, the category of greatest interest is the 'PEN Translation Prize ($3,000): For a book-length translation of prose into English published in 2013'.
       It's not directly comparable to the Best Translated Book Award (the PEN prize considers both non-fiction and re-translations, which the BTBA doesn't) ... but still interesting to compare.
       Their ten finalists are:

• The African Shore by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, translated by Jeffrey Gray
  
  
• An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman, translated by Elizabeth and Robert Chandler
  
  
• Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov
  
  
• The Dinner by Herman Koch, translated by Sam Garrett
  
  
• The Emperor's Tomb by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann
  
  
• The Infatuations by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
  
  
• Kafka: The Years of Insight by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch
  
  
• Shantytown by César Aira, translated by Chris Andrews
  
  
• Transit by Anna Seghers, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo
  
  
• Twists and Turns in the Heart's Antarctic by Hélène Cixous, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic

       Okay, quite a few weren't BTBA eligible, and there is some overlap (well, one title ...), but I gotta say, the BTBA longlist looks ... a bit stronger. (Worth keeping in mind: the judges probably weren't comfortable trying to push their own work, so Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein) and Marcos Giralt Torrente (translated by Katherine Silver) might have lost out for not-quite-objective reasons.)
       The real stunner here for me is not that a Sam Garrett-translation is deemed worthy -- but that it's this one and not the obviously superior Tirza.