2026 National Translation Award Longlist!

Anna Gual’s poems express life in all its unexpectedness, whether she is exploring relationships between human beings and the rest of our universe, between and within bodies, or language itself. Scientific inquiry informs her work as she observes both the visible and the invisible. She is a leading figure in the Catalan literary world, a prolific prize-winning author of eight collections of poetry. Unnameable is Gual’s debut book in English translation and is bilingual in Catalan and English on facing pages.

Gual’s first book, Implosions (2008), now in its fourth edition, was published when she was twenty-two. Her blog, No caic, em tiro, won the 2012 Prize for the Best Blog Written in Catalan. She has received several prestigious awards for her poetry, including the Miquel de Palol Prize, the Bernat Vidal i Tomàs Prize, the Senyoriu Ausiàs March Prize, and the Pare Colom Prize for Mediterranean Poetry. Her collections have been translated into French, Italian, and Spanish. She has appeared at international festivals such as the 2024 Sant Jordi USA Festival, the 2024 European Poetry Festival in the UK, and the Days of Poetry and Wine Festival in Slovenia, and has given readings in Russia, Germany, Switzerland, Croatia, and beyond.

AKaiser holds a doctorate in Translation & Intercultural Studies, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and is the Pushcart Prize-nominated author of glint (2020) and 2022 NEA Fellowship-awarded translator of Catalan, French, and Spanish. Her current translations from Catalan include the work of poet Toni R. Juncosa, as well as the writings of transatlantic urbanista Cebrià Montoliu (1873-1923) and architect Antoni Gaudí. Her translations, poems, and photos appear or are forthcoming in Allium, Amsterdam Quarterly, Circumference, Four Way Review, Harvard Review, Hyperion, Pen + Brush: In Print, Poetry International, POETRY and The Rumpus. Her poem, "Astronaut, or Blues Singer" has been transformed into song by Mel.lif.lu.ous. She has enjoyed support from FaberLlull Olot (Catalunya); Millay Arts (US); NES Artist Residency (Iceland); Write On, Door County (US); and La Cité Internationale des Arts (France).

The publication of this book has been supported by a grant from the the Institut Ramon Llull.

More information about Anna Gual can be found here.

More information about AKaiser can be found here.

Unnameable

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National Translation Award — Longlist! Judges' citation:

"This is Catalan poet Ana Gual’s eighth collection but the first to be translated into English. It is powered by what translator AKaiser calls the “beguiling quotidian”; a world that is at one familiar but strange. Poems are often rooted in the local landscape but simultaneously represent an exploration of language: “I didn’t want a map. / I wanted a machete to clear a path”. Gual offers insights into an intimate, intense world of signs that are at once playful and serious. Constantly surprising and capturing the world anew in all its strangeness, these are at once profoundly visual poems, but also delicious soundscapes of meaning."

"Gual’s poems do not resolve the unnameable—they inhabit it. The poems in the collection are spare, imagistic at times, and powerfully rendered in AKaiser’s English translations." — Susan Smith Nash, World Literature Today

Essay by AKaiser on translating Anna Gual's Unnameable in Poetry Society of America

The poem "Profanity" was featured on Poetry Daily

Anna Gual’s poetry through the English words of her translator and fellow poet, AKaiser, give the reader an excellent measure of the flourishing and diverse group of young Catalan poets who have added to the contemporary European literary scene voices of rebellion, insight, and a bright palette of images rescued from a hidden tradition. Until quite recently a politically oppressed culture, modern Catalan women poets like Gual open up an overwhelming and thrilling new current of intimacy, lyricism, and harsh struggle in one of the most rich and powerful modern European literatures. AKaiser’s considered and fertile rendering of Gual’s intrepid probings capture the tectonic energy of the original, by, just as Gual herself states in “Brots”/“Sprouts,” contemplating, stretching definitions, to “Lengthen sounds/so the waves reach you.”

—Francesc Parcerisas

The poems in Unnameable are stress tests, experiments in tension––taut, condensed arrangements of language by which “problems,” not solutions, not revelations, “are movement, are struggle, are engine.” These poems pierce through assumption––pulling down the walls of the known world, pulling up the floors. “I want/to stick/my fingers into every door hinge,” Gual writes, acknowledging the risk inherent in her dual upbraiding and worship of the world. Competing desires, impulses, and ideas inject her writing with lyric sincerity and real intensity as she questions everything, even the capabilities of language itself. Psychoanalytical, smart, and tender, Unnameable is an urgent new translation for readers ready for a “Pilgrimage to the center of saying.”

—Jane Huffman, author of Public Abstract

Unnameable

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