The Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts

Special Guest Judge, Corine Tachtiris:

Hendri Yulius Wijaya’s poem “Trauma 4DX,” translated from Bahasa Indonesian by Edward Gunawan, viscerally brings together personal trauma with the dizzying pervasion of global capital in the form of the entertainment industry. The use in the translation of italics for English loan words in the Bahasa Indonesian version—catch phrases, entertainment jargon, words for food and building spaces—points to the intrusion of globalized culture beyond the space of the silver screen, like the intrusive effects of trauma on the bodymind. The poem’s speaker is subjected to a full surround-sound experience. Gunawan skillfully, too, recreates an onomatopoeia in the poem that relates the scene to the experience of queerness. Overall, the poem turns the lights up too bright, the sound up too high, leaving the speaker and reader in a scene as “scintillat[ing]” as it is sickening.

A scholar, practitioner, and teacher of translation, Corine Tachtiris is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Michigan. She translates primarily the work of contemporary women authors from the Francophone Caribbean, Africa, and Canada as well as the Czech Republic. Her translation of Frieda Ekotto’s Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella was published by Bucknell University Press in 2019, and her translations of short fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in various literary journals. Her research focuses on the intersection between critical race studies and translation studies; her monograph Translation and Race was released by Routledge in 2024. She has taught translation theory and practice at several institutions, including translation workshops and a graduate seminar on race, gender, and sexuality in translation. She is prose translation editor at The Massachusetts Review and the vice president of the American Literary Translators Association.