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NTA Winner 2004
National Translation Award

The 2004 National Translation Award winner is Aron Aji for his translation of Bilge Karasu’s Turkish novel The Garden of Departed Cats.

Aron Aji, a native of Turkey, has translated works by Bilge Karasu, Murathan Mungan, Elif Shafak, and Latife Tekin, In addition to The Garden of Departed Cats, Aji has translated Karasu’s Death in Troy (City Lights, 2002). Aji is also the recipient of a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for his current translation project, a third novel by Karasu, The Evening of a Very Long Day.

“Masterfully translated by Aron Aji, the book is bound to draw comparisons with the work of…Borges…Calvino, and…Cortazar.” — Vincent Czyz, WBUR Online Arts

“The translation by Aron Aji is commendably graceful….it has stayed with me and enriched my thinking about familiar subjects.” — Lawrence E. Butler, Lambda Book Report

“These are disquieting fables that are breathtakingly enthralling….the translation is superb, the lines sing, emphatic and graceful.” — Joseph Dewey, The Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Turkey’s great philosophical novelist shrewdly imagines a human chess game.” — Philadelphia Inquirer

“[Karasu] rips apart our expectations and then fills the space he’s created with the fabulous, the bizarre, the unexpected.” — Vincent Czyz, West Branch

“Fascinating … [The Garden of Departed Cats] is an illuminating transitional work between the work of Turkey’s romantic realist Yasher Kemal and contemporary postmodernist Orhan Pamuk. Very much the best book of Karasu’s to have appeared in English translation (a splendidly lyrical one, incidentally). More please.” –- Kirkus Reviews