#WiT Goes to Senate House, London: Notes from the “Translating Women” Conference 31 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2019
Being a WiT activist can take you to some extraordinary places. In my case, to Senate House, University of London, in the heart of Bloomsbury and right across from the British Museum, for the first-ever conference devoted to women, translation and literary publishing: “Translating Women: Breaking Borders and Building Bridges in the English-Language Book Industry,” organized by the #WiT activists and scholars Helen Vasallo (U Exeter) and Olga Castro (U Warwick) and hosted by The Institute for Modern Languages Research. As the keynote speaker I had the immense pleasure of kicking the conference off for the over 70 attendees in a talk I called “Snap! The Whys and Hows of Women in Translation”— “Snap!” being philosopher Sara Ahmed’s term in Living a Feminist Life for that critical moment, that pressure point, that can be the start of a pushback. I recounted how Alison Anderson’s posting on Words Without Borders in May, 2013, “Where Are the Women in Translation?” jolted many translators out of our complacent sense that all was forward-thinking and good in the Republic of Translated Literature. Anderson was the first to point out in print the significant gender imbalance in translation. Following the lead of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she used the 3% Database (set up in 2008 by Chad Post of Open Letter Books, and now housed at Publishers Weekly) to establish that only 26% of the books of fiction or poetry in translation published in the US were by women. She also pointed to the near-invisibility of women authors in translation on literary prize longlists and shortlists and to their near-absence as prizewinners, singling out the International Foreign Fiction Prize as what I’d call an especially noxious bastion of male dominance—only 2 women writers won in its 17 or so years of existence. That was Anderson’s Snap! moment. Mine was to follow.
With Anderson’s article in mind, I used the same freely available dataset to see how the biggest publishers of translations fared when gender of the author was taken into consideration. In other words, doing the full VIDA Count, but breaking out these variables: gender by original language, by country of origin, and by US publishers of translations. (Blogger and tweeter extraordinaire Meytal Radzinski—aka @bibliobio @ReadWIT—had also been crunching the same database, and came out with similar results.)
With respect to US publishers, in the most extreme case, I saw that in 2014 Dalkey Archive Press and its legendary editor John O’Brien had published not one single woman author out of its 30 titles in translation that year. Mr. O’Brien: What kind of enlightened and innovative editorial vision is that? A further offense: my tax dollars have gone into funding the NEA, a major grant-provider for your sexist press. Snap!
Did the negative publicity around this outrageous disparity nudge Dalkey into the 21st century? I’ve noticed that their list now never fails to include some women in translation (but nothing close to parity)—perhaps a concession to the threat of government funding—a lifeblood for non-profit presses—being denied.
To underscore, I speak from the perspective of a translator. It’s a rough terrain out there. Translation gigs are extremely competitive and one feels some pressure as a translator to “make nice” to publishers in the insular world of English-language literary publishing in order to stay in the game.
Nevertheless—persistence!
The provocations I ended my talk with are:
— When you write articles or speak on translation, cite women. Click here for a bibliography in progress of book-length works or essays on translation authored by women. It’s a list that incorporates many recommendations made by my translator colleagues.
—Question and challenge canons. I’d like to drop the idea of a “canon’ once and for all. It’s an example of adopting the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house (in Audre Lorde’s terms). Delegitimize the notion of a canon.
—Don’t become a marketing tool for publishers.
—Watch out for “women in translation light,” for example, holding a reading under that banner but not talking about gender and other imbalances in translation. It will soon turn into an empty slogan.
I’m deeply grateful to Helen and Olga for inviting me to do the keynote—an enormous privilege—and I hope it helped set the stage for the wide spectrum of presentations and dialogues that followed over the next two days, a report on which is TK….
[End of part I of “Notes from the “Translating Women” conference.]
