#wit2016

[thefeministpress]

AUGUST IS…

WOMEN IN TRANSLATION MONTH

August 30

Title: Chasing the King of Hearts  

Author: Hanna Krall

Hanna Krall was born in 1935 in Poland and survived the Second World War hiding in a cupboard. She began her writing career as a prize-winning journalist. Since the early 80s she has worked as a novelist. She has received numerous Polish and international awards. Translated into seventeen languages, her work has gained widespread recognition.

Translator: Philip Boehm

Philip Boehm is an American playwright, theatre director and literary translator. He has translated more than twenty literary works from German and Polish, and has won awards from the American Translators Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, the Austrian Ministry of Culture, and the Texas Institute of Letters.

Synopsis: In this canonical work of Polish reportage, Hanna Krall crafts a terse and unexpected human lesson out of a Holocaust novel and occupation-era love story. Based on a true story, the raw interplay of history and fictionalization spans the Warsaw Ghetto, the war-torn countryside, and the nightmare of Auschwitz, and won the English PEN Award and the Found in Translation Award.

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[thefeministpress]

AUGUST IS…

WOMEN IN TRANSLATION MONTH

August 24

Title: The Defiant Muse: Vietnamese Feminist Poems  

Editors: Nguyên Thi Minh Hà, Nguyên Thi Thanh Bình, and Lady Borton

Nguyên Thi Minh Hà has degrees in Russian and in foreign languages and culture. Since 1978, she has been an editor at the Women's Publishing House (Hanoi), where she is responsible for foreign literature.

Lady Borton has received two honorary degrees for her work with all sides during and after the Vietnam War and is currently Adjunct Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Ohio. She is author of four books about Vietnam and has translated Vietnamese poetry, fiction, and memoirs.

Nguyen Thi Thanh Bình has a degree in Vietnamese and foreign literature. Since 1978, she has been an editor at the Women's Publishing House (Hanoi), where she is responsible for Vietnamese literature. 

Synopsis: As diverse as Vietnam itself, this poetry anthology covers topics ranging from early Buddhist spirituals to the expulsion of the Chinese by the Trung sisters to the cultivation of silk worms to the thoughts of rebellious youth in Vietnam today.

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[thefeministpress]

AUGUST IS…

WOMEN IN TRANSLATION MONTH

August 23

Title: My Mother Gets Married  

Author: Moa Martinson

Moa Martinson (1890 - 1964) was a Swedish journalist and novelist.

Translator: Margaret S. Lacy

Synopsis: Originally published in Sweden in 1936, this novel is told through the eyes of seven-year-old Mia, as she observes her mother’s relationship with her handsome but hard-drinking and unfaithful husband. Booklist calls the novel “a poignant, yet unsettling documentary story that transcends time and place in its depiction of the struggles of the working poor, deserving of a place alongside such notables as Sinclair Lewis, Ole Rolvaag, and John Steinbeck."

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[thefeministpress]

AUGUST IS…

WOMEN IN TRANSLATION MONTH

Title: La Respuesta

Author: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695), a seventeenth-century Mexican nun, was a brilliant poet, playwright, and essayist whose persistently defended of the intellectual rights of women.

Translators: Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell

Electa Arenal, professor emeritus of Hispanic and Women's Studies (City University of New York), is a translator and specialist in Hispanic monastic women's culture. From 1997 to 2001 she directed the Center for the Study of Women and Society and coordinated the Women's Studies Certificate Program at the Graduate Center/CUNY.

Amanda Powell, poet and translator, teaches Latin American and Spanish literature and literary translation at the University of Oregon. Powell has published essays on research 16th and 17th century writing

Synopsis: Known as the first feminist of the Americas, the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz enjoyed an international reputation as one of the great lyric poets and dramatists of her time. While earlier translators have ignored Sor Juana's keen awareness of gender, this volume brings out her own emphasis and diction, and reveals the remarkable scholarship, subversiveness, and even humor she drew on in defense of her cause.

This expanded, bilingual edition combines new research and perspectives on an inspired writer and thinker. It includes the fully annotated primary text, The Answer/La Respuesta (1691), which is Sor Juana's impassioned response to years of attempts by church officials to silence her, the letter that ultimately provoked the writing of The Answer, an expanded selection of poems; an updated bibliography, and a new preface.

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[thefeministpress]

AUGUST IS…

WOMEN IN TRANSLATION MONTH

Title: Mulberry and Peach

Author: Hualing Nieh

Hualing Nieh is a Chinese novelist, fiction writer, and poet.

Translators: Jane Parish Yang and Linda Lappin

Synopsis: This extraordinary novel, winner of a 1990 American Book Award, recounts the story of two women—Mulberry and Peach—who are really one. Mulberry is a young woman who has fled the turmoil of postwar China to settle in the United States. Unable to forget the terrors she has witnessed or resolve the conflicts between her new life and her old, she develops a second personality: fearless, tough-talking, sexually uninhibited, Peach. While Mulberry clings to her cultural and ethical roots, Peach renounces her past to embrace the American way of life with a vengeance.

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[thefeministpress]

AUGUST IS…

WOMEN IN TRANSLATION MONTH

August 4

Title: The Power of Weakness

Author: Ding Ling and Lu Hsun

Ding Ling was the pseudonym of Jiang Bingzhi (October 12, 1904 - March 4, 1986), a contemporary Chinese author from Linli, Hunan province. She is most noted for her Communist literature.

Synopsis This pairing of Lu Hsun and Ding Ling reveals the silent revolution for women in the early part of the 20th century, when tradition and woman's servitude give way under the impetus of war and social revolution.

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[thefeministpress]

AUGUST IS…

WOMEN IN TRANSLATION MONTH

August 3

Title: Textile

Author: Orly Castel-Bloom

Orly Castel-Bloom is considered a leading voice in Hebrew literature today. Her postmodern classic Dolly City has been included in UNESCO's Collection of Representative Works, and was nominated in 2007 as one of the ten most important books since the creation of the state of Israel. She has received the Tel Aviv Foundation Award, the Alterman Prize for Innovation, the Prime Minister's Prize three times (1994, 2001, 2011), the Newman Prize, the French WIZO Prize for Human Parts, and the Leah Goldberg Prize. Her books have been translated into eleven languages.

Synopsis The Gruber family are all involved in textiles: Irad, a genius scientist, develops flak jackets for soldiers; Dael, his son, serves as a sniper; Lirit, the rebellious eldest daughter, takes over her mother's pajama factory, and Amanda, the domineering mother, undergoes invasive cosmetic surgery. Written with wit and humanity, Textile is a startling novel about contemporary Israeli life.

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[thefeministpress]

AUGUST IS...

WOMEN IN TRANSLATION MONTH

8.1.16

Title: Thérèse and Isabelle 

Author: Violette Leduc

Violette Leduc (1907-1972) has been referred to as "France's greatest unknown writer."

Translator: Sophie Lewis

Sophie Lewis is a London-born writer, editor and translator from French and Portuguese. Recent translations include The Earth Turned Upside Down by Jules Verne (Hesperus) and The Man Who Walked Through Walls by Marcel Aymé (Pushkin). She is a Senior Editor at publisher And Other Stories.

Synopsis: Censored for half a century for its vivid depiction of female sexuality, this novella follows two young women in the obsessive and at times frightening throes of a first love affair. Thérèse and Isabelle must navigate their schoolgirl relationship in secret, sneaking away from repressive boundaries to explore the limits of friendship and sexual pleasure.

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