It is precisely the detached coolness of [Seong-Nan] Ha’s voice that is disturbing in conjunction with the grotesque facts she outlines. In an ideal world, these are stories that would be in [the] news, but [Janet] Hong’s translation treats them without a hint of sensationalism. She lays them out for us to offer our own verdicts . . . It makes [Ha's] place as a crucial voice in the feminist fiction scene in South Korea evident. Her stories, along with ones of Han Kang (“The Vegetarian”) and Cho Naam-joo (“Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982”) play out in highly patriarchal landscapes, where fear and shame become very much a part of women’s subconscious.
Darshita Jain reviewing Janet Hong’s translation of Ha Seong-Nan’s Bluebeard’s First Wife in Newcity, Aug. 20, 2020.
“It’s worth noting that many of us translators are members of a workforce—and rather vulnerable ones at that—and as much as we’d like to burn everything to the ground and build a brave new world, our decisions are often informed by the need to pay our bills.”
Q&A with Julia Sanches, a literary translator who works from Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, and French into English
From The Magic Word blog @ Books Are Magic Bookstore:
What is the role of the translator in decolonizing translation? In your regional/linguistic focus(es), are there certain stereotypes or tropes you have to avoid?
I’d like to push back against this question because I think decolonizing literary translation, its publication and reception has to be a collective effort. It’s worth noting that many of us translators are members of a workforce—and rather vulnerable ones at that—and as much as we’d like to burn everything to the ground and build a brave new world, our decisions are often informed by the need to pay our bills. And our labor is tied to and dependent on the gatekeeping of others. If an executive editor at X publishing house decides to make it their policy not to consider books that haven’t been awarded prizes or sold X number of books, they are perpetuating a certain power structure. If they read a certain book from Korea, say, and decide it is not Han-Kang enough to make their list, they are participating in a form of reductiveness. If they think a diverse literature begins and ends with books that are written in a single language—that “diversity” begins and ends within the borders of the United States—then they are perpetuating a colonial mode.
Organized under the aegis of the PEN America Translation Committee, this event will bring together five translators joined by their authors.
This Thursday, Aug. 27:
A Live, Bilingual #WiT Month Reading organized by PEN Translation Committee members Anna Isabella Dinwoodie, Nancy Naomi Carlson, and Sandra Smith
This event will bring together five translators joined by their authors, working in such varied languages as Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Sinhalese, and Turkish. The reading will be followed by a brief Q&A discussion. We hope you’ll join us for this one-of-a-kind bilingual reading!
The event will be held on Zoom and will take place on August 27 at 1pm ET. Register in advance of the event. The conversation will be moderated by Nancy Naomi Carlson.
The translator/author pairs are as follows:
Agnes Marton (translator) and Zita Izso (Hungarian)
Olivia Sears (translator) and Mariangela Gualtieri (Italian)
Rachael Daum (translator) and Natalia Rubanova (Russian)
Chamini Kulathunga (translator) and Thilini N. Liyanaarachchi (Sinhalese)
Ralph Hubbell (translator) and Nazli Karabiyikoğlu (Turkish)
RVSP and see the full event description here.
You can also watch the previous two events on the Jill! Facebook page or YouTube channel (note: the second video will be posted on YouTube shortly).
Reading Elena Ferrante in English? You’re Also Reading Ann Goldstein
"Millions of readers in thrall to Elena Ferrante, the secretive and wildly popular Italian novelist, must accept certain conditions.
They won’t be meeting her, virtually or in-person, at any sort of book signing or literary festival. Her stories will be rooted in Italy, and often focus on women trying to tame the chaos of their lives through writing.
And if they are reading Ferrante’s books in English, they are absorbing, whether they realize it or not, the nimble translation work of Ann Goldstein." --Joumana Khatib, New York Times, August 21, 2020
Q&A with Sarli E. Mercado about the 4W-International Women Collective Translation Project at UW-Madison + a poem in translation by Luisa Futoransky
At the WiT Tumblr we were delighted to receive news of The 4W-International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (“4W-WIT”), an initiative in which “readers, translators, and interpreters translate literary texts – particularly poetry – by writers from the Americas and Spain.” Its defining philosophy is that “the practice of collective translation is linked to our ability to make meaning together and foster collective wellbeing.”
We asked the co-leader of the project, Sarli E. Mercado from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UW-Madison, to fill us in a bit more about the origins of the project and about how the workshop runs:
What is 4W-WIT and how did it begin?
In 2018 Lori DiPrete Brown and I began to invite women writers and translators interested in the project to collaborate with us on creating a translation workshop in which texts, mainly by Latin American writers, would be translated collectively. 4W-WIT includes women colleagues and students from various disciplines interested in translation.
In 2019 4W-WIT received a Borghesi Mellon grant from the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities to continue organizing public events and workshops. (Our 2019-2020 Annual Report includes more information about the workshop and short videos of our sessions). Our project is growing slowly. We’ve begun to invite younger poets, writers, scholars, and translators to attend our online events and workshops. We also collaborate with the Museum of Environmental Studies at the Universidad de Guadalajara, the creator of the Premio Ciudad y Naturaleza José Emilio Pacheco, and with Meninas Cartonera Editorial and Ultramarina Cartonera in Spain.
What happens in the workshops?
4W-WIT's methodology for collective translation requires multiple perspectives and iterations and reviews by the author. It has a circular aspect since we begin the meeting by listening to the author read their work. A discussion of the content and context follows. After that, we translate the work collectively in several sessions. There is usually a final meeting with the author to discuss the final version of the translation.
Poetry International recently published one of our translations, “Juana de Arco, el portal / Joan of Arc, the Gateway,” by the Argentine poet Luisa Futoransky, a poem we chose because it relates to our experiences in confinement due to Covid-19. Thanks to our collaborator Phillipa Page in the UK, it’s been added to the archive she created of Luisa's work at Poetry International.
What plans do you have for the upcoming academic year?
We’re still preparing our fall program, but we’ll continue to work on the same projects as last year, and invite poets and translators to visit our workshops.
Click here to read 4W-WIT’s collaborative translation of Luisa Futoransky’s Juana de Arco, el portal / Joan of Arc, the Gateway on the Poetry International website.
"As [poet] Kim Hyesoon often points out, the language of Korean women’s poetry has been prescribed by men, so I avoid translating poets who perpetuate conventionalized “female” language or patriarchal language."
Click here to read Q&A with poet/translator Don Mee Choi on The Magic Word Blog
