Raising awareness of women in translation by posting writeups, Q&As, charts & graphs, reading reports, letters to the editor, links to reviews + announcements + more. We cover writers, translators, editors, reviewers, bloggers, & others who identify as women and who are part of the conversation about the gender gap & other gaps in translation. Name cloud in banner made using translator names from the Publishers Weekly Translation database, 2020 and 2021. —Alta L. Price & Margaret Carson
"The campaign's been running for ten years now and we've seen a massive increase in women-authored books published in translation since Meytal Radzinski got the ball rolling in 2014. Back then, only 26% of published fiction translations into English were written by women. Through steady campaigning and appeals to editors and publishers, that shocking imbalance has been largely eradicated – last year's stats show 47% of translated fiction was originated by women."
Over at https://www.womenintranslation.org/resources Meytal has dropped the latest list of new titles from the past year through Aug. 2023—happy #WiTMonth 2023, keep reading!
A £1000 annual prize established by the University of Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature.
Submissions are now open for the The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2023:
If you’re a publisher, check out the rules and submit your eligible titles.
If you’re a general reader who read an amazing book that fits the criteria, consider reaching out to the publisher of that book and encouraging them to submit it.
Reader feedback can make a difference, especially for indie publishers who might not yet know this prize.
A £1000 annual prize established by the University of Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature.
Submissions now open for the 2022 prize!
“The Prize launched in 2017 with the aim of addressing the gender imbalance in translated literature and increasing the number of international women’s voices accessible to a British and Irish readership.
The Prize is open to any novel, novella, collection of short stories, collection of poetry, graphic novel, play text, book-length work of creative/literary non-fiction or book-length work of fiction for children or young adults originally written in any language other than English by a woman of any nationality and translated into English by a person of any gender, provided that the translation in question was published for the first time in print form in the United Kingdom and/or Ireland between 1 April, 2021 and 31 March, 2022.
Please see our website for the rules in full and the online submission form: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/womenintranslation/2021/
You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter for regular updates and announcements. We are always happy to share any women in translation news you have via social media or on our webpage. We would be very grateful if you could help to spread the word about the prize in 2022 in any way you can.”
“My husband is heading from Kyiv to Kharkiv. He’s delivering baby food to maternity hospitals, medications and humanitarian aid to the city’s territorial defence. Along the way, he tells me he sees road signs that have been knocked down or painted over. This is done by the locals to impede the movement of Russian troops. Passing Ukrainians can figure out where to go based on a Cyrillic soft sign here, the letters “o” or “e” there, in between the other ruined symbols. But the Russian occupiers, most of whom have been sent here without smartphones so that they won’t post selfies with geolocations as they did when fighting in Donbas in 2014, don’t have maps. Instead, these Russians, who were not invited to come here, blunder and get lost.” ... click here for full article in The New Statesman.
Works written decades ago, often by female Jewish immigrants, were dismissed as insignificant or unmarketable. But in the past several years, translators devoted to the literature are making it available to a wider readership.
Olga Tokarczuk’s twelfth book, the novel The Books of Jacob, first published in Poland in 2014 to great acclaim and considerable controversy, kicks off in 1752 in Rohatyn, in what is now western Uk…
Translator Jennifer Croft walks readers through her translation of the opening passage in Book Two of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, just out from Riverhead Books.
“Whenever I translate, I first immerse myself in the original as though taking a dip in a lovely cove, far from the eyes of anyone, where the water’s always warm. (I hope it does not undermine all that I have said so far to confess that in life I am not a good swimmer, and that I have never gone swimming in a cove.) By immersing myself, I can feel weightless as the body of the work suspends me—my preoccupations, much of my subjectivity, which merely acts as a filter—and I can allow the images generated by the words of the original to wash over me, feel them all around me, form them afresh in my cleared head....”
Click here to read Croft’s complete meditation on her dazzling translation!
Kudos to fellow WiT traveller Alta L. Price, longlisted for the 2022 PEN Translation Prize for her translation of New Year by the German writer Juli Zeh!
Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk joins us to present her novel "The Books of Jacob," in conversation with translator Jennifer Croft.
The Nobel Prize–winner’s richest, most sweeping and ambitious novel yet follows the comet-like rise and fall of a mysterious, messianic religious leader as he blazes his way across eighteenth-century Europe.
In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires with throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumors of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs. The story of Frank—a real historical figure around whom mystery and controversy swirl to this day—is the perfect canvas for the genius and unparalleled reach of Olga Tokarczuk. Narrated through the perspectives of his contemporaries—those who revere him, those who revile him, the friend who betrays him, the lone woman who sees him for what he is—The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.
“All art is quite useless,” according to Oscar Wilde, but even the jolt conveyed by that artful line means art does something, and so it must have some use. Or maybe it just feels useful — I don’t know; how useful is a short story compared to a spoon? The essays of Lydia Davis are helpful on this subject.
In “Essays One,” Davis’s meditations on writing include imperatives such as: “When you write, write freely, as you want to, following your own interests,” which is both wisdom to act on and advice whose practicality depends on hazy factors (are your interests, for instance, interesting?). Now comes “Essays Two,” a collection about translation, with some whimsically blunt headings, like “The Comma Splice,” that recall a how-to guide. It’s a guide, however, to new dimensions of thought. Davis makes translation seem like a sublime exercise of mind and self. “Just as you can enter another person and speak in his voice,” she writes, “you are also no longer confined to writing in your own style and with your own sensibility.”
Davis’s adventures in translation are full of such realizations, and the lessons they sustain are encouraging. Reading for fun, it turns out, can make things happen. In an account of Davis’s Spanish studies by almost exclusive means of a Spanish translation of “Tom Sawyer,” we follow her impressive progress and come to understand that the rest of us could do the same, bolstering language-acquisition through a combination of “an interesting story”; “aroused curiosity”; “freedom to work independently”; and — this next part is probably less fun — “constant reinforcement of vocabulary.”
A hopeful mood prevails in this book. In an essay on reading prose in Norwegian, a language about which she originally knows relatively little, Davis advances happily just by noticing, by looking around. “Words are repeated in certain contexts,” she writes — an easy-to-forget key to learning a language — with “some contexts the same and some different, and eventually, over time, with much repetition, we learn what the words mean.” Recognition accumulates through a patient habit of reading out of curiosity, by which Davis begins to understand Norwegian. It’s incredible, and yet, in Davis’s telling, totally credible. She makes it seem so obvious that reading a foreign language for enjoyment leads to astonishing new vistas, because she reminds us that fun is naturally propulsive.
About translating French, Davis writes, “I want to take the always slightly mysterious French sentence and transform it into something every word, and nuance, of which will be thoroughly home to me, which is what English is to me — the home language.” This gets to the wonderful paradox of Davis as a translator, who finds a comfortable mode for thrilling mystery, for language far from home. She writes about translating from challenging to simple language; her (successful) work to translate Alfred Ollivant’s “Bob, Son of Battle” “from one kind of English to another” is largely a matter of “standardization of the dialect, and the simplification of some of Ollivant’s sentence structures and vocabulary.” Again and again, she finds ease amid difficulty.
Complexity, the essays imply, doesn’t have to defeat us. Strenuous literary pursuit could even be good for you. While translating Proust, Davis writes, “Family relations were calmer, in order to provide less distraction. My health habits were improving to promote greater alertness and intelligence; and even the basement was tidier, the mountains of cardboard boxes removed, for fear of a fire that would consume the work.” She lives with this literature, feels through it, without treating it as solely an object of study. She writes, “I have almost always approached any translation I undertake without reading the text beforehand. There are several reasons for this, but a primary one is to keep my own interest stimulated and thus my prose more alive.”
I decided to try some of her tactics, to see if they work. I found a French translation of “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” and read it without really understanding French (I’ve studied French for a few weeks, but not much more than that). I kept track of words I didn’t know, and I tried to figure out what I could from a combination of context and cognates. It sort of worked! At first the sentences were closer to music telling a story I already knew. But gradually I became more at home with basic words, routine phrases, and formulations. The strange case became familiar, in a way.
Still, this experiment reveals some limits of Davis’s method, which mostly works between languages that share cognates. As an English speaker, I can tell that the French “docteur” has something to do with “doctor,” but that trick only works with some languages. This doesn’t negate the inspiring idea — demonstrated by Davis with evident pleasure taken in wakeful thinking — that a leap from one language to another is swift way to vault into new circumstances. Davis writes, “I like being transported to another place and another culture, especially early in the morning . . . there is a refreshing freedom in that.” Similarly, reading her essays is like getting outside after being indoors for too long: I’m pretty sure it’s healthy, and I’m certain that it feels healthy.
Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles
Lydia Davis
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 592 pages, $35
Adam Colman is host of The Cosmic Library podcast from Lit Hub, which is now releasing its second season, “The Worlds of Scheherazade.”
Paalen Rahon embodied the far-ranging imaginations of surrealist pursuit: a shapeshifter.
Georgina Fooks reviews Shapeshifter by Alice Paalen Rahon, translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws, New York Review Books, 2021.
“The collection that opens the text, On Bare Earth, is a formidable emblem of Surrealist poetry; published by Éditions Surréalistes in 1936, it was prefaced by Yves Tanguy, and praised by Breton as a “talisman.” It’s difficult not to read the collection in a rush, swept along by the elemental force of the title. From the very beginning, we start to uncover a sort of visual alphabet, images and themes that mould Paalen Rahon’s poetry—beasts, skies, paths, light, stone.Her unique approach is evident from the very first lines:
A woman once lovely
one day
took off her face
now her head was smooth
blind and deaf
sheltered from mirror traps
and looks of love
Alta and I had a WiT strategizing session today at our headquarters, the Court Square Diner in Long Island City, Queens—a old-style NYC diner we’re glad to see standing despite the real estate frenzy in LIC and new high-rise condo construction on practically all its sides, not to mention the pandemic and months without any business. So many moments of our WiT collaboration have been hatched here...
We were able to meet because Alta was in town to co-curate last weekend’s Festival Neue Literatur (about which hopefully more to come). She carved some time out from a busy schedule so that we could meet in-person for the first time since pre-pandemic days. Time flew by as we talked about WiT and much else over our usual breakfast platters.
Here’s to the Court Square Diner, whose breakfasts have fueled many of our Women in Translation brainstorming sessions!
yousharknotpass
theartofmadeline
ellievsbear
germansingergirl
areudirty
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis