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Translating Women http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen INTERNATIONAL | INTERSECTIONAL | ACTIVIST | FEMINIST Tue, 28 Feb 2023 11:20:38 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.9 http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/files/2022/09/cropped-Its-time-for-change-2-32x32.jpg Translating Women http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen 32 32 It’s been a while… http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2023/02/28/its-been-a-while/ http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2023/02/28/its-been-a-while/#respond Tue, 28 Feb 2023 11:00:42 +0000 https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/?p=2275 It’s been a good few months now since I last posted anything here, and I’m sorry for the long silence. Since I started this blog…

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It’s been a good few months now since I last posted anything here, and I’m sorry for the long silence. Since I started this blog in 2018, I think the longest gap between posts up until now has been a couple of weeks, even during the madness of the Covid lockdown almost three years ago. So I wanted to try to return to some kind of rhythm, starting by explaining why things have gone quiet (and ending with a round-up of recent reads!)

This time last year, I felt that I had reached a stage where I was just churning out reviews, in a way that was great in the sense of talking about lots of great books, but not as mindful as I have always tried to make this project. It was also taking its toll on me – every week I was reading one book while writing about another I’d read a few weeks previously, and I was starting to lose both the enjoyment that has always fuelled what I do here and the sense that I was making any real kind of difference. I took some time to think about what I wanted Translating Women to be/ do going forward, and wrote about my misgivings that in not slowing down to reflect and recalibrate on an ongoing basis I was becoming part of a problem instead of part of a solution.

I thought that after that I’d have so much to write about, to share thoughts on, and to review. And I do… but I haven’t been able to do the regular writing. The main reason for this is what I think is usually described as “burnout” – three years on from the moment when a global pandemic changed our lives, it doesn’t feel that things have slowed down or become more manageable. The demands and pressures alter, but don’t reduce. I don’t want to start listing those pressures here – I feel very aware that I am privileged just to be able to write this, that I am not living in a warzone, that my home has not been razed by an earthquake, that I still have employment in a time of recession. And so my struggles to write regular blog posts while all that is going on in the world seems like a relatively insignificant problem, even if it’s one I didn’t want to ignore.

I have a half-written post on my favourite books of 2022 that I still hope to finish and share with you (yes, I know 2022 is rapidly fading to a distant memory, but there were still some great books!) – one way or another, I’ll write about those books here. And maybe “slow writing” is the way forward, because it gets away from the focus on new releases – don’t get me wrong, I love new releases (and there are some 2023 releases I’m very excited about, which ideally would have been another blog post!), but that doesn’t mean that if I haven’t already read or written about something that was published last year, it should fall off the end of my list. I also want to talk to you about my translation of Darina Al Joundi’s Marseillaise My Way, the sequel to The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing, about my new (well, no longer that new, but I refer you to the previous paragraph!) book on activism in translation and publishing, and about English PEN’s brilliant digital publishing initiative PEN Presents, which I am immensely honoured to be involved with.

So I hope to get back to some kind of rhythm here – perhaps not as regular as in previous years, but without the long silence of the past months. In the meantime, here are some of the things I’ve been reading and doing:

I went to see the theatrical adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (based on Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s translation for Fitzcarraldo Editions) and it was excellent. I always loved the narrator, Mrs Duszejko, and she is brilliantly brought to life onstage – the production captured all of the injustice and intrigue, but also all of the humour. (I have to thank Katie Brown for organising our trip – without her I likely wouldn’t even have realised that Drive Your Plow was coming to Bristol!)

Ave Barrera’s The Forgery (translated by Ellen Jones and Robin Myers for Charco Press and published last year) was a magnificent start to my year’s reading – I was completely swept away by the story of a down-on-his-luck painter brought into a shady underworld of obscene privilege and finding himself trapped both physically and psychologically. The translation was so lexically rich and peppered with understated irony – I would love to know more about how Jones and Myers navigated the co-translation.

I finally read (in French) Nina Bouraoui’s Tous les hommes désirent naturellement savoir: I’ve been reading Bouraoui’s work for 20 years now, and this one felt like a powerful and near-flawless culmination of everything I read of hers in the early 2000s. It’s available in translation by Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Penguin, 2021) and well worth a read whether or not you already know Bouraoui’s work. I also did an online event in November with Nina and Aneesa to launch Nina’s latest novel Satisfaction in Aneesa’s translation for Héloïse Press – I’m hoping a recording will be available on YouTube soon, and will share it here if so!

A book I abandoned: Dorthe Nors’s Wild Swims, translated by Misha Hoekstra (Pushkin Press, 2020). I just couldn’t get into any of these short stories, and about half-way through decided to stop. I’ve tried reading Nors before (Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, same translator and publisher, from 2017 I think) and struggled with it then too. All the reviews I’ve seen of her work are very positive though, so I guess I’m just missing something!

Thank you as always for reading – I hope to be back with more translation talk soon.

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The 17th woman laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/10/21/the-17th-woman-laureate-of-the-nobel-prize-in-literature/ http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/10/21/the-17th-woman-laureate-of-the-nobel-prize-in-literature/#respond Fri, 21 Oct 2022 11:00:53 +0000 https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/?p=2263 On 6th October 2022, iconic French writer Annie Ernaux was announced as the 119th winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the 17th woman laureate…

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On 6th October 2022, iconic French writer Annie Ernaux was announced as the 119th winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the 17th woman laureate in the history of the prize.

I wrote about Ernaux’s award for my department’s blog, so if you’re interested in reading the piece then please click on this link! I discuss Ernaux’s oeuvre, her fame in France, and the championing of her work by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK.  And, as long-term readers will guess after my #BeMoreOlga rant in 2019, no such post would be complete some Nobel scepticism… so you’ll find a little of that too.

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REVIEW: Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/10/07/review-violent-phenomena-21-essays-on-translation/ http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/10/07/review-violent-phenomena-21-essays-on-translation/#respond Fri, 07 Oct 2022 11:00:50 +0000 https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/?p=2251 Edited by Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang (Tilted Axis Press, 2022) I have long been looking forward to the publication of Violent Phenomena, a collection…

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Edited by Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang (Tilted Axis Press, 2022)

I have long been looking forward to the publication of Violent Phenomena, a collection of essays exploring the possibilities of a “decolonised” translation. It was probably my most anticipated book of the year, from one of my favourite publishing houses, and still it managed to exceed all my expectations. This exploration of the power dynamics and colonial legacies of literary translation is a call to action, a call to accountability, a shattering indictment of white European privilege, and an absolute must-read for anyone interested in new ways of considering translation. Compiled, as editors Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang note, in a “spirit of defiance and resistance”, the individual essays echo and resonate with one another, coming together to form a radical shakeup of what we take as given and/or unchangeable. Individually and collectively, the authors tease out common threads of prejudice and isolation within the context of translation into English: despite commonly held and idealistic assumptions about translation being a site of welcoming and embracing otherness, in Violent Phenomena it is exposed as being a space where many can feel unwelcomed, unrepresented, and eternally on the margins.

I want to start by acknowledging that I might make mistakes in the way I write about this volume, because the painful experiences exposed within it are those from which my whiteness spares me; any of the (frequently inaccurate) assumptions about my cultural identity and heritage do not usually close doors to me because they focus on my whiteness, my European-ness, my assumed “belonging”. In this collection of essays, we see the everyday reality for people whose “legitimacy” is constantly called into question because of the colour of their skin, assumptions about their relationship to the English language, or connection to a marginalised culture. As I write this, I question whether I am the “right” person to write about Violent Phenomena, and yet if I don’t write about it for fear of getting it “wrong”, then I only become complicit in the ongoing silencing of marginalised voices. So here goes, and if I am clumsy in my responses to being confronted with a reality that I have not experienced, that is my deficiency and no reflection on the collection of essays in Violent Phenomena.

The first thing that strikes me as I think back over my reading of the book is the discomfort I felt at many of the essays. I see this as a good thing: I don’t think this is meant to be a comfortable or reassuring piece of work. Indeed, I’d say that it is as uncomfortable as it is necessary. At the end of their introduction, Bhanot and Tiang describe the impossibility of decolonising as being anything other than a “violent disruption”, because it is a fight against an oppressor who in theory often no longer exists, but in practice is present in everyday attitudes, encounters and exclusions. And so it is the case for literature in translation: anyone can translate anything from anywhere, but in reality doors are consistently closed to non-mainstream voices, to people (authors, translators, protagonists) who are, as Madhu Kaza notes in her essay, “not a good fit”.

The collection opens with an extended version of a piece published by Gitanjali Patel and Nariman Youssef in Asymptote last year. Patel and Youssef explore the ways in which translators of colour are marginalised in the Anglophone literary translation world, and how this is reflected in “the tendency to view ‘otherness’ as a challenge or a threat” that can erase diversity by hiding behind “a fluency imperative” that assumes only one version of acceptable English. The barriers – both explicit and insidious – to translators and translated texts from non-mainstream languages and cultures are picked up and amplified in other essays of the collection: a particularly enraging episode is Sawad Hussain’s depiction of the patronising “tickbox” approach to diversity that saw one publisher keen to pick up one of the marginalised authors she champions, only to assign Hussain – an experienced and well respected translator – two older white male mentors to co-translate so that they could also tick the box on their new commitment to a mentoring programme. And when you find out why Hussain translates from Arabic rather than her first learned language (French), you’ll find it shameful.

In fact, for someone who believes passionately in social justice, it’s disturbing to see how little of it there is in the experience of the contributors to this volume. From the erasure of the tragic history of the transatlantic slave trade in the “dystranslation” of M. NourbSe Philp’s Zong! (discussed in a raw conversation with Barbara Ofosu-Somuah) to the refusal to see Armenian literature in English translation through any other lens that that of the Armenian Genocide (Shushan Avagyan), the authors repeatedly confront us with situations in which the western receiving context resolutely refuses to see history on anything other than its own (colonial) terms. This is borne out in Anton Hur’s indictment of the “mythical English reader” – a lazy trope used to fulfil two functions: firstly, and more globally, to insist that translated literature be made more familiar and accessible to the target audience, and secondly, more personally, to gaslight Hur – who is, as he points out, an “English reader” himself – by questioning his own use of the English language because “English reader” is a thinly veiled code for “white reader”.

This persistent erasure of difference leads many contributors to reference Édouard Glissant’s notion of the “right to opacity” – to not attempt to be easily understood, and instead of bending to Anglophone expectations that are steeped in the history of imperial dominance, to invite Anglophone readers to venture out of that restrictive mentality and move towards the text and author they are reading. In this vein, Madhu Kaza’s essay on her complex linguistic and cultural heritage reveals how falling back on such tropes (in her case, acknowledging repeated use of the phrase “not a good fit” in a variety of contexts) hides unexamined bias, allowing cultural gatekeepers to keep perpetuating a world that is familiar to them rather than attempting to understand why something – or someone – might not “fit” this world.

Throughout the collection, authors describe acts of resistance to these exclusions that include deliberately using language in a way that preserves it from the desire to package and label (as outlined by Khairani Barokka), that contests the understanding of translation as “a transparent window into another cultural context” (Hamid Roslan), or that refuses to “explain” a term by finding an (often inadequate) equivalent (Elisa Taber). From these individual experiences stems a collective challenge to the kind of “fluency” that is used as a facile yet immutable yardstick by which language is judged and difference systematically erased, a challenge that opens up spaces of encounter and understanding much more profoundly than by bringing everything neatly and recognisably to the (mythical) English reader.

There is one significant lesson for those of us not in such marginal positions: we need to unlearn things that we did not realise we have been conditioned to accept. This is a position I find myself in over and over again the more I research the processes by which translated literature makes it through into English, and it’s an uncomfortable one. Violent Phenomena is not only a landmark collection of essays, with all the intellectual and artistic weight that such a statement carries, but also a manifesto, a disruption, a challenge to improve and expand the values, institutions and structures by which we measure our world(s). And in this context I want to give the last word to Kaza, and align myself with her invitation to recognise that “in reading across distances what we gain is not simply more company, but an opening for solidarity”.

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Review: ALL THE LOVERS IN THE NIGHT by Mieko Kawakami http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/07/20/review-all-the-lovers-in-the-night-by-mieko-kawakami/ http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/07/20/review-all-the-lovers-in-the-night-by-mieko-kawakami/#respond Wed, 20 Jul 2022 17:00:57 +0000 https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/?p=2187 Translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador Books, 2022) It’s always a happy event for me when there’s a new Mieko Kawakami…

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Translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador Books, 2022)

It’s always a happy event for me when there’s a new Mieko Kawakami novel to read. This is the third of her books that Picador have released in the past three years: Breasts and Eggs was published in Bett and Boyd’s translation in 2020, followed by Heaven in 2021. Like Kawakami’s earlier novella Ms Ice Sandwich (translated by Louise Heal Kawaii and published by Pushkin Press), the main characters in Breasts and Eggs and Heaven are on the margins of society in varying ways: Breasts and Eggs focused on the commodification of women’s bodies as either sexualised or reproductive, and followed the experience of three women who did not fit into conventional social stereotypes. Heaven was a painful exposure of high school bullying and the horrific damage (both physical and emotional) it can cause to those who are excluded and humiliated. In all of Kawakami’s work, human relationships are what drives the narrative forward, and All the Lovers in the Night is no exception. Yet this is not to say that there is anything formulaic or repetitive about Kawakami’s work: on the contrary, each book is entirely original and shines a light on a very different kind of alienation.

In All the Lovers in the Night the protagonist is Fuyuko, a lonely woman in her thirties. When we meet her, she is introverted to the point of isolation: she works as a proof reader in a big company, but is alone amidst a crowd of colleagues. When she shifts to freelance work, the new rhythm both suits her and compounds her loneliness. In the course of the narrative we discover why she is so closed in on herself – or, at least, we are given insight into traumatic experiences from her past that allows us to draw certain conclusions. It is a reluctant friendship with Hijiri, a vibrant colleague in the publishing industry, that becomes a lifeline for Fuyuko. At first she is unsure why someone so lively would show an interest in her, but the unravelling of Hijiri’s own insecurities as the two women grow closer is one of the most interesting parts of Fuyuko’s story.

As in Breasts and Eggs, there are some acute observations about being a woman: in particular, the emphasis here is on “success” for a woman being defined in terms of procreation, and the move towards a conventional social role. In a world of self-help books that decree the vital things that must be done by the age of 35 (all of which fall into traditional tropes of what constitutes personal and professional “success”), Fuyuko feels entirely out of place. That Fuyuko’s work is in the publishing industry also offers some pertinent reflections on writers and writing: is a writer’s “greatness” defined by how many books they sell, or by whether or not they win prizes? And are either of these things truly a marker of literary quality? As with so many of Kawakami’s most interesting observations, these can almost seem throwaway comments, yet the questioning of gender roles in particular underlines the reasons why Fuyuko remains on the margins of a society she cannot fit into. Yet she sees beauty where others see banality, from everyday objects to the lights that illuminate the night on her birthday each year.

Fuyuko gradually moves from being a teetotaller to an alcoholic: she finds herself unable to face the most basic social interaction without first fortifying herself with sake or beer. Her solitude grows along with her drinking habit, as she closes in on herself more and more, despite her efforts to integrate society in conventional ways. One such effort is a trip to the cultural centre to look at courses she might enrol on, and it is there that she first meets Mitsuksuka. Having drunk too much, she falls asleep in the lobby and wakes to find that her bag has been stolen. Mitsuksuka is nearby, and helps her. This is the catalyst for a series of awkward encounters that move slowly towards friendship, and then to something deeper. I found the dynamic between them uncomfortable at times: Mitsuksuka is older, and takes on a role as teacher to Fuyuko. He opens her mind to physics, giving substance to her obsession with light, but he remains enigmatic, his interest in Fuyuko and the nature of their relationship never entirely evident.

As in Kawakami’s previous novels, the love interests are not glossy heroes (and nor is “love” a simple concept). On the contrary, what she does is far more interesting: this is not about instant attraction, magnetism, or any of those relationship tropes that abound in literature. This is about people who are dismissed as useless, unattractive or inessential connecting with other people who have had similar experiences, and the vulnerability of the characters is what gives the narrative momentum: my no-spoilers policy means I’ll have to hold my tongue here, but I can only recommend that you find out for yourself what becomes of Fuyuko and Mitsuksuka’s relationship.

The translation by Sam Bett and David Boyd is every bit as accomplished as I have come to expect their collaboration to be. I particularly admire the way they translate dialogue – as with other of Kawakami’s texts, the dialogue is raw (at times excruciatingly so), and they render this in entirely believable English, without letting us forget that these are Japanese characters. But what stood out for me most were the passages where Fuyuko talks about her pain: these manage to be strikingly eloquent even when delivered with a brevity verging on abruptness, and the ability of both author and translators to express a shattering emotion in just a few words is remarkable.

All the Lovers in the Night is an excellent story, whether or not you have read Kawakami’s other work. If you already love her writing, you won’t be disappointed. If you have yet to discover her, it’s a good place to start (though you probably won’t want to stop there!)

Review copy of All the Lovers in the Night provided by Picador Books. This was my final sponsored review; you can read more about the future directions of the Translating Women blog here.

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International Booker Prize 2022: Tilting the Axis of “world literature” http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/06/03/international-booker-prize-2022-tilting-the-axis-of-world-literature/ http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/06/03/international-booker-prize-2022-tilting-the-axis-of-world-literature/#respond Fri, 03 Jun 2022 15:00:25 +0000 https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/?p=2163 Last week Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize. Many media headlines have focused on…

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Last week Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize. Many media headlines have focused on this being the first time a novel by an Indian author has won the prize, or the first time a book originally written in Hindi has won the prize, but the most significant “first” for me is that this is the first time its publisher, Tilted Axis Press has been recognised by the International Booker. It has always seemed to me a glaring omission that no Tilted title had ever made the longlist, so it was encouraging that in 2022 the press exploded onto the longlist with not one but three titles (the other two were Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s Happy Stories, Mostly, translated by Tiffany Tsao, and Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City, translated by Anton Hur).

There is something particularly special about this win: Deborah Smith, founder of Tilted Axis Press, won the first Man Booker International Prize (as it was then called) in 2016 for her translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. The year before that, Deborah had set up Tilted Axis Press, extending her work bringing literature of Asia into English by publishing as well as translating. Yet although Deborah herself was shortlisted again for the prize (in 2018, for her translation of Han Kang’s The White Book), all the eligible titles submitted by Tilted Axis had been overlooked until this year. Is this because none of them had been “good” enough until now? I don’t think so. Rather, I think it shows the importance of the panel, who is on it and what their outlook is.

I have to put my hands up and say that while I’ve read Happy Stories, Mostly and Love in the Big City, I haven’t finished reading Tomb of Sand yet. So my thoughts here are not review-type reflections on the book itself, but rather thoughts on the importance of its win. When I started reading Tomb of Sand in December (yes I know, I’m reading it VERY slowly), my eight-year-old daughter asked me what I was reading. I explained that it was a novel originally written in Hindi, a language of India, by a writer called Geetanjali Shree, and that a translator called Daisy Rockwell had written it all over again in English, and that’s how I was able to read it. Wide-eyed, she said: “But that’s AMAZING!” How often do we forget this? It is amazing that literature from other cultures is accessible to us because of translation (and, more specifically, because of translators), and it’s amazing that there are presses out there who will seek out books that might otherwise not make their way to us, so that the literature that reaches us isn’t always by the same people from the same places.

Tilted Axis Press is committed to this diversity of literature and voices making it through, working to change the legacy of colonialism and imperialism that calcifies our understanding of “world literature” within marginalised or exoticised stereotypes. In a mission statement on the Tilted Axis website, the press describes its process as “an ongoing exploration into alternatives – to the hierarchisation of certain languages and forms, including forms of translation; to the monoculture of globalisation; to cultural, narrative, and visual stereotypes; to the commercialisation and celebrification of literature and literary translation”. This bold statement is intertwined with a public commitment to working with translators of colour and to gender balance, and offers a direct challenge to the publishing industry, drawing attention to hierarchies of language, genre and background, and to the cultural contexts that focus on profit or on the consecration of a handful of authors.

It is a truth not often acknowledged that prize lists are predominantly white and eurocentric: while judges are of course concerned with finding the “best book”, I believe that falling back on this justification without questioning what it means risks overlooking the ways in which we have been conditioned to respond to literature, and the criteria on which we might unconsciously judge its merit. The reference in Tilted Axis’s mission statement to the “monoculture of globalisation” explicitly points out the inherent problems masked behind a neo-liberal concept such as “globalisation”, which can serve to obscure the multiple daily violences inflicted on non-dominant languages and cultures. So this Tilted win is important not because of a need for data-driven diversity initiatives, but rather because it shakes up the way in which we approach and think about literature, dismantling our preconceptions of what makes the “best” books. It shows others in the chain of commission and production that these books can be recognised, can be worth taking a risk on, and it shows us as readers that we do not have to reach only for what is familiar.

Warmest congratulations to Geetanjali Shree, Daisy Rockwell, and all the team at Tilted Axis Press: long may you continue to challenge, to inspire, and to tilt the axis of “world literature” from the centre to the margins.

 

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Reading in Translation: new collaboration! http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/05/30/reading-in-translation-new-collaboration/ http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/05/30/reading-in-translation-new-collaboration/#respond Mon, 30 May 2022 14:55:55 +0000 https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/?p=2149 This week I have a new review for you, which I was invited to write for the fabulous Reading in Translation site! The review is of…

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This week I have a new review for you, which I was invited to write for the fabulous Reading in Translation site! The review is of Ivana Sajko’s Love Novel, translated from Croatian by Mima Simić and published by V&Q Books. Love Novel focuses on an unnamed man and woman in a relationship that has grown toxic, who are kept together by the child they have brought into the world but whose resentment towards one another simmers and grows as the novel progresses. It is a savage and carnal tale, but also cold and brutal, unfolding in a huis clos where “love kills as soon as it gets a chance”. Click here, or on the thumbnail below, to read the review in full.

Love in the Time of Capitalism: Rage and Resentment in Ivana Sajko’s “Love Novel,” Translated from Croatian by Mima Simić

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Review: SOMETHING STRANGE, LIKE HUNGER by Malika Moustadraf http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/05/06/review-something-strange-like-hunger-by-malika-moustadraf/ http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/05/06/review-something-strange-like-hunger-by-malika-moustadraf/#respond Fri, 06 May 2022 09:45:02 +0000 https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/?p=2137 Translated from Arabic (Morocco) by Alice Guthrie (Saqi Books, 2022) Something Strange, Like Hunger is the posthumously published work of Moroccan feminist Malika Moustadraf. A…

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Translated from Arabic (Morocco) by Alice Guthrie (Saqi Books, 2022)

Something Strange, Like Hunger is the posthumously published work of Moroccan feminist Malika Moustadraf. A collection of fourteen short stories, it explores themes of femininity, sexuality, taboos and sociocultural restrictions, and represents an important project of “literary recovery” as detailed by Guthrie in her translator’s note at the end of the text.

The collection opens with ‘The Ruse’, in which two sisters are discussing the imminent marriage of one of their daughters. The mother of the bride-to-be is planning to get a “virginity certificate” for her (unbeknownst to her, far from virginal) daughter. From the outset, Moustadraf pulls no punches about the experience of women in the culture her stories describe, showing misgoynist attitudes to be so deeply entrenched that many women share and perpetuate them: the mother ends up ” wailing and cursing the day she’d given birth to a female child, in mourning for the day when girls were buried alive at birth.” The male characters say even more aberrant things that trivialise women’s suffering and overtly subjugate them, and throughout the stories these dangerous attitudes and practices towards women intensify: the woman taken to a hammam to have her body hair removed, hands henna-ed and eyes ringed with kohl so that she can be married off (or, as she more accurately describes it, “sold off”), the woman doctor summarily dismissed because “women aren’t cut out to be doctors”, the woman slapped by her husband as soon as they are married, so that she knows he has dominion over her, and the casual misogyny of violently silencing claims such as “a woman loves an evening beating from time to time, before she goes to sleep, and for you to pull her hair every once in a while – these customs have been ingrained in women since the Stone Age.” There is a simmering rage in Moustadraf’s work that is deftly communicated in Guthrie’s translation: these incidents are presented without partisan comment, but in a way that makes clear how hateful and harmful they are.

One aspect marketed as a selling point is that Something Strange, Like Hunger includes the first ever trans character in Arab literature (another first of the collection, pointed out by Guthrie in her translator’s note, is the first literary depiction of cybersex in Arabic). This trans (or possibly intersex – the lack of insistence seems quite deliberate and open to interpretation) character appears in the story ‘Just Different’. The main character is a prostitute who, in the course of the story, recounts a series of humiliations they have suffered at the hands of their community and their family, all of whom are unaccepting of their decision to live as a woman. If they carry a razor blade, it’s because of the day a group of bearded men who wanted to “clean up society” shaved their head – an echo of the time their father had marched them to a barber shop and inflicted the same “corrective” punishment on them. This humiliation is explicitly tied to religion, as they are subsequently forced to recite from then Quran before writing out “I’m a man” a thousand times. The impossibility of being other, of deviating from a violently socialised gender norm, is in sharp relief here as elsewhere in Moustadraf’s stories, and the importance of this story is evident in the fact that the title of the collection is taken from a particularly beautiful line from the protagonist’s past. This is the moment of the protagonist’s sexual awakening, in which the teacher asks them to stay behind after class and wipes sweat from their brow, “eyes blazing with something strange, like hunger”. The implicit yearning and impossibility to voice desire is especially delicate in a story of such violence, and I love that this was chosen for the UK title (the collection was also published by the Feminist Press in the US as Blood Feast, which is the title of another short story in the collection).

The translation by Alice Guthrie blends informal register and vocabulary (things get “sketchy” for the protagonist of ‘Just Different’, for example) with evocative expressions from the original language (“As the saying goes, ‘Throw a handful of salt in her eyes and she won’t even blink’”), and superb use of imagery (I must give a mention to one of my favourite images: a decrepit bus moving “like a time-ravaged tortoise”). The stories are then followed by an extended translator’s note, in which Guthrie does several things: first, she draws attention to Moustadraf’s life and legacy, and the importance of this work being translated and circulated. It is particularly notable that Guthrie points out a common response to biographies of women writers from the global south: these, Guthrie notes, “are very often expected to inform and interweave with their fiction. It is much harder for these writers to have their writing received as feats of pure imagination than it is for others, especially white cis male writers.” This is a notion I’ve been coming up against increasingly lately: how women writers are so often asked what it is to write as a woman, or how their fictional work is assumed to be in some way autobiographical. Guthrie delicately draws attention to this without moralising, but underlining the importance of reading Moustadraf’s work for what it is, rather than for what we can infer about the author through reading it.

Guthrie goes on to detail the research that she undertook for this translation, and the people and communities who helped her – this is all the more fascinating after reading the translation with no prior idea of just how much painstaking linguistic and contextual research went into its preparation. Finally, Guthrie discusses some of the linguistic choices she made, in terms of both general approach and specific detail. The inclusion of such a focused and engaged account of the translation process is an excellent example of the translator’s visibility: though this concept is often discussed in terms of the text itself, I find it more useful to consider it in terms of paratexts such as this translator’s note. I don’t want to imagine that a translated text arrived with me neatly in English, with no agent in between the original and the translation. Nor do I necessarily believe that the “best” translations are the ones that never remind us that they are a translation. However, more than anything I want to imagine the translator as a part of the process of this book coming to me: I’m interested in why they chose to champion this book, how they set about completing the translation, the challenges they faced along the way… This can come to us in the form of literary events, interviews, or translator’s notes, and Guthrie’s note on Something Strange, Like Hunger is exemplary – in fact I enjoyed it just as much as the book itself, and came away from it feeling that I understood the stories on another level.

If this review has piqued your interest in Something Strange, Like Hunger, I will be interviewing Alice Guthrie as part of a round table event on Thursday 12 May: it’s free to attend in person or online, and if you’d like to join us you can register here.

Review copy of Something Strange, Like Hunger provided by Saqi Books. This is one of my final sponsored reviews.

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Review: CONCERNING MY DAUGHTER by Kim Hye-jin http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/04/28/review-concerning-my-daughter-by-kim-hye-jin/ http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/04/28/review-concerning-my-daughter-by-kim-hye-jin/#respond Thu, 28 Apr 2022 09:46:06 +0000 https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/?p=2123 Translated from Korean by Jamie Chang Concerning my Daughter is a Korean novel that explores and challenges the difficulties of being lesbian in an adamantly…

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Translated from Korean by Jamie Chang

Concerning my Daughter is a Korean novel that explores and challenges the difficulties of being lesbian in an adamantly (and at times violently) heteronormative society. The two primary characters are a mother and daughter who are opposed in almost every way: when the daughter, Green, asks to move back in with her mother, the mother is unprepared for – and extremely hostile to – the concomitant arrival of Lane, her daughter’s girlfriend. The mother simply cannot comprehend that her daughter would “choose” something that she herself considers to be an unnatural abomination. There is a staggering inflexibility and refusal to see the world differently; she states clearly from the outset that she will never change her mind, and she persists in the belief that something must be “wrong” with her daughter, or indeed that she herself must have failed as a mother, and missed some fundamental warning sign, a crucial phase earlier in life when this transgression could have been prevented before it materialised (and this is, perhaps inevitably, interspersed with plenty of “what have I done to deserve this?”-style self-pitying).

At the same time that the mother seems so devoid of compassion towards her daughter and her daughter’s choice of partner, she is devoted to Jen, one of the patients in the care home where she works. Jen’s mental decline is a source of immense sorrow for the mother, who sees in her deterioration and in the reduction of her life an early reflection of her own solitary future. The sub-plot of Concerning My Daughter, then, is the issue of ageing and the way in which society turns its back on a “useless” generation of people who are becoming dependent. The conditions in the care home are dire: to save resources, workers are instructed to use only scraps of diapers for their incontinent patients, and to change them less frequently. This results in hideous bedsores and abject indignities: Jen is treated with inhumanity by the system, and the mother rebels against this even at the risk of her own job. Yet she cannot see that she is treating her daughter’s girlfriend with the same dismissive attitude that she deplores in her line manager, and this clever complexity/ duality gives further substance to the narrative.

If the mother cannot understand the daughter, then the reverse is also shown to be true, and this is where the choice of perspective is so clever: the mother is not simply an inflexible bigot, but someone who truly struggles with the distance between her and her child and genuinely cannot see how to overcome it. Indeed, the mother’s greatest fear is that her daughter should end up rejected by society and alone in her later life; it is nuance such as this that makes the mother more rounded as a character. The mother is terrified of being judged, and her inability to change her views is testament to the extent to which she has been moulded by a heteronormative culture that abhors difference (“I was born and raised in this culture where the polite thing to do is to turn a blind eye and keep your mouth shut, and now I’ve grown old in it”).

The mother cannot comprehend why her daughter cannot simply live a “normal” life: she even goes so far as to deem her daughter’s life “abnormal”, and here I particularly admired the translation by Jamie Chang, who was fearless in using exclusionary (and sometimes objectionable) terms that indicate not only how the mother thinks, but how she has been conditioned – it may well have been quite hard for both author and translator to write these terms, and this character, yet it was a challenge neither shied away from. Chang also renders imagery brilliantly (rows of houses are “packed in like rotten teeth along small alleys”, for example), and the short sentences are well crafted, simultaneously enhancing (without endorsing) the black-and-white nature of the ideas presented and rendering the emotions with stark honesty.

In the end it is Jen who offers some kind of connection between the mother and Lane, bringing to the fore a shared humanity that seems to be the heart of the story. Yet the more feel-good aspect wasn’t necessarily the part that most struck me, but rather the way in which by writing this story from the perspective of the mother Kim Hye-jin explores a point of view that she presumably does not agree with, and in so doing manages to arrive at some kind of compassion for a character who is in many ways extremely unlikeable. The mother is not simply a one-dimensional and blinkered figure, but a lonely parent whose greatest flaw is the inability to understand what she cannot accept, or accept what she cannot understand. Concerning My Daughter has many levels and complexities, and offers a thoughtful reflection on generational conflict, social conformity, unconventional families, ageing, and loneliness.

Review copy of Concerning My Daughter provided by Picador Books. Please note that this is one of my final sponsored reviews.

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It’s time for change… http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/04/08/its-time-for-change/ http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/04/08/its-time-for-change/#respond Fri, 08 Apr 2022 16:00:03 +0000 https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/?p=2107 I think this post has been a long time coming… I’m making a big change to the way I do the blog part of Translating…

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I think this post has been a long time coming… I’m making a big change to the way I do the blog part of Translating Women, and I want to talk about why.

I am no longer going to do “sponsored” reviews – i.e. I will no longer be accepting books in exchange for a review. I’ve been doing this for almost four years now, and slowly it has built up to the point where the only reviews I do – and almost the only posts I write – are this kind of reviews.

So what’s wrong with that, you might wonder? Well, here’s the thing: in the academic part of my life I’ve been writing a book on intersectional activism in the translated literature sector of the UK publishing industry, in which I’ve put together a “toolkit” of how we can live a feminist life in our reading, translating and publishing choices. It offers case studies of five of my favourite independent publishing houses, showing how each of them puts forward a positive model for one aspect of this toolkit. I was fortunate to be able to interview all of those publishers, as well as translators who have worked with them, and as I analysed the interview responses there was one thing that came up again and again. Almost all of my interviewees talked about how if we want real, sustainable, positive change then we need to cast our nets wider, actively seek out marginalised voices, and not be content with what arrives with us, neatly packaged, ignoring the (often biased or flawed) processes of scrutiny and judgment that have pushed that book or author to the top of the pile and left others behind. And it struck me like a slap in the face: that’s what Translating Women has become. I no longer seek out my own reading, or talk about books I’ve chosen. I read what gets sent to me, and I have stopped “casting my net” and actively seeking out more marginalised voices. I realised that I am part of the problem for which I am trying to offer solutions. How can I suggest ways in which stakeholders in the publishing industry could be more actively intersectional and diverse in their choices, when I have stopped doing this myself?

This is not to say that there is anything inherently bad or un-diverse about the books I’ve been reviewing. It’s also not to say there is anything to criticise about the publishers I review for – on the contrary, in fact, because they are predominantly activist independents. And I will still read – and sometimes still review – their books! But I will buy them myself and decide whether or not to write about them.

Over the last four years I have lost count of the number of publishing houses I’ve reviewed for – some never contacted me again (usually if I didn’t write an overwhelmingly positive review, and this threw up its own ethical dilemma: when I’m invited to review, am I being invited to give an honest opinion, or invited to rave enthusiastically and indiscriminately about everything? Would you trust my opinion if I never showed reservations?) and others have become regular collaborators – even, in a couple of instances, friends. I will never underestimate or devalue how amazing it has been to make these contacts, and in many cases to sustain them. And I will always feel privileged that so many publishers and translators have trusted me with their books, or wanted me to be part of the word-of-mouth promotion of particular titles.

But it’s time for change. I want to embody the positive activism for which I advocate in my research. There are so many things I have wanted to write about here in the past couple of years, and I haven’t been able to do so because I’ve had a long review backlog and no time and scope to write anything else for Translating Women. So there will still be reviews – unsolicited ones that don’t necessarily coincide with a book’s release – but also more opinion posts, reflective pieces, or round-ups of what I’ve been reading and enjoying.

I will, of course, still honour the reviews I agreed to write before making this decision. There are five or six more that I’ve committed to, and so those will still make their way here in the next couple of months. So you won’t see the full change immediately, but I when it comes I very much hope that it will be a shift you’ll enjoy.

Thank you, as always, for reading and supporting Translating Women!

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Review: FATHER MAY BE AN ELEPHANT, AND MOTHER ONLY A SMALL BASKET, BUT… by Gogu Shyamala http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/03/18/review-father-may-be-an-elephant-gogu-shyamala/ http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2022/03/18/review-father-may-be-an-elephant-gogu-shyamala/#respond Fri, 18 Mar 2022 10:45:17 +0000 https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/?p=2083 Translated from Telugu by Diia Rajan, Sashi Kumar, A. Suneetha, N. Manohar Reddy, R. Srivatsan, Gita Ramaswamy, Uma Bhrugubanda, P. Pavana, and Dugginala Vasanta (Tilted…

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Translated from Telugu by Diia Rajan, Sashi Kumar, A. Suneetha, N. Manohar Reddy, R. Srivatsan, Gita Ramaswamy, Uma Bhrugubanda, P. Pavana, and Dugginala Vasanta (Tilted Axis Press, 2022)

It’s no secret around these parts that I’m a Tilted Axis Press superfan. From their mission to dismantle structures of hierarchy and exclusion in the publishing industry to the books they publish to work towards this, they represent the best of independent publishing. So I was delighted to be invited to review their latest book, a collection of feminist short stories from India.

Father may be an elephant, and mother only a small basket, but… is a beautiful, humbling, necessary book. I’ve rarely read anything that made me so acutely aware of my own ignorance and privilege, but that didn’t attempt to make me feel small because of that. It’s the kind of book that inspires me to be better, to open my eyes, to shake off my own biases. Is it the kind of book I couldn’t put down? Possibly not. But then I don’t think it’s meant to be a page-turner. Rather, this collection of short stories is a slow-burner, one that stayed with me each time I put it down rather than that had me racing through.

The stories in Father may be an elephant, and mother only a small basket, but… focus on daily life in poor communities: these are tales of dissidents and resistants, stories of outsiders and underdogs, people born into “the caste that makes slippers for everybody” while their own feet remain bare. In all of the stories the caste system is accepted by protagonists as fundamental truth – the mere mention that, hypothetically, a boy from the baindla caste could marry a girl from the reddy caste results in a near-lynching. Yet the greatest injustice of the caste system is its abuse by cynical leaders who do not want the workers to understand the power they possess, or their importance in the continued functioning of this rural and agricultural life (for, as we are reminded, if everybody is educated, who will do the work?)

Tying in with the rural and agricultural focus, water is sacred in these stories: one of my favourites is narrated by a bounteous and forsaken village tank, while another opens with the quietly ominous statement that “the overflowing stream wound itself around the village like a snake winds itself around a man”. Land is precious and fiercely defended, yet it can be withheld by the village elders, and the greatest shame is being exiled and banished from land that is only ever provisionally and precariously owned. The village, and the community that makes it function, is at the heart of all the stories, yet this is not always a tranquil or co-operative environment: children are bonded to labour, people are cast out by their own families for becoming “impure” from touching those of a lower caste, dogged belief in luck and omens guides many of the decisions about who is included and who is excluded from the community.

There is a specifically female perspective in many of the stories: mothers struggle to get their children educated, to make good marriages for their daughters, to keep art and culture alive. They are left powerless and penniless when husbands die, beaten while husbands are all too alive, or sent away to avoid the fate of belonging to the village’s men; when they show strength they are called witches and ostracised. Their vulnerability is foregrounded implicitly in some cases, and explicitly in others (as one elder explains to an overly dismissive boy, “There is a special way in which girls are insulted or looked at, and it is very painful”). The short essay on Shyamala at the end of the collection indicates that her own experience has inflected many of the situations in the stories, including the vulnerability of children, the focus on hard work and dedication, and the importance of education.

The language of the translation is rich in unfamiliar and culturally specific terms (usually referring to events, roles or social groups) – there is an extensive glossary at the back of the book but I rarely consulted it while reading the stories, preferring to try to understand them from context and then looking them up later. I didn’t always get it right, but I did particularly appreciate NOT having the explanations as footnotes, which I find intrusive. There are also a number of interesting instances of translation that foreground the foreignness of the text. A reference to “the evil gaze” seems more evocative of ill wishes than the standard collocation “the evil eye”, and expressions such as “will we cut our own throats just because the knife is golden?” or “you know that the fingers of the hand are not equal” enrich our own language by infusing it with the imagery and traditions of the original Telugu and refusing to put English sayings in the mouth of these Dalit villagers. This kind of approach to translation can be destabilising, rejecting the insistence on familiarity and bringing texts closer to the reader that is so often assumed to constitute “good” translations. However, in one of my favourite pieces of writing about translation, Madhu Kaza invites us to abandon our ingrained insistence on “faithful” translations, questioning how “errant, disobedient” translations (those that remind us of a text’s foreignness) might better serve us. Leaving many terms in their original form and including expressions whose meaning might be clear but whose construction is not familiar shows a brave refusal to package these stories into a neatly digestible form, instead inviting us to approach translation as a practice of hospitality that, as Kaza suggests, “acknowledges that the host, too, will have to be changed by the encounter”. This is a collection whose translation does not seek to erase its otherness: it invites us to listen rather than co-opt, to adapt rather than to expect adaptation, and to remake the way that we choose to locate ourselves in the world.

Review copy of Father may be an elephant, and mother only a small basket, but… provided by Tilted Axis Press

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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