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Reading recommendations: the coronavirus edition

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In my recent open letter, I talked about my belief that literature from other cultures – especially from marginalised voices – can be a crucial means of fostering empathy in times of crisis. As I watch news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic I become ever more convinced of this, and so here are five books by women in translation that I’m recommending for the global crisis.

1. Was anyone else less than sympathetic to Mike Pence’s complaint that the coronavirus nasal swab test is “invasive”? For those who feel conflicted about a potentially life-saving rapid sweep of the nostril with a cotton bud, I recommend:

The Little Girl on the Ice Floe
Adélaïde Bon, translated from French by Ruth Diver, Maclehose Press (available in the US in Tina Kover’s translation for Europa Editions).
This account of living with the trauma of child sex abuse is as urgent as it is painful. In 1980s Paris, Adélaïde Bon was a happy, privileged nine-year-old living a charmed childhood, until the day that a stranger raped her in the stairwell of her building. In this brave and powerful memoir, Bon pieces together the incident that shaped her life, in an attempt to come to terms with its devastating consequences. In her determination to reconstruct the events and so reassemble herself, Bon confronts the man who defined her life by taking her childhood. A brief nasal swab won’t seem quite so melodramatic when you read what it is to keep living after every intimate orifice has been penetrated by a paedophile.

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2. I’ve seen some scaremongering (and, as far as I can tell, unsubstantiated) clickbait speculating about fatal disruption to the food chain: before propagating sensationalist news, want to know how bad that really could be? I recommend:

Tender is the Flesh
Agustina Bazterrica, translated from Spanish (Argentina) by Sarah Moses, Pushkin Press.
This chilling, gripping study of the cruelty humans are capable of inflicting on each other by artlessly following those who peddle lies and trade in fear is the ultimate dystopian novel: this is a world in which it is legal to breed and slaughter humans whose vocal chords have been cut so that you won’t have the inconvenience of hearing them cry out in pain as they are dismembered for your dinner party. The most terrifying thing about this superb debut novel is how believable Bazterrica makes the circumstances: it really doesn’t feel like a massive leap from the discovery of a deadly virus that led to the extermination of all animals and paralysis of the food chain, to the legalisation and normalisation of eating human flesh. After you read this, finding alternatives to pasta/ eggs/ flour won’t seem like much of a hardship (and a plant-based diet will never have seemed so appealing).

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3. Described in various (sometimes dubious) contexts as a “great leveller”, this virus hits us all and doesn’t differentiate. It will attack Hollywood stars, world leaders and heirs to thrones indiscriminately, but make no mistake about it: some social groups will suffer from it more than others. To help us remember our common humanity, I recommend:

Tokyo Ueno Station
Yu Miri, translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles, Tilted Axis Press.
The radical divide between the very wealthy and the very poor is shown in this lyrical meditation on loss and home as a homeless man dies in Tokyo’s largest park and finds himself condemned to haunt the park indefinitely in his afterlife. Tokyo Ueno Station is a sharply observed and extraordinarily beautiful novel about the fate of those on the edge of society: a man who has lost everything watches the living carry on making their mistakes, unable to warn or help those he once knew and loved. His story is intertwined with that of the Japanese Imperial family: in his life, he was sporadically relocated during imperial visits so that his very existence would not be an eyesore to those who needed to believe in the prosperity of their nation. A magical and poetic novel, which reminds us to be kind to the people who are most vulnerable, and to be the community we want to see.

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4. Much of the supposedly “reassuring” narrative around coronavirus deaths rests on the majority of fatalities being people who are over 60, or who suffer “underlying health conditions”. Though I know this is meant to offer relief that the majority of those affected will recover, a death is a death – a personal, irreconcilable loss – no matter what the age or state of health of the deceased. As a reminder that the life of an older person is worth no less, I recommend:

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Olga Tokarczuk, translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd Jones, Fitzcarraldo Editions.
This tale of vengeance, murder, and retribution is also a powerful reflection on ageing and perceptions of “usefulness”. Through her inimitable narrator, Mrs Duszejko, Tokarczuk offers profound insights into the human condition, the isolation of the non-conformist, the lack of equality for women, and the daily impatience faced by the elderly. Drive Your Plow is also an indictment of animal cruelty, and a reminder not to stand in judgement or to dismiss those who are different from ourselves. By turns hilarious and profound, Drive Your Plow is a book that can be read and enjoyed at any time, but which has particular resonance right now with its philosophical reflections on life and death, acute observations of ageing and invisibility, and poignant reminders about the luxury of being able to cross borders.

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5. One thing I’ve loved seeing in the media is stories of people who have never before interacted with their neighbours now providing them with a lifeline, and streets coming together for socially distanced exercise or dance, or to applaud frontline healthcare workers. For anyone who’s never talked to their neighbours before, I recommend:

Umami
Laia Jufresa, translated from Spanish (Mexico) by Sophie Hughes, Oneworld Publications.
This beautiful, polyvocal novel is set in and around Mexico City, and tells the story of a group of people living in the five houses of Belldrop Mews, during a particular period of their communal lives when “the dead weigh more than the living.” The story/ies are narrated from five different perspectives, but each character in Umami is quietly struggling with grief and loss, and trying to reassemble a broken life. They interact, though not constantly, and when they do, their common grief is never far from the surface. Yet they hide this, trying to maintain an appearance of normality and of coping – but if we can learn one lesson from this global crisis, it is that we are not alone in our fear and frustration, and that solidarity and community will help us to overcome the dark times.

An open letter to friends of Translating Women

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Dear friends,

I hope you and your loved ones are all safe and well.

The past week has seen an upheaval of life as we know it, in a way I had never imagined would be a reality in my lifetime (call me unimaginative, but there we go). As you might expect, this is going to mean a shift in the way I’m able to provide content on the Translating Women blog. Most of the work I do here is on my own time, and my new role as a home-schooler, though precious and grounding, will have an impact on what I can realistically hope to achieve elsewhere.

However, I believe that now more than ever it is important to stay connected, to keep looking outwards not only towards you, who read my words and keep me going on this blog, but also towards other cultures and especially their women’s voices. In Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Made for Men, Caroline Criado-Perez discusses evidence showing that in many cultures pandemics disproportionately affect women (see the chapter “It’s Not The Disaster that Kills You”), and so it is vital not only to ensure that women are represented and heard, but also to look beyond our own experience. I believe that a number of issues I find troubling in the Anglophone world have arisen from looking inwards: Trump’s rise to power based on his pledge to build a “big, beautiful wall” on the border between the US and Mexico, Brexit being voted through on the swell of anti-immigration feeling in the UK… in the immediate aftermath of those election and referendum results, I remember acquaintances telling me that it wouldn’t be that bad, and that nothing is forever. That may be true, but everything has consequences, and the rise of nationalism indicates an increasing disconnection with the other that has been manifest in multiple ways as the global crisis escalates. I’ve been thinking these last days about how this resonates with many of the observations and warnings in Europa28, fresh in my mind from a recent review (written in a time when I took so many simple things in my life for granted): Renata Salecl writes that “While people choose to not put the good of the community before themselves, they expect others to do so. We, therefore, have a situation in which people do not think of themselves as part of the community, yet nonetheless imagine that such a community exists.”

I want to remain part of a community. I plan to keep posting content for the foreseeable future, though less frequently and possibly in different formats. It’s likely that my reviews will be shorter, and I’m hoping to include videos as well as text. I’ve also updated my virtual bookshelf to offer brief synopses of over 100 books, and you can always browse the reviews archive, or catch up on interviews and opinion posts from the last two years. Maintaining a virtual community has never felt more urgent: we are living through a crisis dominated by the rhetorics of division, whether it’s Trump renaming coronavirus the “Chinese virus”, racial abuse towards people of Asian origin, generational confrontation (is anyone else sick of the “Boomers vs Millenials” clickbait?) or outbursts of abuse towards retail staff trying to implement fair policies regarding purchasing quantities. Now more than ever we need to remember our common humanity, and literature – with its power to cross borders and open eyes and hearts – has a role to play in that. As Julya Rabinowich wrote, also in Europa28 (and translated by Katy Derbyshire), “The ability for empathy is what might help humankind survive … The safety and security to which we are so accustomed – they are not guaranteed.” As our lives shift and we lose so much of our certainty and security, let us hold on to our empathy. For as long as I can, and when I can, I will keep sharing recommendations, in the hope that my subscribers and visitors will want to keep receiving them.

Until soon, stay safe, and thank you as always for reading,

Helen

International Women’s Day 2020: Each for Equal

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This year’s theme for International Women’s Day, “Each for Equal”, ties in with the emphasis on intersectionality that is key to any kind of progressive feminism. Since “intersectional feminism” is itself a term that can be bandied around to encompass everything and nothing, I’ve been focusing my thoughts on what it can mean for women in translation.

The P-word

I recently wanted to avoid over-using the word “empower” in a piece I was writing, so looked in a thesaurus and was surprised to find “privilege” offered as a synonym. Perhaps my surprise is partly prompted by the ubiquitous – and scathing – appearance of the term “privilege” in reaction to Jeanine Cummins’s controversial novel American Dirt, but it made me wonder: why is “empower” a positive word and “privilege” so loaded with scorn? Can the two be reconciled? Empowerment as an active process can be the sharing of privilege, or rather, using what privilege we have to work towards equality and justice for those who do not have that privilege. The criticisms levelled at Cummins were for appropriating Mexican experience, speaking for (or over) Mexicans, rather than giving them the platform to speak for themselves. It is the use of privilege that makes it not entirely  synonymous with “empowerment”: privilege can be used to empower, but it can also be used to perpetuate established systems of power, and that’s where change needs to happen.

Is “normal” the new “privilege”?

In 1981, writer and activist Audre Lorde stated that “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” This is as true today as it was thirty years ago: how can we claim progress in the movement for gender equality in translated literature if predominantly white European women are getting translated? And how many of those are straight, cis, middle-class, non-disabled? Let me be clear: this is not an indictment of being any of those things. The problem is when we see these characteristics so frequently that they come to be synonymous with “normal”, and we forget that there are other voices that we are not hearing. In her powerful manifesto We Should All Be Feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie affirms that “culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.” The full humanity of women does not mean only one model of womanhood that we define as “normal” – and if we can’t change culture overnight, we can at least make conscious changes about the way it is represented on our bookshelves. If we care about equality, then we have a responsibility to read books that are not just about our own experience, that do not simply confirm our own way of living in the world. It is a source of constant bewilderment and frustration to me when reviewers or readers claim they couldn’t “relate” to a book because they don’t know the culture. I find this the literary equivalent of going to a different country and heading straight for the English pub: why should writers from other cultures make their narratives more westernised just to make them more easily digestible to us? And doesn’t the translator have a responsibility NOT to impose that in the translation? One of my favourite books, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (translated by Sophie Hughes for Fitzcarraldo Editions and reviewed here), was recently described by Ann Morgan as a book that does not “come meekly to the reader”, and this epitomises everything that I think translated literature should be: a door opened onto other cultures, a wake-up call lest we slip into complacency, a reminder that identity is never singular and that diversity characterises our planet.

#EachForEqual: the “full humanity of women”

In the Building Bridges interview series I conducted last year, almost all of my brilliant interviewees talked about the barriers women writers face at every stage – before they write, then when they seek publication, and after that to be brought to the attention of English-speaking literary agents. So there are two major intersecting prejudices here: being a woman and being “foreign.” With regard to how literature from outside the Anglosphere makes its way in, Tiffany Tsao recently gave an illuminating and impassioned perspective on the way in which national cultures are “packaged”: who gets to choose how their culture is represented in literature? Not the women, I’ll wager. And certainly not the full humanity of women. Then Margaret Carson identifies the issue of visibility for women writers in both their home culture and in translation even when they are published (in an article from In Other Words that you can read by searching the archives on the women in translation tumblr). Next, recent research by Richard Mansell confirms that even if they make it into translation, women are less likely to be longlisted for big literary prizes. These barriers are amplified for women of colour, working class women, disabled women, trans, queer or non-binary writers, but we CAN help to dismantle them. Mansell notes that “change is happening right now in translated fiction,” indicating that we have an opportunity, a moment to be seized before it passes: market logic suggests that if the demand is there, slowly the supply will follow – and that’s the first link in the chain of barriers that I mention above. So, in the spirit of “Each for Equal”, let’s seek out these voices, and support the publishers who champion them. If you have the privilege/empowerment potential of disposable income, support by buying books. If you don’t, borrow and request from your local library. The more these books appear on shelves, the more “normal” it will be for them to exist there.

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Here are a few recommendations of voices and stories that challenge preconceived ideas of “normal” in its various forms, with links to the publishers’ websites:

Elvira Dones, Sworn Virgin, translated by Clarissa Botsford. A rare literary insight into Albania’s landscape and traditions, this brave, absorbing and deeply moving tale of a woman sworn to live as a man reflects on selfhood, sacrifice, and what “being a woman” means. Published by And Other Stories, the only press to commit to Kamila Shamsie’s call to make 2018 a Year of Publishing Women.

Matsuda Aoko, Where the Wild Ladies Are, translated by Polly Barton. This collection of contemporary feminist twists on Japanese ghost stories puts women at the centre, allowing them to unleash their power through a web of spooky, wry and interconnected tales. Published by Tilted Axis Press, champions of intersectional reading who are on a mission to decolonise translation by “tilting the axis of world literature from the centre to the margins.” Tilted Axis have also published Indonesian writer and disability activist Khairani Barokka’s Indigenous Species, a sight-impaired-accessible art book (though, for clarity, not a translation).

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, The Adventures of China Iron, translated by Fiona MacKintosh and Iona MacIntyre. This queer feminist re-telling of a gaucho epic is a bold, revolutionary and subversive dialogue with Argentina’s history and literary canon, and is currently longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize. Published by Charco Press, whose catalogue to date includes 17 titles from diverse voices from across Latin America; 8 of the 17 are by women (and with the next release, it will be a perfectly balanced 9 of 18!)

Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season, translated by Sophie Hughes. A torrential vision of people on the margins of society, and a rage against a world that abandons there. Set in the fictional Mexican town of La Matosa, a place riven with violence and superstition, this is a tale of the monsters we make with global indifference, and is currently longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize. Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, who deliberately sought out a Polish author in response to the backlash against the Polish community in the UK following the Brexit referendum. You might have heard of that author, Olga Tokarczuk, since then…

Rania Mamoun, Thirteen Months of Sunrise, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette. The first major translation of a Sudanese woman writer, this anthology brings together urgent, thoughtful and occasionally surreal short stories that reflect variously on love, contingency, broken promises, despair, religion and corruption. Published by Comma Press, who are known for their radical approach to publishing and have just released the groundbreaking anthology Europa28, bringing together women’s voices from across Europe in the wake of Brexit.

For a great list of intersectional feminist readings originally written in English, see this guide that Sophie Baggott compiled for the International Women’s Development Agency.

 

 

20 books to watch out for in 2020

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2020 looks set to be an exciting year for women in translation: if, like me, you’re thinking about what your reading year will hold in terms of new releases, here are 20 books to look forward to this year by women from around the world. From dystopian alternate realities and speculative fiction to a feminist retelling of ghost stories and wickedly wry reflections on modern life, this is an eclectic and exhilarating mix of personal and political literature that includes novels, short stories, fiction, memoir, autofiction and speculative fiction. Dive in and enjoy!

I have a renewed gift subscription to Tilted Axis Press this year, and so I was excited to see that 2020 looks set to be a bumper year for the press, with five of their six titles (their biggest annual catalogue to date) being by women in translation. I can’t wait for the first release, Matsuda Aoka’s Where the Wild Ladies Are, “a contemporary feminist retelling of traditional ghost stories by one of Japan’s most exciting writers” translated by Polly Barton, and am also impatient for the new Yan Ge novel, Strange Beasts of China, translated by Jeremy Tiang (I loved The Chilli Bean Paste Clan, translated by Nicky Harman for Balestier Press and reviewed here), as well as the UK publication of Duanwad Pimwana’s Arid Dreams, translated from Thai by Mui Poopoksakul. You can read publisher Deborah Smith’s take on all of the 2020 Tilted Axis titles here.

And Other Stories continue to fly the flag for women in translation this year: first off, later this month we can look forward to Rita Indiana’s second novel, Made in Saturn, translated by Sydney Hutchinson. I’m champing at the bit for this; Indiana’s first novel Tentacle, translated by Achy Obejas, was my surprise hit of 2018, and Made in Saturn is described as “a hangover from a riotous funeral, a rapid-fire elegy for the revolutionary spirit, and a glimpse of hope for all who feel eclipsed by those who came before them” – it promises to be as electrifying as Tentacle. Later in the year we can expect the next Lina Wolff, Many People Die Like You, a “wicked, discomfiting, delightful and wry” collection of short stories (translated again by Saskia Vogel, who did a magnificent job with Wolff’s The Polyglot Lovers last year), and a new-to-me Salvadoran writer, Claudia Hernández, whose novel Slash and Burn, “a suspenseful, slow-burning revelation of rural life in the aftermath of political trauma,” is in the very capable hands of Julia Sanches.

Fans of Margarita García Robayo and Selva Almada are in for a treat, as Charco Press are bringing us their next novels! There probably isn’t a corner of the internet where I haven’t professed my love for García Robayo’s Fish Soup (2018); the follow-up is Holiday Heart, a novel about a disintegrating marriage, translated again by the very talented Charlotte Coombe. As for Selva Almada, The Wind That Lays Waste (tr. Chris Andrews) was an excellent debut (and won best first book of the Edinburgh International Book Fair 2019); Almada’s second offering Dead Girls is a journalistic novel about femicide, and the cherry on the cake is that it will be translated by Annie McDermott, whose previous work for Charco is top-notch. Charco will also be publishing the debut novel of Chilean author Andrea Jeftanovic, Theatre of War (tr. Frances Riddle), which marks Jeftanovic’s first appearance in English and Charco’s continued championing of women authors from across Latin America.

In March, Comma Press will be releasing a landmark collection in collaboration with Wom@rts and Hay Festival: Europa28 brings together 28 acclaimed women writers, artists, scientists and entrepreneurs writing about the future of Europe in a “powerful and timely anthology [that] looks at an ever-changing Europe from a variety of different perspectives and offers hope and insight into how we might begin to rebuild.” Sophie Hughes edits with Comma’s Sarah Cleave, and Europa28 features a stellar cast of writers and translators.

And speaking of Sophie Hughes, her translation of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season for Fitzcarraldo Editions will be released imminently! Hurricane Season is “a formidable portrait of Mexico and its demons” that, I believe, opens with the line “The Witch is dead.” Hurricane Season is one of my most anticipated books of 2020 – this time last year I mistakenly thought it was coming out in 2019, so I’ve been looking forward to it for a looooong time and I CAN’T WAIT. (*update*: I just received my copy, and the first line is not “The Witch is dead”, but it’s even better – if a book can be judged on its first page alone then I can say right now that this is AMAZING). Then in April Fitzcarraldo will be bringing us the next Annie Ernaux, A Girl’s Place (translated by Alison L. Strayer, who also translated The Years) – and will be releasing it on my birthday, no less! Champagne all round.

Elsewhere, we can look forward to the next Samanta Schweblin from Oneworld: Little Eyes, translated by Megan McDowell, is “a chilling portrait of our compulsively interconnected society”, and looks set to be as spine-tingling as Schweblin’s previous work. Earthlings, Sayaka Murata’s second book, is coming in October from Granta Books: Earthlings continues with the theme of outsiders, presenting characters who believe they are not human, and is translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, who did an excellent job on Murata’s best-selling Convenience Store Woman in 2018. Les Fugitives have kicked off the year with a new novel by award-winning Mauritian author Ananda Devi, The Living Days (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman), in which white supremacy, desperation and class conflict collide on the streets of London. My 2020 pick from Pushkin Press is Tender is the Flesh by Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica: translated by Sarah Moses, this chilling-sounding dystopian novel is set in an alternative reality in which it is legal to eat human meat. Sounds horrifying, but I do love dystopian fiction so I’m going to steel myself and dive in…

In less gruesome news, here are three very different French-language books to look out for in translation this year:

Europa Editions UK will be bringing us Valérie Perrin’s Fresh Water for Flowers, translated by Hildegarde Serle: the daily life of a cemetery caretaker is disrupted by a clandestine tribute in the “funny, moving, intimately told story of a woman who believes obstinately in happiness,” while Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho, which I enjoyed reading in French last year, is coming from Daunt Books in a translation by Aneesa Abbas Higgins: in this closed-down tourist town on the border between North and South Korea, a young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a dilapidated guesthouse, and is drawn into a tacit relationship with an unexpected and mysterious guest. Finally, Harvill Secker are offering a new international series of eight books in 2020, kicking it off with All About Sarah, the debut novel by Pauline Delabroy-Allard (translated by Adriana Hunter): this was a literary sensation in France last year, and is described as “an intoxicating and evocative novel about the all-consuming love affair between two women and the ruin it leaves in its wake.”

Fans of German literature will be pleased to know that V&Q Books recently founded an English-language imprint, headed by women in translation champion Katy Derbyshire, and we can expect their first three releases in September. Two of the three are by women: Lucy Fricke’s Daughters (translated by Sinead Crowe) tells the story of “two women, pushing forty, on a road trip across Europe, each of them dealing with difficult fathers along the way”; Sandra Hoffmann’s Paula (translated by Derbyshire herself) is an autofictional account of “the writer’s relationship to her grandmother, a devout Swabian Catholic who refused to reveal who fathered her child in 1946.”

So that’s 20 books for 2020, with doubtless many more exciting releases to come in the course of the year. I’m already wondering whether any of these will make it onto my end-of-year top books of 2020 – in the meantime, happy reading!

Translating Women conference: reflections on activism in action

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For some time now, I’ve been lucky to work with feminist translation studies scholar Olga Castro on projects close to both our hearts: the most recent of these was organising the inaugural Translating Women conference, which took place on 31 October and 1 November 2019. If you use Twitter you can catch up on events via the #TWConf19 hashtag; in the meantime, here are my reflections on those two memorable and stimulating days.

Translating Women: Breaking Borders and Building Bridges in the English-language Book Industry was an event which, as keynote speaker Margaret Carson noted, enters the chronology of the Women in Translation movement. 70 energetic, engaged academics, translators and activists from four continents came together at the Institute of Modern Languages Research in London, UK, to discuss the barriers facing women in translation in the Anglophone world, and to come up with ways in which we could challenge these.

The defining feature of the conference for us was that this was not a group of people concerned with simply exposing the injustices of the status quo, but rather with challenging them. The conference opened with a rousing keynote from Carson, in which we were called upon to “Snap the gap”: the gap in question is the gender gap in publishing translated literature, and the “snap” is taken from Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, in which “snap” moments are defined as tipping points, part of something bigger, a feminist call to action. The Translating Women conference was a “snap” moment for us collectively: the energy in the room over the two days was moving and inspiring, and brought up some necessary discussions.

Firstly, Carson invited us to be “troublemakers” – not to accept injustices just because they exist, not to be a marketing tool for publishers who do not prioritise “snapping the gap”, and to beware of women in translation “light”. This “troublemaking” was picked up in Rosalind Harvey’s impassioned indictment of the “triple absence” of Latin American women writers in discussions of “great” literature (indeed, as Carson warned us, “great writer” is in itself a gendered term). Harvey pointed out that women are not the default, and so when we make the cut we are troubling; this echoed Nicky Harman’s comments on Chinese women’s writing that “when writers are talked about collectively, what’s meant is ‘male writers’”. If even “writers” is a gendered term, then how much more gendered is “great writers”? It was for this very reason that delegates were sporting #BeMoreOlga badges – the badges stemmed from a response I wrote to the Nobel Prize in Literature awards earlier this year, and specifically in response to the chair of the prize committee justifying the paucity of women laureates across the prize’s history by claiming that “now we have so many female writers who are really great.” To this I argued that they were always there, but not seen; that they had always been great, but not recognised. The prize committee commended Tokarczuk’s work for “representing the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”, and so “#BeMoreOlga” is a call to action, a “snap” manifesto to do the same (you can imagine our excitement when Olga Tokarczuk herself was pictured wearing a #BeMoreOlga badge at the Nobel ceremony in December!)

Read Tokarczuk’s Nobel lecture in full here; it’s a wise and compassionate reflection on crossing borders, resisting categorisation, and connecting the individual with the universe, and is translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Jennifer Croft.

The feminist engagement with crossing borders is particularly important, because many of us are still in relative positions of power. Women of colour – both writers and translators – receive less attention still than white women, as Corine Tachtiris discussed in her presentation on allyship and intersectionality. If Harvey reminded us that “people in positions of power are often blind to others’ powerlessness”, Tachtiris built on this by detailing initiatives that prompt white women translators to be feminist and activist allies by amplifying the voices of women of colour. Discussion elsewhere encompassed a broad geographical spread both across the panels (from the Pacific to Bangladesh, as well as “stateless” languages such as Kurdish) and within individual papers (for example, former Translating Women contributor Muireann Maguire showed how two Russian women writers have crossed immense geographical distances in their personal lives and enable their characters to do the same).

Arching over all of these discussions was a concept presented to us by Aviya Kushner: Expectation bias. Kushner described this as the stance that “I want you to write about what I want you to say”, an attitude that relegates women to a sphere that has already been picked for them, and assumes that these women writers have nothing to add to our experience of the world. This was picked up in Pâmela Berton Costa’s discussion of paratexts in The House of the Spirits, and the expectation that a woman could write about families and love, but not about history. As Kushner noted, expectation bias silences women, does not allow them to express their “wild individuality”, and condemns them to write about only what dominant structures want them to say. Kushner’s concept brought together so many of the talks we heard: Şule Akdogan showed that Turkish women writers are expected to write about a western conception of Turkey, while Aysun Kiran noted that Ece Temelkuran, despite her high profile, is still subjected to marketing exoticised by western concepts of Turkish women, and expected to produce books that fit in with Anglophone publishers’ understanding of her country. Expectation bias also drives what gets published in the first place: author Eva Moreda explained that Galician publishers lead the way in deciding which books get put forward for translation, but despite good numbers of women writing in Galician, very few books by women are put forward for translation into English, and both Harman and Berton Costa detailed the expectations of what women in the cultures they work with are expected to write about, or told they must write about. And, of course, the denunciation of expectation bias is at the heart of Harvey’s comments on how “troubling” women are: we had all been implicitly talking about expectation bias, without a concept that we could cite – Kushner has given us that concept in one of the greatest “snap!” moments of the conference.

The second day of the conference opened with a plenary session on initiatives promoting women in translation: Godela Weiss-Sussex and Heike Bartel presented their “Encounters” seminar series, which promotes dialogue between authors and translators; Margaret Carson showed us the Women in Translation tumblr that she runs with Alta L. Price, and which is a key repository for information about WIT; Chantal Wright talked about the joys and challenges of administering the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation; the inimitable Meytal Radzinski, founder of #WITMonth, explained why she started this work and how it has grown, and Salwa Benaissa talked about why she decided to launch the new online publishing initiative Project Plume, focusing on under-represented women writers in translation. Finally, I was honoured to be able to talk to delegates about the “snap!” moment that led me to create and develop the Translating Women project.

We were also lucky enough to have two dynamic and inspiring author-translator events as part of the conference: on the first evening, Négar Djavadi and Tina Kover, author and translator of the prize-winning Disoriental (Europa Editions, 2018) discussed issues of cultural silencing (of political dissidence, sexual difference, and gender oppression), with an empowered Kover asserting her accreditation as the author of the translation. The following evening, Ariana Harwicz, Annie McDermott and Carolina Orloff (the latter via video) discussed their collaboration on the translation of Harwicz’s explosive Feebleminded, which Harwicz kicked off with the comment that “I’m completely atheist, but I believe in the translator”. The authors and translators discussed their work equally, highlighting one of the important themes of the conference: the visibility of the translator – not in terms of the text, but in terms of agency.

Key challenges raised by the conference participants included the lack of gender parity in translated literature, the “invisibilisation” of the translator, and the evidence that in overviews and surveys, women are simply overlooked (Carson denounces Tim Parks; Harvey counters Matt Bucher). We should demand better, cite women, channel the fellowship we all experienced in those two days to fight the status quo, to challenge expectation bias, to speak on behalf of those who are silenced, to build bridges by, in the words of Olivia Hellewell, “first understanding the terrain on the other side.” It is not just our right to be “troublemakers”, but also our responsibility. Snap!

You may also like to read:

Margaret Carson reports on the women in translation tumblr: “WiT goes to Senate House”

Salwa Benaissa of literary initiative Project Plume gives a full round-up of all the papers and events.

Barbara Spicer writes the conference report for the Institute of Modern Languages Research blog (Living Languages).

Podcasts of author-translator events

Day One: 31 October 2019.

Author Négar Djavadi (Disoriental, 2018) and translator Tina Kover

https://youtu.be/cN7STHc4UXI

https://www.sas.ac.uk/videos-and-podcasts/culture-language-and-literature/translating-women-authors-and-translators

 

Day Two: 1 November 2019.

Author Ariana Harwicz (Die, My Love, 2017; Feebleminded, 2019) and translators Carolina Orloff and Annie McDermott

https://youtu.be/0ZbeZoj4VQk

https://www.sas.ac.uk/videos-and-podcasts/culture-language-and-literature/translating-women-authors-and-translators-0

 

The Nobel Prize in Literature: Be More Olga

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Yesterday Olga Tokarczuk was announced as the winner of the (delayed) 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. I’m not going to linger on the reasons for awarding the 2018 and 2019 prizes together – or about why I’m only focusing on Tokarczuk and not the 2019 winner – you probably already know them. There are also issues surrounding diversity, with many people criticising the 2018 and 2019 awards for being euro-centric and white (despite Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel Prize in Literature committee, saying in the week before the announcement that “We had a more Eurocentric perspective on literature and now we are looking all over the world” – as if looking is enough, a gesture towards inclusivity before falling back into old habits). These criticisms are valid points, and it’s important to make them: we can’t champion women in translation without considering how other forms of bias intersect with gender bias. I can’t pretend I wouldn’t have liked the 2019 winner to have been… different (in so many ways). And I’ll come back to Olsson later, because he had some pretty inflammatory things to say about women too…

Regular readers will already know my admiration for Tokarczuk’s work – for the incandescent, challenging Flights (translated by Jennifer Croft) and for the gloriously fatalistic Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, and also longlisted this week for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation). These were both published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, who form part of a wave of brave, outward-looking independent publishers resisting narratives of nationalism and isolationism, and who we need in these insular times. But though Tokarczuk may have exploded on the Anglophone literary scene with Man Booker International-winning Flights a couple of years ago, this was not an overnight success story. Rather, it was the result of years of work: Croft had been trying to get her translation of Flights published for ten years, and Lloyd-Jones, who translated Tokarczuk’s House of Day and House of Night back in 2002 (published by Granta Books), has championed Tokarczuk’s work (and Polish literature) tirelessly for years.

So yesterday’s win didn’t come out of nowhere. Tokarczuk has been widely read in Poland and in other European countries for decades. We’re the ones who are late to the party: it took fifteen years between the publication of Lloyd-Jones’s translation of House of Day and House of Night and Croft’s translation of Flights, which coincided with Poland being the guest of honour at London Book Fair, and the first time that Tokarczuk was tipped to win the Nobel prize. Then there was the Man Booker International win in 2018, and Fitzcarraldo’s nurturing of Tokarczuk’s œuvre (as well as the 2018 publication of Drive Your Plow, they will publish Croft’s translation of The Books of Jacob in 2021). I’m not suggesting that Tokarczuk won the prize because she was translated into English; that would reinforce the Anglophone dominance of the Nobel. But I do think that, for those of us celebrating the award in the English-speaking world, congratulations should also be extended to her brilliant translators, who have made her accessible to so many people who otherwise would not have been able to read her.

So there is much to celebrate. But there is also much still to do. Back in May, I was interviewed by a journalist who, when I mentioned some of the factors above, insisted that “Olga would have been published in English anyway” because she is a brilliant writer. I agree that she’s a brilliant writer – erudite, quick-witted, philosophical, and shrewd – but that isn’t the only reason her work is available for me to read. Indeed, attributing everything to a writer’s innate “brilliance” plays into the myth of meritocracy that so often excludes women and other marginalised groups from the top table. Chair of the Nobel Prize in Literature committee Anders Olsson also said in the lead-up to the announcement that “Previously it was much more male-oriented. Now we have so many female writers who are really great, so we hope the prize and the whole process of the prize has been intensified and is much broader in its scope.”

Wait, what? Now we have so many female writers who are really great? Ah, so THAT’s why only 14 of the previous 114 laureates were women. There just weren’t many women writers. Or not many great ones.

No. No. No.

They were there, they just weren’t seen. They were great, they just weren’t recognised. If we blindly and glibly accept that the gender disparity is about quality and not about visibility, then we are complicit in a system that privileges white Eurocentric masculinity. I’m delighted that Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 prize, not just because of her brilliance, but also because of the way she resists borders, embraces diversity, and, in the words of the Nobel committee themselves, “represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” Note to the academy: Be More Olga.

5 women writers to discover in translation

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Women in Translation month is in full swing, and following on from the individual book recommendations I gave in an earlier post, today I want to focus on authors. I love it when publishing houses champion an author rather than a single book, and when translators get to work on several books by the same author, forming a relationship and bringing a whole body of work into translation – especially when this oeuvre is constantly growing. So here are my suggestions of five contemporary women writers whose work it’s worth diving into.

(Please note that I refer here to UK editions of these books, though many are also published by US publishing houses)

Hiromi Kawakami, Portobello/ Granta Books and Pushkin Press

Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami is known for her offbeat love stories, writing relationships that are unusual, unexpected, and in many cases delightfully awkward. Published by Portobello Books, Kawakami’s portfolio was taken on by parent company Granta Books when they shuttered the Portobello imprint in January 2019. Her current translator is Allison Markin Powell, who communicates Kawakami’s whimsy perfectly.

Strange Weather in Tokyo was Kawakami’s first work to be published in Markin Powell’s translation, and has received widespread critical acclaim. It recounts the will-they-won’t-they relationship of a thirty-something woman and her much older former teacher: it’s a great unconventional romance story, though I didn’t connect with it as deeply as most people seemed to until the final page, in which the relevance of the US title (The Briefcase) becomes apparent in a way that knocked me for six.

Call me contrary, but though Strange Weather in Tokyo is worth reading, I preferred Kawakami’s  follow-up, The Nakano Thrift Shop. This follows the lives and entangled relationships of four people who work in a Tokyo thrift shop; the contemporary star-crossed young lovers, the fallibility of Mr Nakano himself, and the eccentricity of his sister are sublimely awkward.

The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino is Kawakami’s latest and much anticipated release, and offers connected short stories of ten women who have all loved the same man at different stages of his life. Through their reflections, a portrait of Mr Nishino emerges that is always shifting and never complete, and this innovative way of understanding a central character is as accomplished as I’d come to expect from the Kawakami-Markin Powell collaboration.

In addition to the three novels above, Kawakami’s novella Record of a Night Too Brief was translated by Lucy North and published by Pushkin Press in 2017, and her novel Manazaru was translated by Michael Emmerich and published by Counterpoint Books in 2017.

Jenny Erpenbeck, Portobello/ Granta Books

Jenny Erpenbeck writes in German, and won the Independent Foreign Fiction prize in 2015 for her sweeping novel The End of Days. Her work is deeply embedded in German history, from the ravages of the twentieth century to the modern-day refugee crisis; Susan Bernofsky translates Erpenbeck with great sensitivity and depth.

The End of Days is Erpenbeck’s best-known work, and is a historical saga with a difference, recounting the many ways in which a life could have been lived (and died) in the twentieth century. At its heart are profound and unsettling questions of the difference one life can make, and the impact one choice in one moment has on not just on an individual life, but on history. A protagonist who is unnamed for much of the novel lives through fixed historical events and more arbitrary personal ones, that may or may not all be leading to the same fate in a different way.

The progression of German history through the twentieth century echoes Erpenbeck’s earlier work Visitation, which was the only one of her novels I struggled to appreciate. Whereas in The End of Days history is viewed through a single character who lives (and dies, and lives again) through the events, in Visitation the focus is on a house by a lake in Brandenburg, which sees inhabitants (including a family of Jews and a regiment of soldiers) come and go throughout the years, and stands as a silent witness to the atrocities of the twentieth century.

My admiration for Erpenbeck and Bernofsky returned full throttle with Go Went Gone, a moving account of the refugee crisis in Berlin. Retired university professor Richard observes a makeshift camp in Oranienplatz, and strikes up an unexpected relationship with the refugees as he attempts to understand their plight. The relationship between a relatively privileged European and a group of displaced people is sensitively developed, but even more interesting are the reflections on nation and nationalism; the questions Erpenbeck raises about borders make their way into English at a particularly apposite time, confirming her status as an important writer of our times.

Erpenbeck has also published The Old Child and The Book of Words, both translated by Bernofsky and published by Portobello/Granta.

Ariana Harwicz, Charco Press

Ariana Harwicz was one of the five Argentine authors that Charco Press launched with in 2017. She writes frenzied and disturbing accounts of women’s experience on the edge of reason, and is an explosive and innovative writer. Charco co-director Carolina Orloff has been involved in the translation of all of Harwicz’s books, working with Sarah Moses on Die, My Love and with Annie McDermott on Feebleminded and the forthcoming Precocious.

The women in Harwicz’s narrative universe are “in the prime of life and in freefall” (Die, My Love): Die, My Love was longlisted for the Man Booker International prize in 2018, and is an extraordinary debut in which a woman living in the French countryside struggles with maternity and with a man who can never be all she wants him to be. On its initial release in Spanish, critics rushed to categorise Die, My Love as a narrative of post-natal depression, but it is so much more than this: it is a challenge to society, a voice that refuses to be silenced, and a turbulent account of an outsider’s experience with no neat solutions.

Feebleminded returns to many of the themes of Die, My Love, and if possible is even more intense. The narrator and her mother live in a chaotic household in the countryside, constantly at loggerheads with one another but unable to exist apart. The prose is sparse and violent, but rhythmic, viscerally poetic, and full of striking images which are rendered beautifully in the translation. Contrasts abound in Feebleminded: love is perversion, tenderness is violence, lucidity is madness, and the basic premise rests on the following question: could a person want something so badly they destroy it? Harwicz’s prose is electrifying and addictive, and we can look forward to her third translated novel, Precocious, coming from Charco in 2020.

*Ariana Harwicz will be in conversation with Carolina Orloff and Annie McDermott at the Translating Women conference in London on 1 November 2019; visit the conference webpage for details and booking links!*

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Pushkin Press

Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen writes page-turning narratives that offer a painfully acute observation of human fallibility and experience. Translator Sondra Silverston is perfectly matched to Gundar-Goshen’s wry whimsy, and all of these books are a treat to read. If you’re after a good story, you’re in safe hands here: Gundar-Goshen’s storytelling is a thing of beauty, as is Silverston’s translation.

Gundar-Goshen’s debut One Night, Markovitch is a modern-day fable that follows the lives of two friends, the “gloriously average” anti-hero Yaacov Markovitch and his larger-than-life best friend Zeev Feinberg. Thanks to Zeev’s sexual exploits with the butcher’s wife, the two men have to flee their village in Eretz Israel and make marriages of convenience in Europe. Once back in Israel the new couples are to divorce, but Markovitch falls in love with his new wife and refuses to let her go – a decision that sets in motion a chain of events unfolding over decades and weaving together the destiny of all the characters. The narrative develops in unexpected ways, with retribution never quite falling where you think it will.

Gundar-Goshen followed One Night, Markovitch with Waking Lions, a tale of secrets, lies, extortion and atonement. Dr Eitan Green is a good man who did a bad thing: speeding along a deserted moonlit road, he hit and killed a man. His life is then torn between two women: his wife, Liat, a senior detective in the Israeli police with a keen sense of what is right, and Sirkit, a taciturn Eritrean who sweeps floors for a living. Sirkit is the wife of the man Eitan killed: she saw what happened, and she comes to demand atonement. Fast-paced and full of suspense, this novel is not to be missed.

Liar was Gundar-Goshen’s latest release in translation, and is a piercing look at how one unfortunate decision or instinct can ruin lives. 17-year-old Nofar is desperate to escape the anonymity of being unexceptional, and when a washed-up reality TV star insults her outside the ice cream parlour where she works, she lets out all her rage in a scream that will change her life: from this moment on, Nofar is caught up in a web of deceit from which no-one will emerge unscathed. Gundar-Goshen deftly blends humour and pathos in all her works, and is a writer I highly recommend.

Annie Ernaux, Fitzcarraldo Editions

A literary institution in France, Annie Ernaux has only recently come to publication in the UK thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions. Ernaux writes primarily from her own experience, and engages with issues that shaped her life and the lives of many other women throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

The Years was the first of Ernaux’s books to appear in translation (by Alison L. Strayer) from publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions, and was released in 2018. This monumental book is described as a “collective autobiography” of French twentieth-century cultural history: filtered through the experience of a woman we see through photographs, and who we know to be Ernaux, The Years represents her imperative to bear witness before “all the images (…) fade”.

Ernaux’s second English-language release was Happening (translated by Tanya Leslie) earlier this year; this short novella reconstructs Ernaux’s experience of a clandestine abortion in 1963, supplementing her memory of events with fragments of a journal she kept at the time. Through the public articulation of her experience, Ernaux fulfills a sense of moral responsibility to hold a misogynist social system up to justice. It’s not an easy read, but it is a fearless and necessary one: In this time of desensitization and indifference we need books like Happening, and it begs to be experienced, even if not “enjoyed” as such.

I Remain in Darkness is the next of Ernaux’s books that Fitzcarraldo will publish later this year (also translated by Leslie). I read this in French many years ago – it’s another autobiographical piece, but this time focuses on Ernaux’s elderly mother, dying and already written off by the healthcare system. Expect painful insights and more no-holds-barred depictions of human frailty.

 

Changing the status quo: the 2019 Man Booker International prize

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Tonight the winner of the 2019 Man Booker International prize will be announced, and it’s something of a landmark year for women in translation. I want to talk about how 2018’s Year of Publishing Women, though it seemed to have a relatively small reach at the time, has had a significant impact on this prize: it’s possible that we’re witnessing a coincidence on a grand scale, but perhaps the fact that the shortlist features a higher proportion of women than is usual for literary prizes is a direct consequence of the Year of Publishing Women – partly owing to what was published last year, but also because of an increased awareness of the importance of striving for greater balance. The gender ratio on this year’s shortlist has made headlines everywhere, but even in neutral reports an unconscious bias is evident; in The Guardian it was described as being “dominated” by women, a phrasing quite rightly questioned by women in translation advocate Meytal Radzinski. Her point was that no shortlist with the opposite ratio would be described as being “dominated” by men – that would just be normal, right?

Image from themanbookerprize.com

Right. Except it’s so wrong that this attitude of male “domination” being normal is still prevalent. I’ve encountered several people in the past year who have said they’re unsure about whether there should be such a thing as a year of publishing only women, and so I’m just going to nail my colours to the mast and say that at this point in history YES, THERE SHOULD: women are disadvantaged at every stage of the publishing process, and this is compounded in translated literature as women face a double marginalisation. By not challenging this, we allow it to continue. Saying that we’re not gender-biased but still having catalogues or bookshelves that are heavily weighted towards male authors is, I think, quite dangerous: there may not be conscious bias, but the bias that exists at all the stages a book goes through on its journey to translation, publication and reception is allowed to continue – is even normalised – if we ignore it by believing that not being deliberately biased against women in translation is enough to tilt the balance.

So the Year of Publishing Women was brave and necessary, and opened a dialogue about the books that get published and those that don’t. In an interview last year, publicist Nicky Smalley told me that And Other Stories (the only publishing house to commit fully to the Year of Publishing Women) had to actively seek out books by women writers to fill the 2018 catalogue; one of those books, Alia Trabucco Zerán’s debut novel The Remainder, is now on the Man Booker International shortlist. The Remainder is a spirited dual narrative in which three young people shackled to the historical memory of the Chilean dictatorship drive a hearse through the mountains from Chile to Argentina in search of a corpse lost in transit, and was beautifully translated by Sophie Hughes for And Other Stories. Its well-deserved place on the shortlist represents activism at its best, and it is not the only success of the Year of Publishing Women: the more women are published, the more they will be discussed, reviewed and entered for prizes, and the more these lists might see a more lasting shift where people are no longer surprised to see the scales tipped towards a preponderance of women writers. Where this is no longer “unprecedented”, no longer a surprising “domination”, but something perfectly normal – just as it will continue be perfectly normal for the ratio to favour men on other occasions. Neither scenario should be surprising, and yet one of them is.

The 2019 Man Booker International shortlist also smashes tired stereotypes of what women write about: women’s writing is too often pigeonholed as “romance”, “chick lit” or “women’s fiction”, and it is assumed and accepted that women write for women (an attitude brilliantly challenged by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett) – these kinds of facile assumptions are exactly what perpetuate the invisible bias that women writers have to confront every time they sit down to write. And yet the women-authored books on the Man Booker International shortlist are extremely diverse: as well as Trabucco Zerán’s debut novel, there is the second English-language publication of last year’s winner, Olga Tokarczuk: the magnificent Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a witty and poignant pseudo-noir murder mystery flawlessly translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones for Fitzcarraldo Editions. The difference in genre and voice from Flights (Tokarczuk’s 2018 prizewinner, translated by Jennifer Croft for Fitzcarraldo Editions), along with the sheer scope of her work, shows that we cannot pigeonhole Tokarczuk (and, with her, Polish literature or women’s writing). And the excellent, ambitious books are not limited to The Remainder and Drive Your Plow (though they are my two unequivocal favourites on the shortlist): in Celestial Bodies Jokha Alharthi tells the history of Oman through the women of one fictional family, translated by Marilyn Booth for Sandstone Press; Annie Ernaux’s The Years is a “collective autobiography” of twentieth-century French cultural history, translated by Alison L. Strayer for Fitzcarraldo Editions, and Marion Poschmann’s The Pine Islands, an excoriating account of one man’s self-indulgent journey of enlightenment, finds new audiences in Jen Calleja’s sardonic translation for Serpent’s Tail.

Women represent half of history, half of the world, half of life – let them fill half your bookshelf, and then we won’t need a Year of Publishing Women or see women’s success framed in terms of anomalous “domination”. I’ve mentioned the scales tipping, the balance shifting, the ratios changing: the theme for International Women’s Day this year was “Balance for Better”, and I believe that the Year of Publishing Women has done exactly that. Shamsie noted that the real point of interest would be what happened in 2019:

“Will we revert to the status quo or will a year of a radically transformed publishing landscape change our expectations of what is normal and our preconceptions of what is unchangeable?”

2018 may not quite have been the “radically transformed publishing landscape” that Shamsie had hoped for, but the Year of Publishing Women did shake up expectations, complacencies, and resignation about the “unchangeability” of gender bias. The 2019 Man Booker International shortlist is testament to that, and as both gatekeepers and readers we need to carry on balancing for better so that the legacy of the Year of Publishing Women is not limited to one year, but carries on challenging the status quo until the status quo itself is changed.

The Man Booker International 2019 longlist: picks, celebrations, and regrets

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The picks

Last week saw the announcement of the Man Booker Prize longlist, and with it a remarkable and welcome surge of women in translation: more than half of the thirteen books selected this year are by women writers. The two books I was particularly delighted to see on the longlist were Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a funny, subversive and insightful pseudo-noir murder mystery translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones for Fitzcarraldo Editions (full review here), and Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder, a glorious tumult of historical memory, friendship, guilt, families and death, with raining ash and a lot of pisco, translated by Sophie Hughes for And Other Stories (short review here, a more in-depth one to follow). Drive Your Plow and The Remainder are very different narratives, with distinct preoccupations: an elderly woman struggles to be taken seriously in rural Poland in Drive Your Plow, and three young Chileans weighed down by a past they can never experience go on the road trip of a lifetime in The Remainder. But these two books also have plenty in common: they are both brave, distinctive, brilliantly translated, and a window onto the culture they represent.

The celebrations

As you can imagine, I find it immensely heartening to see a clear move away from the some of the biases that have traditionally prevailed in literary prizes: in an article for In Other Words, Daniel Hahn wrote of the 2017 Man Booker International prize that the longlist reflected “a significant gender imbalance (as we see every year), and a significant bias towards European writers and European languages (as we see every year, too).” Hahn goes on to note that these imbalances were indicative of the overall submissions pool, and so this leads me to wonder whether the tipping away from gender bias and eurocentrism on the 2019 longlist might also reflect moves in this direction more generally. Nine languages and twelve countries are represented in the thirteen books, and here’s where they’re coming from:

Europe is not quite as dominant as in previous years, which suggests the beginnings of a shift towards greater diversity and globalisation. As for languages, Spanish is best represented with three of the thirteen books:

All of the books translated from Spanish are from Latin America rather than peninsular Spain, which also partly accounts for the more diverse geographical spread. Arabic and French tie for second place, and of the remaining six, two are Asian and four European.

It’s not only women writers who make up the majority of this list: independent publishers are the big winners, with eleven of the thirteen entries. The year when gendered and eurocentric biases are less evident is the same year that independent publishers dominate the longlist, suggesting a direct correlation between the activism of smaller presses and increased parity in the translated literature market. As MBI judge Maureen Freely noted in an article in The Guardian, “the really good independents have become the cultural talent scouts”, and The Remainder and Drive Your Plow are stellar examples of this: The Remainder is a debut novel published by And Other Stories as part of their commitment to the Year of Publishing Women, and Tokarczuk was discovered by Jacques Testard of Fitzcarraldo Editions because of his determination to seek out a Polish author as a response to the backlash against the Polish community in the wake of the Brexit referendum.

The regrets…

Though there is much to celebrate, I can’t offer a reaction without mentioning the books I wish had been on the longlist. I am fully aware that I have not read all thirteen longlisted books, and that my opinions are necessarily inflected with my own subjectivities, but for what it’s worth, I am baffled that these two did not feature on the longlist:

Disoriental (Négar Djavadi, translated by Tina Kover for Europa Editions): this is not just one of the best books I’ve read for this project, it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. A sweeping family saga set in twentieth-century Iran, Disoriental is also a personal story of exile and (dis)integration in Europe. It’s ambitious, witty, wrenching, and the translation by Tina Kover is exquisite.

Resistance (Julián Fuks, translated by Daniel Hahn for Charco Press): another story of exile and an intensely poetic imbrication of the personal and the historical. Resistance is a haunting account of Fuks’s troubled relationship with his adopted brother, and the consequences of displacement. The writing is taut, subtle, and lyrical, and Hahn’s translation is flawless.

The shortlist?

I fervently hope that both Drive Your Plow and The Remainder will make it onto the shortlist. Last year’s winner and a debut author, two fantastic books and two impeccable translations. I’ll leave you with a favourite quotation from each:

“Can it really be true? Is this nightmare really happening? This mass killing, cruel, impassive, automatic, without any pangs of conscience, without the slightest pause for thought, though plenty of thought is applied to ingenious philosophies and theologies. What sort of a world is this, where killing and pain are the norm? What on earth is wrong with us?”
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“the heat intensifies and I push it away and the ash is falling and I push it away and the memories come flooding back and I push them away too, and I think that I could just let go, let it all out and then leave, but no, I don’t, cos if I did that I’d get lost and I’ve already got enough missing people on my hands; I’m never going missing, never ever.”
The Remainder

Further reading:

Tony offers the Man Booker International shadow panel’s official response to the longlist

Michael at Translated Lit does a roundup of the longlist

Jess and Will at Books and Bao choose their favourites, with links to reviews of several of the longlisted books

My full reviews of two other longlisted books:

Samanta Schweblin, Mouthful of Birds, translated by Megan McDowell (Oneworld Books, 2019)

Annie Ernaux, The Years, translated by Alison L. Strayer (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018)