"The Deep Sea Where Ideas Swim"
Celebrating Women in Translation Month with free books, events, & more.
2023 marks the tenth annual Women in Translation Month! The Women in Translation (WIT) project was started by book blogger and research biologist Meytal Radzinski in 2013. In the years since, #WITMonth has become a global celebration of writing by women who are working in languages other than English.
According to WIT, only thirty percent of new literature releases in the US are by women. That figure gets even more dramatic when you consider re-translated works. This disparity—which extends far beyond the US—makes an annual celebration of writing by women in translation more than just a fun way to learn about authors and translators whose work you may love.
Read on for free books and other digital resources for reading women in translation (this month and beyond):
Seven Stories Press is offering The Night Trembles: A Sampler of New Writing by Women in Translation, a free eBook excerpting new books from some of the most exciting writers and translators working today. The collection features: Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison Strayer; Claudia Rankine, translated by Cecilia Pavón; Nadia Terranova, translated by Ann Goldstein; Clyo Mendoza, translated by Christina MacSweeney; and more!
PEN America is hosting a free, virtual reading series featuring writers and translators working in a wide array of languages. The next one is tonight (Thursday, August 17!).
Asymptote is always a great source for reading works in and about translation spanning a variety of genres— like this interview with Alexa Frank on translating manga titles.
“Translation, to me, is like you’re inhabiting something. I’m inhabiting these characters, but also, because manga is visual, I translate sound effects, signs, etc. It feels very amorphous. I’m almost gliding over each panel and touching everything like a ghost.”
—Alexa Frank
Words Without Borders publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, graphic literature and more from around the world. Read new work — like the poem “When Did You Know” by Argentinian poet Mariana Spada from her new collection The Law of Conservation, translated by Robin Myers. You can also explore the “Women in Translation” tag for interviews and recommendations
Cita Canon Spotlight
#WITMonth celebrates writing by women in translation, not necessarily translation by women. (Often these go hand-in-hand, though, as women translators have worked hard to raise the visibility of women writers.*)
Many pioneering women writers were themselves translators. Here are just a few of the many that live in our canon:
Aphra Behn (1640-1689), widely considered the first woman to write professionally in English, was also a translator from French and Latin to English. She wrote translations of work by Ovid, Brilhac, Fontenelle, and La Rochefoucauld—spanning poetry, novels, philosophy, and more.
The first major literary work by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans; 1819-1880) was a translation of Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined) by David Strauss. Eliot completed the translation of the deeply controversial text in 1846, years before she adopted her pen name. Her name did not appear in the book until the second edition came out in 1892 , but it did help her secure a job editing Westminster Review. In 1856, her first work of published prose, “Silly Novels by Silly Lady Novelists,” came out in that journal. Eliot also translated work by Feuerbach and Spinoza. [Translations by George Eliot at The George Eliot Archive]
Simin Dāneshvar (سیمین دانشور, 1921-2012) was a writer of many firsts. Her 1946 book Atash-e Khamoosh (The Quenched Fire) was the first Persian-language story collection to be published by an Iranian woman; her bestselling 1966 book Savushun was the first published novel by an Iranian woman; and in 1989 a collection of her shorter work, Daneshvar's Playhouse (translated by Maryam Mafi), became the first published collection in translation by an Iranian woman author. On top of all of that, she was a prolific translator from multiple languages, supporting herself and her husband through her translations of work by Anton Chekhov, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Bernard Shaw, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, and more.
One of the most significant Latin American poets of the 20th Century, Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972), was also a translator from French to Spanish. Among her translations, which included writing by surrealists and artists, is Marguerite Duras’ second novel La vie tranquille/La vida tranquila. She also wrote some of her best known poems in French and then translated them into Spanish prior to publication. [More on Pizarnik’s work across languages from translator Patricio Ferrari in The Paris Review.]
*Further Reading
For more on the ideas behind WIT, check out interviews with Radzinski as well as recent reflections on social media about what has changed (and what hasn’t) over the past decade. In 2021, #DailyWIT highlighted one women writer from around the world every day for a year.
“Shining a Spotlight on the Art of Translation” by Alexandra Alter. Jennifer Croft (translator of Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk) discusses the need for greater recognition for the work of translators — including on the book cover. [The New York Times - “gifted” link.]
“Breaking the Circle: Women Writing in Endangered Languages” by Alison Wellford. “Women are renovating minority languages by introducing modern and diverse perspectives in the culture of that language.” [World Literature Today.]
"Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat…"
—Ursula K. Le Guin, “Reciprocity of Prose and Poetry,” 1983 via asymptotejournal
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