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I was ten and stopped taking off my coat. That morning, Mum had covered us one by one in udder ointment to protect us from the cold. It came out of a yellow Bogena tin and was normally used to prevent dairy cows’ teats from getting cracks, calluses and cauliflower-like lumps. The tin’s lid was so greasy you could only screw it off with a tea-towel. It smelled of stewed udder, the thick slices I’d sometimes find cooking in a pan of stock on our stove, sprinkled with salt and pepper. They filled me with horror, just like the reeking ointment on my skin. Mum pressed her fat fingers into our faces like the round cheeses she patted to check whether the rind was ripening. Our pale cheeks shone in the light of the kitchen bulb, which was encrusted with fly shit. For years we’d been planning to get a lampshade, a pretty one with flowers, but whenever we saw one in the village, Mum could never make up her mind. She’d been doing this for three years now. That morning, two days before Christmas, I felt her slippery thumbs in my eye sockets and for a moment I was afraid she’d press too hard, that my eyeballs would plop into my skull like marbles, and she’d say, ‘That’s what happens when your eyes are always roaming and you never keep them still like a true believer, gazing up at God as though the heavens might break open at any moment.’ But the heavens here only broke open for a snowstorm – nothing to keep staring at like an idiot.

In the middle of the breakfast table there was a woven bread-basket lined with a napkin decorated with Christmas angels. They were holding trumpets and twigs of mistletoe protectively in front of their willies. Even if you held the napkin up to the light of the bulb you couldn’t see what they looked like – my guess was rolled-up slices of luncheon meat. Mum had arranged the bread neatly on the napkin: white, wholemeal with poppy seeds, and currant loaf. She’d used a sieve to carefully sprinkle icing sugar onto the crispy back of the loaf, like the first light snow that had fallen onto the backs of the blazed cows in the meadow before we drove them inside. The bread-bag’s plastic clip was kept on top of the biscuit tin: we’d lose it otherwise and Mum didn’t like the look of a knot in a plastic bag.

‘Meat or cheese first before you go for the sweet stuff,’ she’d always say. This was the rule and it would make us big and strong, as big as the giant Goliath and as strong as Samson in the Bible. We always had to drink a large glass of fresh milk as well; it had usually been out of the tank for a couple of hours and was lukewarm, and sometimes there was a yellowish layer of cream that stuck to the top of your mouth if you drank too slowly. The best thing was to gulp down the whole glass of milk with your eyes closed, something Mum called ‘irreverent’ although there’s nothing in the Bible about drinking milk slowly, or about eating a cow’s body. I took a slice of white bread from the basket and put it on my plate upside down so that it looked just like a pale toddler’s bum, even more convincing when partly spread with chocolate spread, which never failed to amuse me and my brothers, and they’d always say, ‘Are you arse-licking again?’

‘If you put goldfish in a dark room for too long they go really pale,’ I whispered to Matthies, putting six slices of cooked sausage on my bread so that they covered it perfectly. You’ve got six cows and two of them get eaten. How many are left? I heard the teacher’s voice inside my head every time I ate something. Why those stupid sums were combined with food – apples, cakes, pizzas and biscuits – I didn’t know, but in any case the teacher had given up hope that I’d ever be able to do sums, that my exercise book would ever be pristine white without a single red underscore. It had taken me a year to learn to tell the time – Dad had spent hours with me at the kitchen table with the school’s practice clock which he’d sometimes thrown on the floor in despair, at which point the mechanism would bounce out and the annoying thing would just keep on ringing – and even now when I looked at a clock the arms would still sometimes turn into the earthworms we dug out of the ground behind the cowshed with a fork to use as fishing bait. They wriggled every which way when you held them between forefinger and thumb and didn’t calm down until you gave them a couple of taps, and then they’d lie in your hand and look just like those sweet, red strawberry shoelaces from Van Luik’s sweet-shop.

‘It’s rude to whisper in company,’ said my little sister Hanna, who was sitting next to Obbe and opposite me at the kitchen table. When she didn’t like something, she’d move her lips from left to right.

‘Some words are too big for your little ears; they won’t fit in,’ I said with my mouth full.

Obbe stirred his glass of milk boredly with his finger, held up a bit of skin and then quickly wiped it on the tablecloth. It stuck there like a whitish lump of snot. It looked horrible, and I knew there was a chance the tablecloth would be the other way around tomorrow, with the encrusted milk skin on my side. I would refuse to put my plate on the table. We all knew the paper serviettes were only there for decoration and that Mum smoothed them out and put them back in the kitchen drawer after breakfast. They weren’t meant for our dirty fingers and mouths. Some part of me also felt bad at the thought of the angels being scrunched up in my fist like mosquitoes so that their wings broke, or having their white angel’s hair dirtied with strawberry jam.

‘I have to spend time outside because I look so pale,’ Matthies whispered. He smiled and stuck his knife with utmost concentration into the white chocolate part of the Duo Penotti pot, so as not to get any of the milk chocolate bit on it. We only had Duo Penotti in the holidays. We’d been looking forward to it for days and now the Christmas holidays had begun, it was finally time. The best moment was when Mum pulled off the protective paper, cleaned the bits of glue from the edges and then showed us the brown and white patches, like the unique pattern on a newborn calf. Whoever had the best marks at school that week was allowed the pot first. I was always the last to get a turn.

I slid backwards and forwards on my chair: my toes didn’t quite reach the floor yet. What I wanted was to keep everyone safe indoors and spread them out across the farm like slices of cooked sausage. In the weekly roundup yesterday, about the South Pole, our teacher had said that some penguins go fishing and never come back. Even though we didn’t live at the South Pole, it was cold here, so cold that the lake had frozen over and the cows’ drinking troughs were full of ice.

We each had two pale blue freezer bags next to our breakfast plates. I held one up and gave my mother a questioning look.

‘To put over your socks,’ she said with a smile that made dimples in her cheeks. ‘It will keep them warm and stop your feet getting wet.’ Meanwhile, she was preparing breakfast for Dad who was helping a cow to calve; after each slice of bread, she’d slide the knife between her thumb and index finger until the butter reached the tips of her fingers, and then she’d scrape it off with the blunt side of the knife. Dad was probably sitting on a milking stool next to a cow taking off a bit of the beestings, clouds of breath and cigarette smoke rising up above its steaming back. I realized there weren’t any freezer bags next to his plate: his feet were probably too big, in particular his left one which was deformed after an accident with a combine harvester when he was about twenty. Next to Mum on the table was the silver cheese scoop she used to assess the flavour of the cheeses she made in the mornings. Before she cut one open, she’d stick the cheese scoop into the middle, through the plastic layer, twist it twice and then slowly pull it out. And she’d eat a piece of cumin cheese just the way she ate the white bread during communion at church, just as thoughtfully and devoutly, slow and staring. Obbe had once joked that Jesus’ body was made of cheese, too, and that was why we were only allowed two slices on our bread each day, otherwise we’d run out of Him too quickly.

Once our mother had said the morning prayer and thanked God ‘for poverty and for wealth; while many eat the bread of sorrows, Thou hast fed us mild and well,’ Matthies pushed his chair back, hung his black leather ice skates around his neck, and put the Christmas cards in his pocket that Mum had asked him to put through the letterboxes of a few neighbours. He was going on ahead to the lake where he was going to take part in the local skating competition with a couple of his friends. It was a twenty-mile route, and the winner got a plate of stewed udders with mustard and a gold medal with the year 2000 on it. I wished I could put a freezer bag over his head, too, so that he’d stay warm for a long time, the seal closed around his neck. He ran his hand through my hair for a moment. I quickly smoothed it back into place and wiped a few crumbs from my pyjama top. Matthies always parted his hair in the middle and put gel in his front locks. They were like two curls of butter on a dish; Mum always made those around Christmas: butter from a tub wasn’t very festive, she thought. That was for normal days and the day of Jesus’ birth wasn’t a normal day, not even if it happened every year all over again as if He died for our sins each year, which I found strange. I often thought to myself: that poor man has been dead a long time, they must have forgotten by now. But better not to mention it, otherwise there wouldn’t be any more sprinkle-covered biscuits and no one would tell the Christmas story of the three kings and the star in the East.

Matthies went into the hall to check his hair, even though it would turn rock hard in the freezing cold and his two curls would go flat and stick to his forehead.

‘Can I come with you?’ I asked. Dad had got my wooden skates out of the attic and strapped them to my shoes with their brown leather ties. I’d been walking around the farm in my skates for a few days, my hands behind my back and the protectors over the blades so they wouldn’t leave marks on the floor. My calves were hard. I’d practised enough now to be able to go out onto the ice without a folding chair to push around.

‘No, you can’t,’ he said. And then more quietly so that only I could hear it, ‘Because we’re going to the other side.’

‘I want to go to the other side, too,’ I whispered.

‘I’ll take you with me when you’re older.’ He put on his woolly hat and smiled. I saw his braces with their zigzagging blue elastic bands.

‘I’ll be back before dark,’ he called to Mum. He turned around once again in the doorway and waved to me, the scene I’d keep replaying in my mind later until his arm no longer raised itself and I began to doubt whether we had even said goodbye.

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Excerpt fromÌęThe Discomfort of Evening.ÌęCopyright © 2020 by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. English translation copyright © 2020 by Michele Hutchison. Reproduced with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, .

Despite 2020 being a downright awful year, it has given us several excellent works of Spanish-language SFT by women, so at least there’s that. With novels and stories exploring such themes as mass surveillance, cannibalism, and nanobot rebellion, readers who hadn’t yet heard about these texts are in for a treat.

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The beginning of the year brought us three short SFT texts—two from Mexico and one from Cuba. Bibiana Camacho’s “,” translated by Cecilia Weddell and published in World Literature Today, tells the chilling story of a woman who realizes that her reflection is not her own. This awareness comes first as she gazes into her bathroom mirror, and then while she’s riding the metro: “I touched my chin and cheeckbones, and though I felt my fingers’ contact, I felt that I was stroking a stranger’s face, one that belonged to some other woman.” Eventually, the chaos that starts to unfold outside of her stalled train mirrors the woman’s fear and panic at this unexpected change in her appearance.

This story is about shifting identities on multiple levels. As translator Cecilia Weddell points out in her accompanying essay “Translation as Masquerade,” the author’s name itself is a pen name, taken up because it is the author’s beloved grandmother’s name. Furthermore, “The Other Woman” can only be rendered into English via translation, which, in this case, is done by a woman who is not the author. As Weddell notes, Camacho’s story is both the same and different in English translation—recognizable yet different from the original, a reality that lies at the heart of translation itself. And yet, according to Weddell, “I cannot say if my translations are as good as what they re-create, but I know the work can be done well.”

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Malena Salazar Maciá’s “,” translated by Toshiya Kamei for The Future Fire, is a dreamlike fantasy about a woman who grows up in a forest, sheltered from everyone and everything by her grandfather. Upon his death, she escapes and wanders into a city, where she is forced into marriage by a cold, unfaithful man who ultimately abandons her. Eventually, she makes her way to the sea and couples with a mermaid, who helps her give birth to herself as the mermaid she always felt herself to be.

Salazar Maciá’s second story in English this year, “,” also translated by Toshiya Kamei but published this time in Clarkesworld Magazine, is the tale of a nanobot rebellion.

Nanobots of various types, originally designed to “instill in us the traditions handed down from our ancestors many millennia ago,” wind up turning against their human hosts. One woman takes it upon herself to bring them back into line and save herself in the process. The author’s two other stories in English were published in 2019 onÌę SFinTranslation.com and in Mithila Review.

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May and August of this year brought us two books by women authors from Argentina: by Samanta Schweblin (translated by Megan McDowell) and by Agustina Bazterrica (translated by Sarah Moses). Like Schweblin’s earlier works in English—Fever Dream and Mouthful of Birds—Little Eyes is a disturbing and surreal text that invites us to rethink our everyday reality. Set in a world that could be our own in just a few years time, it imagines that people can go out and purchase the equivalent of a small stuffed animal (called a “kentuki”) that also has cameras for eyes, wheels for legs, and a motor. Inside of that creature is technology that allows a person on the other side of town or the other side of the world to direct it and give it commands. The owner of the creature knows this, and the person “inhabiting” the creature knows that they know this. And because this is Samanta Schweblin, we know that nothing good will come of this arrangement. Eventually, kentukis proliferate and their owners begin to see them as more than just mobile cameras, but as living creatures with rights and desires. The human connection to technology that it doesn’t fully understand, however, leads to unanticipated horrors.

Speaking of horror, Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh offers us a world in which a virus has made animal meat inedible. Forced to look for other sources of protein, humans quickly turned to cannibalism, legitimizing it by using genetically-modified humans that are raised and slaughtered like the animals before them. One day, the protagonist, who works in one of the processing plants, falls in love with one of the humans he’s supposed to “harvest” and the moral questions that have been forcibly stifled in this new world burst back out into the open.

Alternately surreal, dreamlike, and horrifying, these works of SFT by Spanish-speaking women authors show Anglophone readers just how diverse and intriguing this literature is. And there’s certainly more to look forward to in the coming years.

Ìęby Zhang Ling, translated from the Chinese by Shelly Bryant (AmazonCrossing)

Forthcoming on October 1st from AmazonCrossing,ÌęA Single SwallowÌęby Zhang Ling, the award-winning author of nine novels along with several short story collections. Here’s the jacket copy:

On the day of the historic 1945 Jewel Voice Broadcast—in which Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender to the Allied forces, bringing an end to World War II—three men, flush with jubilation, made a pact. After their deaths, each year on the anniversary of the broadcast, their souls would return to the Chinese village of their younger days. It’s where they had fought—and survived—a war that shook the world and changed their own lives in unimaginable ways. Now, seventy years later, the pledge is being fulfilled by American missionary Pastor Billy, brash gunner’s mate Ian Ferguson, and local soldier Liu Zhaohu.

All that’s missing is Ah Yan—also known as Swallow—the girl each man loved, each in his own profound way.

As they unravel their personal stories of the war, and of the woman who touched them so deeply during that unforgiving time, the story of Ah Yan’s life begins to take shape, woven into view by their memories. A woman who had suffered unspeakable atrocities, and yet found the grace and dignity to survive, she’d been the one to bring them together. And it is her spark of humanity, still burning brightly, that gives these ghosts of the past the courage to look back on everything they endured and remember the woman they lost.

To celebrate the release of this book—and Women in Translation Month—here’s a conversation that Lucy Silag conducted with Zhang Ling:

Lucy Silag: Tell us about Ah Yan, the main character of A Single Swallow. What makes her extraordinary?

Zhang Ling: Ah Yan, “Swallow” in Chinese, is a girl whose initiation into womanhood is marked with unspeakable atrocity, a woman who bears, with dignity and courage, the suffering and shame inflicted upon her by people she abhors as well as people she adores, and a woman who, through her action, redefines the meaning of hope and salvation.

A character pivotal to the development of the story line, Ah Yan outlives all three men who have once loved her, each in a different way. What war has snatched away from her, peace does not give her back. Bullied, downtrodden, but never defeated, she has drawn her strength from attending to the needs of others. It is her spark of humanity, burning brightly throughout her life, that brings people together and gives them hope in their darkest moments. While both of her American lovers have left her, by death and by different course of life, she provides a home and fortress to which the weary Zhaohu, her puppy love, and Ah May, her interracial daughter, turn for shelter and protection. Her extraordinary ability to endure and forgive makes her a truly remarkable woman of her time, and in fact, of all time.

LS: What inspired you to write about Ah Yan’s village during World War II?

ZL: The acts of atrocity committed by the Japanese military and the great sufferings of the Chinese people during the War of Resistance (1939-1945) have not received, in my opinion, sufficient literary attention worldwide. As an enthusiastic reader of wartime memoirs, I’ve for years brooded over the idea of a Chinese war story.

A small, secretive American military group specializing in spy and guerrilla warfare, with an acronym of SACO (Sino-American Special Technical Cooperative Organization),operated in China during WWII. SACO established thirteen camps during 1943-1945 along the Chinese coastline with the dual purpose of gathering meteorological data for a possible air raid on Tokyo and training local Chinese guerrilla forces using the latest technology.

Through my reading I discovered, with great excitement, that the 8th SACO Camp was located in a place called Yuhu (or Yuehu in the novel), which was under the jurisdiction of my hometown Wenzhou, a city 800 km south of Shanghai. The American presence more than 70 years ago in a then very poor and isolated village immediately roused my curiosity. I instantly decided to write a war novel set in my hometown.

LS: The historic detail in A Single Swallow is so vivid. How did you research the novel?

ZL: I was able to arrange field trips, with the help of a local volunteer group, to visit the site of the 8th SACO camp, which has miraculously survived not only the Cultural Revolution but also recent economic development. I met with three surviving Chinese SACO trainees, an old man who worked when he was a youngster as a kitchen helper for the Americans, and some local residents with childhood memories of their interactions with the American soldiers in the village, etc. Vivid details emerged from my meetings with those people.

While my reading has helped me to gain a historic perspective of the war, the field trips helped me understand the poverty and sufferings of China as a war-torn country, the local people’s initial resentment and distrust of the American presence forced upon them, the displacement and alienation the American soldiers felt when trapped in an isolated village thousands of miles away from home, and the bond that eventually established between these two groups of people.

LS: The three narrators of the story—Pastor Billy, U.S. gunner’s mate Ian Ferguson, and local Chinese soldier Liu Zhaohu—each bring a new perspective to the story and to Ah Yan as a character. What makes each of their voices distinct?

ZL: By age and line of work, Pastor Billy is naturally the more mature and nurturing type. His mind is constantly occupied with thoughts about Ah Yan’s future when the war ends—her education, her medical career, and her financial independence, etc. His plan seems to proceed well except for one problem: he realizes, along the way, that he wants to be a part of her future, too. Sadly, he never gets a chance to find out whether his feelings for her are reciprocated.

A well-educated youth by local standard, Liu Zhaohu (“Tiger” in Chinese) gets his ideas about changing the world from his more sophisticated teachers in school, but the war shatters everything around him, including his chance to build a life with Ah Yan. Unable to overcome the shame and humiliation associated with Ah Yan’s lost virginity as a result of gang rape by the Japanese, he abandons his duty to Ah Yan and his own family, hoping in vain to die an eager and heroic death in battlefield. Forever haunted by his guilt-laden conscience, he lives his post-war years destitute of passion and enthusiasm.

Out of the three, Ian is the only one not aware of, nor bothered by, Ah Yan’s painful past. Ian’s youthful energy and free spirit breathe fresh air into Ah Yan’s care-laden life, but their flame of passion is doomed evanescent. Peace separates them as suddenly as the war has once joined them, leaving her pregnant with his child. This child, a girl named Ah May, becomes the talk of the town for many years to come, as Ah Yan never reveals the true identity of the father.

These three men each plays a different role in Ah Yan’s life. While Pastor Billy is a fatherly figure, forever living in a future tense, Liu Zhaohu seems to dwell on the past, unable to cross the gulf of shame. Ian’s youthful passion for life in its present tense seems to strike a right chord with Ah Yan. Pastor Billy embodies knowledge, wisdom and common sense whereas Ian represents youth and passion dangerously bordering on recklessness. A terribly torn man unable to put the broken pieces of life together, Liu Zhaohu, on the other hand, procrastinates whenever called upon to make a decision. Those are the elements I was conscious of while creating their individual voices.

LS: A Single Swallow was released in China in 2017 to wide acclaim. What is the most common thing that readers say about it when they reach out to you?

ZL; Readers were quite intrigued by the existence of SACO camps throughout China during WWII, as this part of history is new to most of them. While outraged by the atrocity of war and saddened by the suffering of Ah Yan, they admire her incredible resilience, her innate ability to forgive and love, and her power to neutralize the most trying crises in life. Many of my readers, old and young alike, feel that there is a sense of modernity in Ah Yan, as she struggles to maintain her “five hundred pounds and a room of her own” even in the direst situations.

LS:What was the most emotional section of this novel to write?

ZL: Two sections seem to linger in my mind long after I’ve finished the novel. The first one is the farewell scene when Ian leaves the village at the armistice and his houseboy, Buffalo, runs barefoot after him, with the boots Ian gives him as a parting gift slung around his neck, to say his long goodbyes, until he reaches the port and can go no further. Fully aware this might be their last sight of each other, they wave and wave until the boat carrying Ian and his comrades fades into the deep sea.

The second section is when Ah Yan, narrowly escaping a rape attempt by a Chinese trainee who regards her as a piece of left-over by the Japanese, finally decides to lay bare the story of her past in front of a strange and initially unsympathetic crowd, just to stop, once and for all, the gossip that has haunted her wherever she goes. It breaks my heart to write about the agonizing pain inflicted upon her not only by the enemy, but also by her own people.

LS: Tell us what you are working on now.Ìę

ZL: During the pandemic outbreak in China, I was trapped in my hometown Wenzhou, the second most affected area in China outside Hubei Province (where Wuhan lies), for three weeks. Cut off from my family and social ties in a lockdown city, I succumbed to fear, both real and imagined, of my daily supply chain being interrupted. Upon returning to Toronto, I’ve started to write about my experience there. This will be my first work of non-fiction.

Ìęby Naja Marie Aidt, translated from the Danish by K. E. Semmel

Naja Marie Aidt’s long-awaited first novel is a breathtaking page-turner and complex portrait of a man whose life slowly devolves into one of violence and jealousy.

Rock, Paper, ScissorsÌęopens shortly after the death of Thomas and Jenny’s criminal father. While trying to fix a toaster that he left behind, Thomas discovers a secret, setting into motion a series of events leading to the dissolution of his life, and plunging him into a dark, shadowy underworld of violence and betrayal.

A gripping story written with a poet’s sensibility and attention to language,ÌęRock, Paper, ScissorsÌęshowcases all of Aidt’s gifts and will greatly expand the readership for one of Denmark’s most decorated and beloved writers.

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by Xiao Hong, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt

Ma Bo’le’s Second LifeÌęis a humorous-yet-stark depiction of the despair of ordinary Chinese people confronted with the sudden onslaught of war and Westernization. It follows theÌęeponymous cowardly layabout as he escapes his unhappy family life by going on the run to avoid the coming Japanese invasion. Just a step ahead of the destruction, bumbling his way from one poorly thought out situation to the next, Ma Bo’le’s comic journey mirrors that of China as a whole during this chaotic period of history.

Incredibly well respected during her short, difficult lifetime, Xiao Hong’s final novel is an undiscovered masterpiece, a philosophical comedy in the vein ofÌęBouvard and PĂ©cuchet, finally available to English readers in Howard Goldblatt’s inventive rendering.

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by Josefine Klougart, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken

The English-language debut from one of Denmark’s most exciting, celebrated young writers,ÌęOne of Us Is SleepingÌęis a haunting novel about loss in all its forms.

As she returns home to visit her mother who is dying of cancer, the narrator recounts a brief, intense love affair, as well as the grief and disillusionment that follow its end. The book’s striking imagery and magnificent prose underpin its principal theme: the jarring contrast between the recollection of stability—your parents, your childhood home, your love—and the continual endings that we experience throughout our lives.

A true-to-life, deeply poetic novel that works in the same vein as Anne Carson,ÌęOne of Us Is SleepingÌęhas won Klougart countless accolades and award nominations—including the Readers’ Book Award—securing her place as a major new voice in world literature.

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by Marguerite Duras, translated from the French by Barbara Bray

Disaffected, bored with his career at the French Colonial Ministry (where he has copied out birth and death certificates for eight years), and disgusted by a mistress whose vapid optimism arouses his most violent misogyny, the narrator of The Sailor from Gibraltar finds himself at the point of complete breakdown while vacationing in Florence. After leaving his mistress and the Ministry behind forever, he joins the crew of The Gibraltar, a yacht captained by Anna, a beautiful American in perpetual search of her sometime lover, a young man known only as the “Sailor from Gibraltar.”

First published in 1952, this early novel of Duras’s—which was made into a film in 1967—shows those preoccupations which have so deeply concerned her in her later novels and film scripts: loneliness, boredom, the inevitability and intangibility of love. The lambent poetry of the book, and the limning of a woman’s mind, her love and sense of the inevitability of that love are singularly Marguerite Duras.

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These four books, and are 40% off all month—just use WITMONTH at checkout!

A few years back, she gave with Luciana Carvalho. The whole thing is worth checking out, but here are a couple highlights:

CARVALHO: We last saw each other during your talk in the Translation Matters series at Stanford. I cannot help but start with a question that draws not only on the name of the series, but also on the title of Edith Grossman’s book: Why translation matters. However, the question has a slight twist, because I would like to focus on Karen Sotelino, the translator: Why does translation matter—to you? Or what is—to you—the meaning of translation? How has it shaped your life?

SOTELINO: Your mention of Edith Grossman’s book is, I think, a good departure point. She said, “Where literature exists, translation exists;” another way to think about why translation matters is to think about why reading, and reading fiction in particular matters. There has been a significant amount of recent research in psychology analyzing the question of the role the imagination and empathy play in our society, especially by Alison Gopnik at UC Berkeley. It so happens that ability to imagine, and to empathize has been linked to other forms of intelligence. If we can think of reading fiction as a form of honing our imagination and our ability to empathize, translating literature, and/or comparing works in more than one language is reading at its most complex level. And, of course the ability to reach into another culture through language has been enormously fulfilling. My Bachelor’s degree was in International Relations—political science, economics, French and Italian. It took me several years to realize that the language component of my studies had truly been the most useful, had offered me the most insight. Over the nearly 20 years I lived in Brazil, I had the opportunity to meet people from very different segments of society: business, art, education, and of course, the marginalized. Truthfully, it wasn’t my degree in International Relations from Stanford that facilitated so many situations; it was my ability with language. Obviously a translator should have other interests, and every single great translator I have ever known does, in fact, have other passions. But the love of language, the ability to communicate in another language is what makes a translator. I felt extremely fortunate when I was invited to teach translation at Associação Alumni in São Paulo, to be able to share my ideas on the importance of language and communication . . . because, as I mentioned, my sense is that language is integral to empathy and imagination. So translation has taken that role in my life, a means through which to express my, shall we say, more philosophical ideas. [. . .]

CARVALHO: During your talk at Stanford, you actually shared samples of your work on Resurrection and Ancient Tillage, and reflected on them. You even showed a wonderful photograph of one or two of the pages of Lavoura Arcaica full of notes in the margins, the pages were indeed extensively glossed by you. How often to do you take notes on the original? What do you usually consider worthy of notes? And when teaching translation, do you share your own process? How else do you foster students’ reflectivity?

SOTELINO: I think each translator has their own system. I usually describe my process as “hearing” the translation. When I start reading a novel, I plan to translate, I spontaneously hear it in English. But that process gets interrupted when there is a word I don’t recognize. Or a situation I might be unsure of. In the case of Machado de Assis, something as simple as location can throw one off. Think about this: a conversation that takes place in the garden might have a different tone than one that takes place in the living room. The same conversation might be different if there were someone else present. So as I’m reading or translating, I might create two different versions of the same conversation—later I go back to situate the dialogue. In the case of Raduan Nassar, there were many vocabulary words that he had used in unusual manners, which is of course typical of great authors. They bring language to life. But for the translator it is risky—we have to bring language to life but in a way that readers accept. Otherwise, it’s “kill the messenger.” I’m somewhat cautious about sharing my own process with students because I know that translating is a very individual exercise, like painting or singing . . . What I do tell them is to respect the original text, ask themselves why an author has chosen to express an idea in a certain way, to choose one vocabulary word over another, and to keep in mind that the author has had the same choices they, as translators, have. So if the author uses an unusual word, don’t use a clichĂ©!

CARVALHO: Finally, when you are translating, and as an accomplished and seasoned translator, what are the translation theories that most often come to your mind? In what kinds of situations do you feel the need to tap translation theory when you are translating? How eclectic are they? And how significant are they to your work? Will you be sharing some of this in your forthcoming book on literary translation, practice and theory?

SOTELINO: Well . . . I sometimes think about the issue of domesticating. It’s funny, because I do not consider myself a very innovative translator—in the sense of creating a text in English that will read so foreign that readers will be alienated. But I have found over the years that I do feel strongly that the originality of Portuguese language literature must be recorded in English. I am currently working on a Portuguese author, Raul BrandĂŁo, who wrote before Virginia Woolf, and whose stream of consciousness and vague narrative voice are extremely innovative. In the process of copy-editing, I’ve had to be somewhat stubborn! How can I homogenize such a creative voice? And why should I? To make him conform to some preconceived notion of what a Portuguese language author should sound like? So the timeless question of the belles inŽÚŸ±»ćĂš±ô±đČő does come up in my mind. I really try to make my translations both belles and ŽÚŸ±»ćĂš±ô±đČő. Otherwise, I must admit, I am far more influenced by linguistic theory than translation theory. Saussure’s description of sign, signifier and signified seems to me crucial to approaching translation. The translator must understand that each reader will create their own image, or sign. I am very influenced by Voloshinov, who theorized that language is not neutral, that every speech act, every word carries different connotations for different readers/listeners. Umberto Eco describes the “deep story” that the translator must respect, that is, the translator should bear in mind the fundamental message of the author in order to choose the register, vocabulary and atmosphere of the text. Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of “making strange,”that is, re-representing works of art in new environments is another theory I’ve found useful. And Walter Benjamin, who, in “The Task of the Translator,” talks about the importance of translators reading between the lines, has been fundamental. He claimed that translation is the language of philosophers—that the translated text reveals the hidden meanings behind originals. Perhaps that goes too far, but one must look for one’s friends while facing the lonely endeavor of literary translation. These theorists in a sense guide me, if only subliminally. My book is based on their work. I look at literary prose in translation, and I study what is missing, where there are differences between the original and the translation. Guess what? It turns out that in most cases, what is missing from a literary translation is crucial to the original text. For example, I translated a novel by a Portuguese author who was very fond of using the indeterminate “-se” structure, which in English, as you know, can be translated as “I,” “we,” and “one.” This is standard fare from Portuguese to English, I mean this sort of difficulty. But what happens when we ask ourselves why a particular author used such a structure? When did they use it, at what point in the work? Such is also the case with Machado de Assis’s polysemic usage—difficult to translate and leading to discrepancies between the several translators of his major works. In my book I look at these discrepancies in the context of language philosophy.

Again, the whole interview can be found .

Unfortunately, most of the time when Polish reportage is written about (such as ), the focus falls on the major maleÌęwriters of note. KapuƛciƄski, Melchior WaƄkowicz, Wojciech Tochman, Artur DomosƂawski, etc. Not that these writers aren’t all very interesting, and worth reading, but the influence of the foundingÌęmothers of Polish reportage—and their “daughters”—tend to be overlooked.

I’m not any sort of expert on this (or anything, really), but I thought for the second day of Women in Translation Month, it would be interesting to highlight three works of Polish reportage by women writers—including a forthcoming one that, if I’m being completely honest, prompted this post.

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Ìęby Hanna Krall, translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm (Feminist Press)

A contemporary of KapuƛciƄski’s, Hanna Krall is one of the few women who do get name-checked in articles about Polish reportage, and with good reason. A survivor of the holocaust, Krall has written a lot about World War II, including what’s arguably her most famous book,ÌęShielding the FlameÌę(sadly out of print) which is subtitled: “An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.”

Chasing the King of HeartsÌętells the story of Izolda, and her harrowing experiences in the concentration camps, and her desperate search to find and help her husband after he’s sent to Auschwitz. It’s a very powerful book, and masterfully translated, which is why it received the 2018 English PEN Translation Prize. (Full disclosure: I was on that jury along with Will Evans and Julia Sanches.)

I can’t find my copy here (probably at the office), but if I remember right, Krall gives a bit of the history behind how this book came to be and admits that this is essentially a rewriting of a book she had been commissioned to write, but which never never saw the light of day. I might be inventing half or more of this story, but “Izolda” wanted Krall to write a book that would become a major movie. That’s not the book Krall wanted to write, and after Izolda passed, she reconstructed the work, paring it down and employing her more traditional, journalistic techniques.

What’s kind of funny about the reception of this book—which points to some of the issues regarding Polish reportage and Western-style hard journalism—is that no one really knows if this book is a novel or not. On the Feminist Press page, the description starts “in this canonical work of Polish reportage,” and is followed by this blurb from theÌęSunday TimesÌęabout “this strange unsettling novel.” EvenÌęPublishers WeeklyÌęput it in their Best Fiction Works of 2017 . . .

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by Malgorzata Szejnert, translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye (Scribe Publications)

Also born in the mid-30s, Malgorzata Szejnert co-founded Poland’s leading daily newspaperÌęGazeta WyborczaÌęand led its reportage division for 15 years.ÌęHer first works started appearing in the early 1970s, but this is the first book of hers to be translated into English.

When we first set about crafting the Open Letter Polish Reportage series, we talked with Sean Bye and Antonia Lloyd-Jones about which titles we should focus on first. (Sean actually translated the first book in our series, Foucault in Warsaw, which is coming next spring.) Sean had told me quite a bit about this book, a giant account of testimonies, memoirs, photographs, and letters that bring to life all of the varied experiences of arguably the most famous landmark of immigration in the world.

published a section of this book last week (the book comes out tomorrow), which is definitely worth checking out:

That is precisely what takes place on the island. After entering a large vestibule on the ground floor of the station’s main building, the immigrants climb up one floor, under the watchful eye of doctors who, as we already know, wear military-looking uniforms. People arriving from the subjugated nations of Europe fear nothing and no one more than men in uniforms, who embody oppression in their towns and villages—so they do everything to stay out of sight: hiding behind someone taller, disappearing into their coats, or covering themselves with their bundles. These naive methods have been quickly discovered, catalogued, and laid out in instructions, and the doctors know exactly whom to pull out of the crowd for further investigation.

A medical inspector giving the immigrants a quick visual once-over must pay attention to six elements: the skin of the head, the face, the neck, the arms, the gait, and their general condition—physical and mental.

If any of the above is invisible to the naked eye, the doctor will stop the immigrant to make sure there is nothing suspicious going on.

A high collar. This must be unbuttoned to check if there is a goiter or an ulcer lurking underneath.

A hat. Often used to cover ringworm or mycosis.

A thick head of curls. As above.

A cap pulled low over the eyes. This could conceal conjunctivitis or trachoma.

A hand hidden under a coat, a scarf, or a bag. The limb may turn out to be deformed, paralyzed, missing fingers, or afflicted with tinea.

Luggage. This can be used to conceal deficient posture. The immigrant must lay their bags on the ground and walk about ten feet without them.

Children above the age of two clinging to their mothers. The mother must proceed as above.

It is calculated that on days with larger intake, when Ellis Island accepts four to five thousand people, each doctor has more or less six seconds to visually scan a single person. The medical inspectors, also known as “line inspectors,” are increasingly known for their “six-second physicals.”

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Ìęby Katarzyna Boni, translated from the Polish by Mark Ordon (Open Letter)

And here’s the book that set this post in motion . . . I just finished editing this last night and man, I’m blown away. This is Svetlana Alexievich level good. (Having been involved in the publication of Voices from Chernobyl, I feel justified in making this claim.) There’s a reason it won the Gryfia Award for female Polish writers. It was also nominated for the Conrad Award and the Ryszard KapuƛciƄski Award for literary reportage.

Broken up into three sections, Ganbare!Ìędetails the twin tragedies of the tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011, and the ensuing Fukushima nuclear disaster. Although I’ve been reading about these events all summer—starting with AndrĂ©s Neuman’s latest book,Ìę—but this is by far, the most comprehensive, most compelling account of how these horrific events impacted the people of Japan. From details about the cremation process—and the inability to keep up with the dead bodies after the tsunami—to the overwhelming number of ghosts and spirits that wrecked havoc in the region, to the hour by hour breakdown of the Fukushima event (which would make an incredibly tense movie) to the ways in which the government obfuscated the dangers of exposure to radiation, this book brings to life so many different perspectives and individual stories in a way that’s both a gut punch and hard to put down. (The final section on the “Workshops on Dying” messed me up a bit.)

This won’t come out for another year, but when it does, I think it’s going to get an exceptional amount of attention. We’re working on the possibility of producing a multi-part, scripted podcast speaking with experts and reporters about some of the aspects of these tragic events. There’s so much to go into, and, if done right, this could be a really engaging way to promote the book itself. (And I’m already excited to read her new book that just came out in May about a planned utopia in the south of India.)

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If you want more information of Polish reportage, I’d recommend and Sean Gaspar Bye’s list of . Additionally, I did a podcast with Sean and Antonia about this subject that’s also worth listening to. (And includes Chasing the King of Hearts.)

And you can find all of the Women in Translation Month posts by clicking here.

For this first kick off post though, I’m going to cheat a bit. Keeping up with the Translation Database during COVID-19 has been so tricky. We don’t get mail, I’m trying to enter in books based on iPage searches,ÌęPWÌęreviews, email, and Twitter references, so IÌęknow this list is totally incomplete. (If you want to help me out—please! I need soooo much help right now—feel free to add all missing titles .) But, here’s what I have, at this moment, for 2020 works of fiction and poetry in translation that were written by women. (Later in the month, I’ll run a list of all booksÌętranslatedÌęby women, but I want to fill out my database more first.)

Fiction:

Poetry:

This is embarrassing to me. I know that I’m missing a TON of books—especially in the last half of the year. By the end of the month, these lists will be much closer to complete—I promise. But for now, if you’re looking for a new #WIT book to read this month, this list is a decent enough starting place!

More analysis to come next weekend, but for the rest of this week, let’s actually talk about specific books.

“When you live in an adopted country, when you’re an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death.”

Cars on Fire, MĂłnica RamĂłn RĂ­os’s electric, uncompromising English-language debut, unfolds through a series of female characters―the writer, the patient, the immigrant, the professor, the student―whose identities are messy and ever-shifting. A speechwriter is employed writing for would-be dictators, but plays in a rock band as a means of protest. A failed Marxist cuts off her own head as a final poetic act. With incredible formal range, from the linear to the more free-wheeling, the real to the fantastical to the dystopic, Rios offers striking, jarring glimpses into life as a woman and an immigrant. Set in New York City, New Jersey, and Chile’s La Zona Central, the stories inÌęCars on FireÌęoffer powerful remembrances to those lost to violence, and ultimately make the case for the power of art, love, and feminine desire to subvert the oppressive forces―xenophobia, neoliberalism, social hierarchies within the academic world―that shape life in Chile and the United States.

Ìę Here’s one of the stories from the opening section of the collection.

“The Writer”

I move in slender fog
but I still wear
the features of my face
. . .
and I answer to my name
although I’m someone else by now.
Ìę

Gabriela Mistral, â€ÆàŸ±ČőłŠŽÇ±č±đ°ùČâ,” Poem of Chile

Ìę

Before the writer died, she’d held long meetings with her lawyers to discuss the possibility of being buried far from her country of origin with all the papers she’d written and never published.

One of the envelopes I’d found on her nightstand, even before I realized that the body in the bed was no longer breathing, contained the signed papers. My name was written in trembling letters on another, smaller envelope with the unmistakable green ink she used to draft her manuscripts. Inside it was a long letter dated two days before. It explained why she felt it would do no one any good to read her old notebooks. They’d only find her sorrows, her regrets—not because her life had been dissatisfying, but because her papers were crammed with experiences that had plagued her repeatedly in the form of dreams, night terrors, or when she forgot to take her pills—an empty medicine bottle on her nightstand—even when the people involved were long dead. No one could possibly benefit from reading a compendium of humanity’s most hideous features, which had pervaded the writer like fog.

As she once read in a mediocre book—her steady, uniform handwriting informed me that this was how she judged most of her contemporaries—the passing of time was supposed to imply that one had acquired a certain wisdom in focusing on pleasurable things—I could almost hear her say the words, her voice dense with sarcasm. Ever since she was a young woman, she had devoted her mind to resolving things that any reasonable person would dismiss as unimportant. But they reminded her that there was essentially nothing, deep down, to distinguish her from the gargoyles trapped in limbo between the St. Vitus Cathedral and the rest of Prague. Maybe this was only obvious to me because I’d spent so many years helping her with her work and her personal affairs, years in which my own writing was starved of attention, withered by the emotional paroxysms that periodically disfigured the writer’s face—the scratch on my left cheek smarted at the sight of her lifeless nails peeking out from under the sheets. It wasn’t that she’d killed anyone—with reference to the legal scandal that hounded Mario Vargas Llosa and RubĂ©n Santos Babel—or that she’d destroyed young female writers who wrote like her—an allusion to the article she’d written under a critic’s pseudonym for several journals in her home country. What she meant is that she’d let her nightmares ruin every moment of her life, every relationship, every place she’d ever visited—her complaints filled interminable paragraphs. I skimmed them. She hated people, she mistrusted them, and perhaps, the writer mused, her sole raison d’ĂȘtre was to work out their basest inclinations, to fix a clinical eye on everyone who entered her field of vision. Where could this destructive instinct have originated, if she’d had an idyllic childhood and the world rose up sweetly to meet her? Even at a very young age—I remembered the time she’d shoved that academic out of an elevator—she couldn’t stand places where people congregate: museums, concerts, parties, gatherings, offices, conferences, readings, houses, living rooms, hallways, public restrooms, and assembly halls. She didn’t know how to behave among people she actually knew. She felt more comfortable as the eternal, ever-inaccessible foreigner. This was the source of her countless woes and afflictions, and it explained why she was always on the move.

I thought I heard a sigh leave her body as it lay prone. Out of habit, I got up to check on her. I looked at her face for the first time since I’d entered the room. Her eyes were half-open, her eyelashes metallic. Her skin had taken on the texture of drying wall sealant. Gum, I heard myself say, my voice a wispy thread.

I opened the windows to air out the medicinal smell that had thickened during her dragged-out death throes, real or imagined. I sat down in an armchair to watch the sun shifting along the rug until it reached the foot of the bed and illuminated a delicate curtain of dust spilling down from the books on the nightstand.

Sometime in her thirties, the writer had decided that the only way she could keep on living was to document her regrets in curt, precise, objective sentences. Attaining this literary distance from her own memories, the writer continued, her penmanship listing forward into dramatic peaks, was the only way she could forget. The bookshelves in her house soon filled with notebooks, and the notebooks filled with endlessly repetitive phrases. And so on for decades. The letter piqued my interest at last.

I daydreamed about where the notebooks might be. I knew she’d stashed some of them away in the walls, but what if there were more?

They were nothing but pages and pages of useless drivel—I sensed, in the letter, the writer’s desperation to dissuade me from the search, and I felt a rush of pleasure—that no one in their right mind would waste more than an instant thinking about. They overflowed with events that were of little interest to anyone, not even the writer herself, but would soon lodge themselves in her mind like inflection points with hundreds of possible interpretations. Later, much too late, the writer realized things she’d done, emotions she never knew she’d felt. As she stood in the kitchen, knife poised over the butter, or just before bed, or subsumed in a deep sleep, they’d reappear. Then she’d take out whatever notebook she was keeping at the time.

The sentences soon turned into verses. The verses into songs. The songs into elaborate precepts on the meaning of life that seeped into her work, the speech of her characters, her narrative style, her own voice. I could almost hear her declare “Tell me what it feels like to be alive,” the edict that would become, thanks to an erroneous attribution, her most frequently quoted line. She never dared correct the misunderstanding. It hounded her when she won those prizes. It plagued her on the death of the stepdaughter she’d cared for as her own, and even when her own death started nipping at her heels. As soon as anything receded into the past, she realized that she actually enjoyed her friends’ mistakes, enjoyed contributing to the demolition of the young man who approached her as she prattled on in a corner of the hall, enjoyed pronouncing stark truths that caused the ruin of her loved ones.

I put down the letter, half-read—I couldn’t take any more of her whining—and glanced at her motionless body. Then I opened all the little wooden doors in the room that had been her workplace for so many years. I stared at the spines of the notebooks. They covered more than an entire wall, spilling out of the shelves she’d built herself, hidden behind the books. She always used the same kind of notebook at first, but they soon started changing size and color. There was a thick-notebook period and a small-and-thin-notebook period. Later, she’d settled on a specific kind of notebook that was bound in bluish leather and ruled with lines that were far too wide for her tiny script.

I sat down in her reading chair, switched on the lamp, and started paging through them. The same stories were repeated over and over in different syntax, in different words intentionally overlaid with contradictory meanings. She omitted information that appeared later on, or rearranged events out of order, or included explanations where there hadn’t previously been any. The stories grew longer and more complex. Then they shrank down until they all seemed like the very same story endlessly written and rewritten. In the last notebooks, the stories morphed into mere lines, as if marking her mental activity in waves, peaks, and valleys, grounded in nothing but the green strokes of a pen on paper.

I was supposed to organize the funeral. She’d made the request in writing, the lawyers told me that night. This information and her other wishes lured journalists like wayward men to siren songs. Disputes with the leaders of the writer’s sect were made public. Under the dark tunics and demonic masks they used to conceal their identities, they declared that her body must be buried without pollutants: naked and alone. No one but they must know the location of her grave, and no mark or fire must inscribe it. After a long discussion among the lawyers, trying to avert a scandal, and after various intrusions by the literary milieu and the fans amassing outside what had been the writer’s home, but now served as storage for my furniture, I managed to orchestrate her cremation behind everyone else’s backs and attended it as a spectator.

“One cold winter evening, I stood before the snow-white body of the writer and watched it blaze inside a concrete grid.” So begins my prologue to the edition of her Dirty Notebooks, which is how I chose to title the anthology of her posthumous work.

And as a special bonus, for everyone who orders five or more titles from this collection will receive a free “” t-shirt! Ìę Ìę(Just put your preferred size in the “notes” when ordering.)

Check out the of Open Letter titles written by, or translated by, women. Here are a few highlights:

Ìęby Sara Mesa
Translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore

An exploration of the relationship between the powerful and powerless—and the repetition of these patterns—Mesa’s “sophisticated nightmare” calls to mind great works of gothic literature (think Shirley Jackson) and social thrillers to create a unique, unsettling view of freedom and how a fear of the outside world can create monsters.

Ìęby Ha Seong-nan
Translated from the Korean by Janet Hong

“These mesmerizing stories of disconnection and detritus unfurl with the surreal illogic of dreams—it’s as impossible to resist their pull as it is to understand, in retrospect, how circumstance succeeded circumstance to finally deliver the reader into a moment as indelible as it is unexpected.”
—Susan Choi

byÌęMĂłnica RamĂłn RĂ­os
Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers

“When you live in an adopted country, when you’re an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death.”

Cars on Fire, Mónica Ramón Ríos’s electric, uncompromising English-language debut, unfolds through a series of characters—the writer, the patient, the immigrant, the professor, the student—whose identities are messy and ever-shifting.

Ìęby MercĂš Rodoreda
Translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent

Set in 1920s Spain,ÌęGarden by the Sea takes place over six summers at a villa by the sea inhabited by a young couple and their beautiful, rich, joyous friends. We get to see the dissolution of these magical summers through the eyes of the gardener, as a sense of darkness and ending creeps in, precipitated by the construction of a new, larger, more glamorous villa next door.

by Kristín Ómarsdóttir
Translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith

“[A] daringly droll, wholly perturbing book.”
—New York Times

A lyrical and continually surprising take on the absurdity of war and the mysteries of childhood,Children in Reindeer WoodsÌęis a moving modern fable.

by Bae SuahÌę
Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

“Bae Suah offers the chance to unknow—to see the everyday afresh and be defamiliarized with what we believe we know—which is no small offering.”
—Music & Literature

A novel of memories and wandering,ÌęA Greater MusicÌęblends riffs on music, language, and literature with a gut-punch of an emotional ending, establishing Bae Suah as one of the most exciting novelists working today.

byÌęMaria JosĂ© Silveira
Translated from the Portuguese by Eric Becker

Traces a Brazilian family’s lineage, from the arrival of the Portuguese armada in 1500 to the twenty-first century.

by Can Xue
Translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping

“There’s a new world master among us, and her name is Can Xue.”
—Robert Coover

Introduction by Porochista Khakpour

A layered, multifaceted masterpiece from the 2015 winner of the Best Translated Book Award,ÌęFrontier exemplifies John Darnielle’s statement that Can Xue’s books read “as if dreams had invaded the physical world.”

by Inga Ābele
Translated from the Latvian by Kaija Straumanis

Winner of the 2015 AATSEEL Book Award for Best Translation into English

“A sharp realist.”
—Aleksandar Hemon

Told more or less in reverse chronological order,ÌęHigh TideÌęis the story of Ieva, her dead lover, her imprisoned husband, and the way their youthful decisions dramatically impacted the rest of their lives.

Those results are especially disconcerting if you assume that the countries whose authors are most frequently translated have a larger impact on the perception (and sales) of literature in translation. Which led me to wonder: Are the results any different if you take theÌępublishersÌęwho do the most books in translation? Answer: Nope, not really.

Well, on the upside, AmazonCrossing has published more books by women than men (60.00%), but then things drop off rather quickly, with Other Press coming in at 39.36% and only four presses (those two plus Europa and Open Letter) above 30%. That far right side is bleak. Dalkey Archive, NYRB, FSG, Archipelago, Knopf, and Pushkin are all under 20% (Pushkin is 12.86%, which, ouch).

To make this easier to view in terms of raw numbers, here’s a graph of the number of titles by men and women from each of those fourteen presses.

Similar to France on the last set of charts, the gap for Dalkey looks insane. Although those little blue bars for NYRB, FSG, Archipelago, Knopf, and Pushkin aren’t much better.

And if you take all of these presses and add their books together? Only 31.45% of all their fiction and poetry in translation since 2008 has been written by women. (Almost identical to the 32.27% breakdown for titles from the most translated countries.) Visually, that looks like this:

Given that, combined, these presses are doing approximately 164 titles a year, it would take overÌęfour yearsÌęof publishingÌęonlyÌębooks in translation by women to reach a 50-50 balance.

All of this is useful to know, if not a bit discouraging, but it also makes me wonder what impact Women in Translation Month has had on the industry as a whole. Come back next week for some analysis of pre-WITMonth versus post-WITMonth numbers. Should be interesting to see who’s tried to course-correct (and where those books are coming from).

Anyway, we’ll wrap this with a chart of the raw numbers.

You can support Women in Translation Month—and Open Letter—by using the code and receiving 40% all books written OR translated by women. That’s a significant portion of our catalog, and includes a ton of great books, from all of Dubravka Ugresic’s books to Ingrid Winterbach to MercĂš Rodoreda to Naja Marie Aidt’s first novel to Madame Nielsen to Bae Suah, to many many more.