Raising the Volume
Five Poet-Translators on Women in Translation
Aviya Kushner, Sharon Dolin, Katherine E. Young, Andrea Jurjevic, Nancy Naomi Carlson | September 2022
Aviya Kushner, Sharon Dolin, Katherine E. Young, Andrea Jurjevic, Nancy Naomi Carlson
Introduction
Aviya Kushner
Translations make up a tiny portion of books published in English—about three percent in America, by most estimates,1 and 5.63 percent in the United Kingdom.2 But if a translation does manage to make it into English, the author is usually a man. Less than twenty-nine percent of literary translations published between 2008–2018 were of books by women authors, according to the University of Rochester’s translation database.3 This depressing situation has major implications for readers and writers.
Once you notice the shortage of international women’s voices, you can’t stop noticing. The absence glares at you from bookstore shelves and college syllabi. It reverberates in your mind as you read about how Jennifer Croft4 spent a decade trying to place her translation of Flights, a novel by Olga Tokarczuk—who later won the Nobel Prize. But passionate translators and committed readers of international literature are trying hard to make people notice that much of the world is excluded from their reading.
Women in Translation now has its own month—August—to raise awareness, and its own Tumblr. Several literary magazine editors have issued calls for translations of women writers translated by women, and dozens of dedicated readers take to social media to discuss their reading of books written by women around the globe. But most people in the broader literary community still don’t realize that the chance of a woman writer getting translated into English, and then read, is miniscule.
Our panel was born out of the desire to make noise.
Our title “Raising the Volume” reflects our hope—as four women translators—to make sure more writers understand just how limited the literary landscape really is. We came to AWP in the hope of sparking a broader conversation. We each focused on women writers who are unknown or barely known, and discussed issues particular to a region’s specific literary landscape. In total, these presentations showed one undeniable fact—most of the world’s talented women writers are completely ignored.
Of course, there are some blockbuster women writers in translation, like Elena Ferrante. Big names like Jhumpa Lahiri have also become passionate advocates for translation, and they are translators themselves. But our concern is for the less famous, for the vast pool of talented women writers who have no chance because they come from a place that is ignored in the literary community, or because the literary community has preconceived notions about who they should be or what they should be writing about. These writers often do not fit the slick image of writers “you should know about” for reasons like age, economic status, and subject matter—none of which have anything to do with literary excellence.
I chose to discuss my translations of two striking poets, Yudit Shahar and Rina Soffer. Both women made their debuts relatively late in life—one at fifty-eight and one at ninety-two. Both are from marginalized backgrounds that are unusual in Israeli poetry; Shahar grew up in extreme poverty in Tel Aviv as the child of Turkish immigrants, and Soffer grew up in Lebanon. Hebrew is Soffer’s third language, after her native Arabic and her schooling in French.
Once you notice the shortage of international women’s voices, you can’t stop noticing. The absence glares at you from bookstore shelves and college syllabi. It reverberates in your mind…
Shahar’s work chronicles financial inequality and the struggle to survive as a single mom in low-wage jobs like telemarketer, housecleaner, and vegetable-seller. Soffer’s poems detail the sex life of a woman in her late eighties and early nineties. Neither fit into expectations of what an Israeli poet “should” write about, and so I found myself thinking about the inherent bias in expecting a writer to write about a particular subject. For women writers all over the world, “expectation bias” often further limits their chances of being translated.
Why does all this matter? Without translation, women writers are doomed to local careers; their voices will never appear on the world stage. They will never be eligible for awards outside their country, and they will never be taught in universities worldwide. They may never have the chance to be in conversation with writers who work in languages other than their own. In these essays, women translators take us inside all these complex issues as they discuss four different literary cultures and make a case for individual women writers all of us should read.
Where are the Women Writers in Translation of Spain?
Sharon Dolin
According to Three Percent, as of 2019, twenty-seven percent of the books from Spain that are translated into English are by women.5 That means that books by men account for almost three-quarters of all books translated. I translate poetry from Catalan, one of the regional languages within Spain. While it is true that the greatest and most well-known 20th-century Catalan novelist is, arguably, Mercé Rodoreda with La Plaça del Diamant (translated into English as The Time of the Doves or In Diamond Square), Catalan women writers in the 20th and 21st century receive scant recognition in their home region and country as well as abroad. According to the Translation Database, only nineteen books (twenty-seven percent) were works written by a Catalan woman translated into English spanning the years 2008 to 2021.6
Gemma Gorga, the Catalan poet whose work I translate, told me that she would often be invited to local and international poetry festivals as the token woman poet: “I have the awful sensation that many invitations I receive (for a jury, a reading, a talk) are because the organizers need women in order not to be criticised.”7 Indeed, I discovered Gorga’s poetry in a British anthology entitled Six Catalan Poets,8 five of whom were men.
How can a shift be effected: to have more women translated into English? In my opinion, translators have to walk a fine line between translating a writer simply because she is a woman and translating a writer who happens to be a woman. I have chosen to translate Gemma Gorga first because I find her poetry powerfully evocative, and secondarily because she is a woman. Gemma Gorga is a poet who happens to be a woman, not a woman poet, and she concurred with this characterization of herself and her work. In my current project of translating her seventh book of poems, Viatge al centre (2020), Voyage to the Center, I am struck by its supple use of language and white space to convey meaning. Do I think only a woman poet could use language and silence in this way? Probably not.
Giuseppe Ungaretti’s micro-poems come to mind as precursors to Gemma Gorga’s poetry. Here is the famous two-word, two-line poem “Mattino” (“Morning”) in its entirety:
M’illumino d’immenso
I’m lit with
immensity.9
This poem’s compression as well as its preoccupation with light come closest to what Gemma Gorga is doing in her latest book. Her poem “Radiance” is an example of her palpable use of white space to suggest presence as well as absence.
Fulgor
Com més escric
més invisible em torno.
M’esborro
amb meravellosa
intensitat.
Radiance
The more I write
the more invisible
I become
erasing myself
with stunning
intensity.10
The suggestion in these five short lines (six lines in my translation) is to play with presence and absence, in which the letters on the page, as they take shape into words and lines, eradicate the poet, yet do so with radiant intensity. In her most recent book, Gorga’s limpid poems are interested in creating surfaces that gesture toward silence, the unsaid, the no-speech of the blank page. I find nothing inherently gendered about this minimalist aesthetic, as deployed by both Ungaretti and Gorga.
Yet, what are we to do about the paucity of women being translated? I think women have to make sure they are not colluding in the hegemonic preference for male writers. The translator of the anthology Six Catalan Poets is, in fact, a woman. I have to wonder why she did not insist on there being one or two more women among the six featured poets. A more recent anthology, Xeixa: Fourteen Catalan Poets,11 translated by a man and woman couple, does not right the gender imbalance. Only four of the fourteen (about twenty-eight percent) are women. Readers and translators themselves have to advocate for women writers: to translate them and to review their books.
Through organizations such as Three Percent, Vida, and PEN, we should continue to apply pressure on publishers to publish more women in translation, and to nominate women for translation prizes. To do, as Saturnalia Books has now done: created a book prize exclusively for women-identified translators translating women-identified poets.12 And women translators, can—and should—make the decision to translate more women.
This advice might seem to contradict what I wrote earlier about translating a poet not merely because she is a woman. But I think it is possible to hold these two competing ideas in mind simultaneously: for translators to find women writers to translate whose work is powerful in its own right as well as to champion the work of women writers. In an interview with ALTA, the American Literary Translators Association, Meytal Radzinski, creator of the Women in Translation project, faults a system that does not review or publicize books in translation by women. According to her, the ultimate responsibility lies with publishers to right the gender imbalance: “We all know there are always excellent books that are untranslated. The books a publisher chooses to translate are exactly that—a choice. And many publishers have so far chosen without any acknowledgment of the huge imbalance they’re creating.”13
Translating Women Russophone Writers
Katherine E. Young
Although Russian-language (Russophone) publishing is largely centered in Russia, the Russophone literary diaspora extends much further than Russia proper. In many former Soviet republics—now independent nations—Russian remains the lingua franca, a literary language, and a gateway language for translation; there are also significant Russian-speaking literary communities in Europe, the United States, Israel, and elsewhere. Women play an important role in contemporary Russophone literature, particularly in genre writing (horror, YA, romance, etc.). However, once the label “women’s” becomes attached to a piece of Russophone writing, that work is immediately discounted by many of the literary powers-that-be, including publishers, editors, critics, and prize jurors. Thus, women writing in Russian are often excluded from the conversation about translating their work before that conversation even begins.
All contemporary Russophone writers, regardless of gender, face particular barriers that limit their chances of being translated. One of these, paradoxically, is the Russian literary “brand” of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. For example, in 2014 two new English-language translations of Anna Karenina appeared, by two leading translators—two publishing slots that a contemporary writer didn’t get. Furthermore, as Boris Dralyuk and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp have pointed out, the Russians don’t promote new Russophone writing as actively as, say, Nordic countries promote Scandinavian literature. At the infrastructure level, there are only a few literary agencies representing Russophone writers, and while they do important work, it’s a big universe.
Another barrier that all Russophone writers face in being translated is funding, as few translation publishers have the resources to fully pay for translation. While Russia’s Institute of Translation has actively supported the translation of work by Russian writers for at least a decade, it’s a small government organization with limited funding; in the current political moment, of course, non-Russian publishers may not be willing or able to accept Russian government funding. In Kazakhstan, where Russian remains a gateway language, there is also some limited government funding to support literary translation. In Ukraine, overall funding and publication opportunities for the country’s many Russophone writers—let alone support for translation—shrank noticeably after Russia’s 2014 invasion and continue to shrink. In all these cases, politics plays a role in funding decisions: you’re unlikely to see government funding to translate, say, a queer writer from a country where queerness is criminalized, or for a Russian writer who protested Russia’s 2022 escalation of the war in Ukraine, or a writer whose choice of language is politically unpalatable to institutional funders.
What are we to do about the paucity of women being translated? I think women have to make sure they are not colluding in the hegemonic preference for male writers.
On the publishing end of translation, Russophone writers, no matter where they come from, must also contend with publishers who pigeonhole their writing as culturally Russian. Editors will say, “We just published a title translated from Russian” without understanding that “Russian” covers more than a dozen countries, hundreds of cultures, and hundreds of millions of speakers. I myself have translated Russian-language work that’s rooted in the quite diverse cultures of Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and North Ossetia. While most US-based editors now understand the difference between Russian and Ukrainian—indeed, the war in Ukraine has created important new publishing opportunities for Ukrainian-language writers—they often struggle to contextualize the Russophone writing still coming from Ukraine and other countries of the former Soviet Union.
In terms of gender-specific obstacles faced by women Russophone writers, an additional barrier lies in Russia’s system of literary prizes. Literary prizes are often believed by translation publishers to indicate quality in books they themselves can’t read. In Russia, the prize system has long been plagued by accusations of favoritism and jury rigging, a situation that affects all writers. But even if the system itself were less suspect, today’s prize shortlists—and even longlists—contain the names of relatively few Russian women, a fact that translator Lisa C. Hayden frequently notes on her influential blog about Russian literature, Lizok’s Bookshelf. Prizes, then, are not only an unreliable measure of good Russian writing but also constitute a significant barrier to women’s writing being translated.
Women Russophone writers also face the same implicit bias that all women writers face from publishers of translations. Lisa Hayden has established that, pre-pandemic, there were usually around sixty Russophone titles published annually in English translation (that number fell to thirty-eight in 2021 and may fall further as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine).14 According to Hayden, the pronounced thirty percent female, seventy percent male gender imbalance among authors translated from all languages generally holds true for Russophone writers, as well.
One final barrier faced by women Russophone writers in translation is publisher desire for what one might charitably call “novelty.” I’m often asked to submit work by women writers who are still “undiscovered” in English translation. My own experience, sadly, is that a twenty-something who takes a pretty picture is more likely to be published in translation than a woman in her fifties, no matter how fine a writer or how many books she’s published in Russian.
What can people interested in seeing more work by women writers do about the systems that keep women from being published in translation?
1. Notice and speak up about inequities. When I submit a book proposal to a publisher, I check the gender breakdown of the authors they publish. I’m not shy about pointing out why they should balance existing offerings with work by a woman writer like the one whose work I’m submitting.
2. Advocate for institutional changes that benefit women writers in translation. Prizes remain one of the best ways to bring attention to good writing: we need more of them for women’s writing in translation. It’s also high time for a publishing series dedicated solely to women in translation. And if your local literary festival doesn’t include work in translation (many don’t), push for change.
3. Be an ally. Publicize work by women writers in translation even if you didn’t translate it. Review that work, if you can’t publish or translate it. Join with other translators in pitching “themed” submissions of women’s writing to editors. One important recent development in Russophone literature is the blog Punctured Lines, founded by two Russian-speaking immigrants to the US who explicitly support feminist and traditionally under-represented voices.15 Recently, they threw an online book launch for my translation of Look at Him by Anna Starobinets, a memoir of pregnancy loss that is extraordinarily controversial in Russia but could easily have slipped under the radar here.
4. Be intentional in what you choose to read and/or translate. Seek out work by women; I do.
5. Fight the power. Translators and lovers of translated work must continue to challenge notions of “excellence” and “merit” that have traditionally devalued the work of women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ and differently abled communities—and this fight must be waged both in the literary communities where the work originates and where the work appears in translation. Although more than half of translators are women, seventy percent of what’s published in English translation is still written by men. These battles haven’t been won—in some cases, they haven’t yet been fought!
Translating Women Writers from Croatia
Andrea Jurjevi?
During an interview with Trafika Europe Radio, John O’Brien, founder of Dalkey Archive Press, said that fifty percent of all literary translations into English are from Europe, and out of that only seven percent come from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The fact that Europe is well represented is not terribly surprising. However, considering that CEE is an exceptionally large region that is home to more than half of Europe’s population, its representation is miniscule. This, compounded with America’s habit of choosing only one writer from each country—and the fact that not many get chosen to begin with—results in only a tiny sliver of literature from this region, poetry in particular, ever making it to American shores.
So far, I have mostly focused on translating contemporary Croatian poetry. Croatia, my homeland, is one of the former Yugoslav republics, what used to be an ethnically diverse country. The Croatian language, along with Bosnian and Serbian, is a variant of the language that was formerly known as Serbo-Croatian. These three variants are spoken by approximately twenty million people. They also have a number of very distinct dialects.
Overall, Americans have a limited knowledge of Croatia. They may be familiar with the Adriatic coast (Hunger Games fans might be aware that the show was partially filmed in Dubrovnik), and those who follow international news remember the bloodshed of the Yugoslav wars in the ’90s, but very few know of its rich vein of literature. Croatian writers are doing incredible work. Unfortunately, they—poets in particular—have not received serious attention. Writers from the former Yugoslav region often get mixed up with other countries surrounding them, their work translated often into nearby languages, yet rarely into English, or other languages beyond the region. Prose writers fare a little better, the reason being, I suspect, that much of that prose deals with the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars. Traditionally, the West tends to show more interest in our literature when it is engaged in war and trauma as this fits the western perception of the Balkans as a complicated place of destruction, rogue corruption, and exotic yet dim women. This image of the backward Balkans has been marketable. However, if we are to create a more equitable literary scene in the US, we need to raise the volume of authors from underrepresented regions—especially women writers—in order to disturb the preconceived notions and expectations of what that region’s output is. In other words, we need to broaden the American audience’s understanding of what underrepresented regions are capable of.
If we are to create a more equitable literary scene in the US, we need to raise the volume of authors from underrepresented regions—especially women writers—in order to disturb the preconceived notions and expectations of what that region’s output is.
Being a translator in the US is a matter of privilege. Once a book is translated into English, it travels into other languages. Our job is to make the translations available. Here are some ways we can help:
1. Funding! Émigré writers often do most of the work of translation, often without compensation. Translation, especially from minor languages, can’t grow significantly without proper funding. We can’t raise the volume of women in translation without translators being paid for the work they do. The NEA’s support, while wonderful, is remarkably limited.
2. Exposure! Our work as translators doesn’t end with translating literature into English. We look for publishers, submit individual pieces to literary journals, conduct interviews, promote our writers, secure mini-grants from writers’ home countries for American indie presses (so many of which are small, short-staffed, and overextended), and we teach translation in places that don’t even recognize the value of literary translation. We submit our translations to contests, seek reviews, read at book festivals, organize US visits and secure travel funds for our writers. This work of promotion cannot largely fall on the backs of translators if we want to seriously amplify the voices of women writers.
3. Translating diverse and varied voices, and not succumbing to stereotypes that sell! There is a fascination with the depictions of the Balkans as this eccentric place where, as Slavoj Žižek says, “people only eat, drink, and fuck all the time, a perpetual orgy.” Žižek compares the Balkan artists whose work falls within this stereotype to good hosts who want to satisfy their guest and perform for the Western gaze. Danilo Kiš in his essay “Homo Poeticus, Regardless” also argues that the Balkan culture is perceived as a monolithic place, exotic in its violence and natural beauty. Kiš claims that the West places the Balkan literature in a narrow political category and perceives Balkan writers as Homo politicus—the political animal that should stick to writing about scandalous politics. He says:
“We are exotica, we are political scandal, we are at best fond memories from the First World War and the conscience of the old poilus d’ Orient and members of the Resistance. We are also beautiful sunsets on the Adriatic, balmy memories of beautiful, peaceful sunsets on the Adriatic, memories dripping with šljivovica. And that’s it. We are barely a part of European culture. Politics? Fine! Sightseeing? Terrific! Slibowitz (as the Germans have it)? Naturally! But who in God’s name would expect to find literature there? Who could be expected to make sense of their nationalist nonsense, of all those languages and dialects so close to one.”16
This reduction of writers to a narrow, unidimensional political category automatically excludes most women writers. We cannot expect literature from the Balkans to stick to political scandals, to nationalism and chauvinism, as this creates a situation that from the start excludes a lot of women. Olja Savi?evi?, an acclaimed contemporary Croatian writer, puts it well in her poem “Summer ’91” (the year Croatia claimed independence and the war broke out): “In the realm of war and politics, we never existed.”17 This “we” is “women.”
We know that there has been a marginalization of South Slavic and other lesser-known literatures in the US. And we also know that we must read and translate more writers, especially women writers. What’s important to keep in mind is that we should do it especially if their writing doesn’t fit the expectations. These expectations are born from stereotypes (which, I suspect, exist primarily to stroke the ego of the West). Most contemporary poets from the former Yugoslav region, the Balkan peninsula, and much of CEE still write in the shadows of the English language, while we keep the spotlight on the English language and drumroll to our own literature.
Translating Francophone Women of Color
Nancy Naomi Carlson
The number of translated works published in the United States is low. The numbers become even more disheartening when considering the percentage of translations coming from Africa, the Caribbean, and other regions of the francophone world, including parts of Asia and North America, and downright dismal when considering translations of women and nonbinary authors of color… especially those writing poetry (which Honorée Fanonne Jeffers referred to as “that eternal literary stepchild”).
Although women participated in the development of the Negritude literary movement that arose in the 1930s, founded by French-speaking African and Caribbean writers living in Paris at the time, Irène Assiba d’Almeida observed that their contributions were, for the most part, relegated “to the secret history where women’s work is all too often buried,” adding that “in its poetical practice, Negritude offered an idealized picture of ‘woman’ and developed a kind of formula of interchangeable relations in which woman = mother = earth = Africa = Mother Africa.”18 Indeed, poetry written by African women did not get published until the 1960s. Even in today’s publishing world, the poetry of women and nonbinary authors of color writing in French is rarely anthologized, translated into other languages, or met with critical acclaim.
I have had the honor and pleasure of translating Suzanne Dracius, a prizewinning writer from Martinique, who was praised by Frédéric Mitterrand as “one of the great figures of Antillean letters.” In her poems, short stories, novels, and plays, Dracius protests against both racial and gender discrimination. I met Suzanne through a mutual friend who introduced us via Facebook. As a poet myself, I was immediately drawn to the lyricism of her work, which opened a portal for me to an exotic Caribbean culture living in the shadow of Mount Pelée, one of the deadliest volcanoes on Earth, located in Martinique. In 1902 the volcano erupted, completely destroying the town of Saint-Pierre. Despite the volcano’s constant threat, Martiniquans celebrate life, whether through riotous Carnival festivities, culminating in Mardi Gras, or through their rich culture that includes music, dancing, and storytelling. I especially enjoyed Suzanne’s poems written in Creole, as well as my encounters with individual Creole words sprinkled among the French ones. I had need of Suzanne’s clarifications and explanations to decipher the Creole of the poems, as comprehensive Creole/English dictionaries are hard to find, probably due to the fact that Creole lacks a long written tradition. More importantly, I learned about the finely calibrated racial distinctions on the black/white continuum found in Martinique. Suzanne herself is considered a “calazaza”—a biracial person at the lighter-skinned end of the Black/White continuum, with reddish blond hair and very few Black features. Suzanne’s female protagonists often feel too dark-skinned to feel at home in Paris, where they spend much of their time, but too light-skinned to feel at home in Martinique, where they were born. In addition to this unique form of marginalization, Suzanne’s work examines the relationship between Africa and the Caribbean, as she challenges the belief that Caribbean authenticity only lies in Africa. Dracius champions the concept of “métissage,” which refers to the blending of two distinct elements, in either a biological or cultural sense, and Creolization.
I was committed to giving voice to Suzanne in English, and translated a book of her poems, Calazaza’s Delicious Dereliction, as well as cotranslated her novel, The Dancing Other, with Catherine Maigret Kellogg. The first time I met Suzanne was in Fort-de-France, where I got to see with my own eyes the landscapes she was describing. Even the volcano! I’ve met up with her in Paris on two other occasions. Dracius maintains her faith in humanity, as can be seen in these lines from a recent poem: “Racism is soluble in black ink: / an unequivocal calazaza, I write in the feminine ‘we.’”
Another barrier that all Russophone writers face in being translated is funding, as few translation publishers have the resources to fully pay for translation.
I’ve tried to make it my mission to discover exceptional francophone female voices from the Caribbean or Africa that haven’t yet been translated into English, but it’s not that easy. I do research. I comb through anthologies. One of my favorite anthologies is A Rain of Words: A Bilingual Anthology of Women’s Poetry in Francophone Africa. Many of the featured writers have already had some of their work translated into English—Tanella Boni and Véronique Tadjo from the Ivory Coast, Werewere Liking from Cameroon, and the Congolese writer Amélia Néné. There I found Marie-Léontine Tsibinda from Congo-Brazzaville, whose selection of her poems I have translated and published.
What can we do to increase the number of women being translated, especially those from non-European backgrounds and those of color? Those writing about topics not expected to be written by women? For the past two years, I’ve had the wonderful experience of co-curating a series of “Women in Translation” virtual readings sponsored by the PEN America Translation Committee and supported by PEN America. In 2020, our call for proposals resulted in over eighty translators responding! We ended up hosting three bilingual events (two taking place on the Facebook page of the Jill: A Women+ in Translation Reading Series), with three different panels of five translators and their women and nonbinary authors appearing “live.” Presenters zoomed in from all over the world, from many different time zones, including Budapest, Cairo, Guatemala City, Lebanon, Peru, Reykjavik, Sri Lanka, Tehran, and the UK. A veritable feast of languages, including Arabic, Danish, Galician, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Persian, Polish, Russian, Sinhalese, and Spanish! Each of the events drew a crowd, and many, many more people watched the recordings later posted on Facebook. One of the events was viewed over 1,500 times! The 2021 event will feature fifteen translators, joined by their authors, working in twelve languages from across the world, including Cameroonian French, Canadian French, Chinese, Czech, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. All three events will take place on the PEN America website. These events are important, but we need more of them, as there is still much more work to be done in raising the visibility of women and nonbinary authors of color and their translators.Aviya Kushner is the author of The Grammar of God and Wolf Lamb Bomb. She is The Forward’s language columnist and a board member at the American Literary Translators’ Association. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago and translates Hebrew poetry and prose.
Sharon Dolin is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Imperfect Present. The recipient of a 2021 NEA in Translation fellowship, she is cowinner of the inaugural Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize for her translation from Catalan, Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems of Gemma Gorga, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Katherine E. Young is the author of Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards and the translator of Anna Starobinets, Akram Aylisli, and Iya Kiva. Her translations of Russophone poetry have won international awards, and she was a 2017 NEA translation fellow. From 2016–2018 she served as poet laureate of Arlington, Virginia.
Andrea Jurjevi? is a Croatian poet, literary translator, and educator. She is the author of Small Crimes, winner of the 2015 Philip Levine Prize, and the chapbook Nightcall. Her book-length translations from Croatian include Mamasafari and Dead Letter Office.
Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet and translator whose translation of Khal Torabully’s
Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull, 2021) won the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Decorated with the French Academic Palms and twice a recipient of NEA literature translation grants, she is the translation editor for On the Seawall.
Notes
1. “Translation Database,” Three Percent at the University of Rochester, (website) http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/translation-database/.
2. Porter Anderson, “Nielsen Reports Translated Literature in the UK Grew 5.5 Percent in 2018,” Publishing Perspectives (online business news magazine), March 6, 2019, https://publishingperspectives.com/2019/03/nielsen-reports-translated-literature-in-uk-grows-5-percent-in-2018-booker/.
3. “The Biggest Update to the Translation Databases Ever (And Some More Women in Translation Data),” Three Percent at the University of Rochester (website), http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/2017/08/16/the-biggest-update-to-the-translation-databases-ever-and-some-more-women-in-translation-data/.
4. Rhian Sasseen, “Even the Simplest Words Have Secrets: An Interview with Jennifer Croft,” The Paris Review (blog), The Paris Review, August 31, 2020, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/08/31/even-the-simplest-words-have-secrets-an-interview-with-jennifer-croft/.
5. “Women in Translation by Country,” Three Percent at the University of Rochester, (website), August 19, 2019, http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/2019/08/19/women-in-translation-by-country/.
6. See “Translation Database,” now hosted by PublishersWeekly.com (website), https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/translation/search/index.html
7. Gemma Gorga, email message to author, Nov. 18, 2020.
8. Pere Ballart, ed., and Anna Crowe, trans., Six Catalan Poets (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2013).
9. Giuseppe Ungaretti, Allegria, trans. Geoffrey Brock (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2020), 131.
10. Gemma Gorga, Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems of Gemma Gorga, trans. Sharon Dolin (Philadelphia: Saturnalia Books, 2021), pp. 130–131.
11. Xeixa: Fourteen Catalan Poets, Marlon L. Fick and Francesca Esteve, trans. (North Adams: Tupelo Press, 2018).
12. See “The Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize,” Saturnalia Books (website), https://saturnaliabooks.com/poetry-prize/translation/.
13. Sara Iacovelli, “Women in Translation: An Interview With Meytal Radzinski,” The American Literary Translators Association (website), https://www.literarytranslators.org/blog/women-translation-interview-meytal-radzinski.
14. Lisa C. Hayden, “Wishing You a Happy 2022 with 2021’s New Translations,” Lizok’s Bookshelf (blog), December 31, 2021, http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com/2021/12/wishing-you-happy-2022-with-2021s-new.html.
15. Yelena Furman and Olga Zilberbourg, “About This Blog,” Punctured Lines (blog), https://puncturedlines.wordpress.com/about-this-blog/.
16. Danilo Kiš, Homo Poeticus, trans. Ralph Manheim, Michael Henry Heim, Francis Jones (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 75.
17. Olja Savi?evi?, Mamasafari, trans. Andrea Jurjevi?, (New Orleans, LA: Lavender Ink / Dialogos, 2018).
18. Irène Assiba d’Almeida, ed., and Janis A. Mayes, trans., A Rain of Words: A Bilingual Anthology of Women’s Poetry in Francophone Africa, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), xxii.
