Location: Conway Hall
Date: 24th January 2024
Time: 9:30 - 16:00
Inpress Books is delighted to be running their annual Festival of Publishing at Conway Hall in London later this month.
The 24th of January 2024 will see the Newcastle-based sales and marketing agency joined by publishers and other book trade professionals from across the UK for a day of panel conversations, presentations and networking.
This year’s programme will cover sustainability, inclusivity, collaborative partnerships, TikTok and working with influencers. It will feature representatives from several Inpress publishers, including Sonya McGilchrist (Publisher at Dinosaur Books), Kristel Buckley (Publicity & Media Associate at Lantana Publishing), Cherry Potts (Director of Arachne Press), and Stefan Tobler (Founder of And Other Stories), alongside figures from the wider industry, including Illumicrate founder Daphne Tonge, BookSource MD Davinder Bedi, The Poetry Pharmacy founder Deborah Alma and many more.
Sophie O’Neill, Managing Director of Inpress Books, says ‘It’s a highlight of our year to gather in person to celebrate the achievements of small presses, and, of course, discuss the challenges facing the book trade.’
Click here for tickets and further programme details.
About Inpress Books
Inpress is the UK’s specialist in selling books produced by independent publishers. Since 2002, we have worked to support innovative, literary publishers across the UK and Ireland, helping their fiction, poetry and non-fiction to reach book lovers worldwide. We bring painstakingly-created, innovative and outside-of-the-mainstream books together in one place so that you can browse, buy and love them, wherever you live.
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The adaption of the International Booker-shortlisted novel is by acclaimed Argentinean filmmaker Anahí Berneri, with Mercedes Morán and Érica Rivas (Wild Tales) in the lead roles. It begins streaming globally, including in the UK, on November 24th. The trailer can be seen here.
The audiobook of Elena Knows is Charco’s first foray into this format, and has been produced with the support of Publishing Scotland’s Audiobook Project, aimed at assisting independent publishers to realise the potential this format offers. The audio book is available now on all major channels, including Audible, Kobo and Apple.
Charco’s co-founder and director, Samuel McDowell, said: “Claudia Piñeiro’s writing is powerful and gripping, and we have seen first hand the impact Elena Knows has had on readers. To now see it being adapted to new formats, and knowing that it will reach new audiences, is simply wonderful. This is an exciting moment for Charco Press.”
Elena Knows was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022. A new work by Piñeiro, A Little Luck, also translated by Frances Riddle, was published by Charco Press in July 2023. Her most recent novel, Time of the Flies will come out by Charco Press next summer.
About Charco: Charco Press focuses on finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world. We select contemporary translators, to give our authors a modern voice and bring emerging talent in from the margins.
Press: For press inquiries in the UK, please contact Carolina Orloff at carolina@charcopress.com. In North America, please contact Caroline Casey at caroline.a.casey@charcopress.com.
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Tilted Axis Press
Lolli Editions
Seren
Lantana Publishing
Neem Tree Press
Les Fugitives
Valley Press
Nine Arches Press
UEA Publishing Project
Fly on the Wall Press
The Poetry Business
Istros Books
Story Machine
Scotland Street Press
It was great to see books from Prototype, Charco and Valley Press featured in the Bookshop.org newsletter last Friday!
Ze Books
And Other Stories
Les Fugitives
Scotland Street Press
Fly on the Wall
Neem Tree Press
Lantana
Valley Press
The Emma Press
Arachne
Dinosaur Books
Last Girl In 9781999336370 is getting great ratings as part of being selected for the Summer Reading Challenge (the Reading Agency) and Cheryl is doing an author reading next week on Tuesday 8th August at East Ham Library in London.
AND OTHER STORIES
Yuri Herrera’s Ten Planets 9781913505608 (tr. Lisa Dillman) recommended by Jenny Offill/ The Guardian’s author summer page-turners round-up: 'A book of startling, minimalist short stories that read like philosophical fables and stayed with me long after I finished them.'
LANTANA
Maybe you Might 9781913747862 was chosen as one of 5 for the Growing Good Kids books - Excellence in Children's Literature. Winners are announced at a conference. More here.
SCOTLAND STREET PRESS
Scotland Street Press have a range of authors in attendance at Edinburgh Book Festival:
There are a range of forthcoming events including a trip across the pond to New York with Janet McGiffin’s Empress Irini Series. Join Janet McGiffin at The Jefferson Market Library, New York, on the 8th of August to find out! Full details here. There’s also an event at Oxford – the launch of The Empress Irini Series at The University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, at 6.30pm on the 18th of October.
Alindarrka’s Children 9791910895405 was featured on a summer reading list for European literature.
MAKINA BOOKS
On Trampolining 9781739616014 by Rebecca Perry was featured on Rough Trade Books Club Radio. The title was also selected by Brick Lane Bookshop for their Independent Bookshop Week Picks.
SMOKESTACK BOOKS
Michael Rosen, author of The Advantages of Nearly Dying 9781739772291 has just won the Pinter/PEN Prize.
FLY ON THE WALL PRESS
The Truth Has Arms and Legs 9781915789082 has had some great praise in the press:
TILTED AXIS
The End of August 9781911284697 was featured in the Foyles Newsletter at the beginning of July.
HOPE ROAD
Kamala Markandaya's novels were discussed on BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking programme by Kim Oliver (Kamala's daughter and literary executor) and literary scholar Alastair Niven. Her forthcoming debut novel Nectar in a Sieve 978191310110 was published on the 13th of July.
MYRMIDION
God’s Vindictive Wrath 9781910183311 Local English Civil War Battles to feature at Chiswick Book Festival. Historical novelist, Charles Cordell, will be speaking at Chiswick Book Festival from 6th to 13th September.
ARACHNE
Unmothered 9781913665807 had an article feature on Idle Ink.
SNOW BOOKS
Needle in the Blood 9781905005390 being commemorated in Norwich this month by being made into a stone bench and displayed outside the cathedral.
YLOLFA
Betrayal 9781800993198 has had a great review on popular Welsh news site Nation.Cymru and The Peacemakers 9781912631414 has had a glowing review on Nation.Cymru.
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Lolli Editions
Their new title My Work 9781915267177 has an excerpt featured in Granta!
Peepal Tree Press
Azucar 9781845235475 was reviewed in the Guardian.
Les Fugitives
May The Tigris Grieve 9781838490492 for You has had a beautiful praise review in the Financial Times:
Ze Books
Has had some impressive coverage across their range of titles. Please see below:
UEA Publishing Projects
Fly on the Wall Press
Have had some great reviews for some of their titles. Please see below:
Lantana Publishing
Story Machine
Bradington Bay 9781912665167 has had some great reviews.
‘I couldn’t put it down. It’s so beautifully written and incredibly sensitive. Such a powerful, important book, which I predict is going to be an instant hit.’ Jo Brittan, The Shelf - http://jmbsbookblog.blogspot.com/
Love Like Your Heart’s On Fire by Sally-Anne Lomas (9781912665181) next Tuesday 4th July at Waterstones Norwich, and Yvvette Edwards (Booker Longlisted author of A Cupboard Full of Coats and The Mother) will be in conversation with Sally-Anne Lomas.
Launch for Lines and Shadows by Sarah Bower (9781912665273) at National Centre for Writing on Thursday 27th July.
Valley Press
Penny Boxall's poem 'The King's Bed' from her Valley Press collection Ship of the Line 9781912436057 is to be featured in Poem of the Week column in the Telegraph this week. It will appear in Saturday Review supplement this weekend, and the Culture Newsletter email tomorrow, alongside a short introduction to Penny's work.
Scotland Street Press
There have been several features for The MacDiarmid Memorandum 9781910895795 & Don Roberto 9781910895764:
Arachne
Paper Crusade 978-1-913665-67-8 just won the Inky Tentacle for it’s cover in the Kitschies.
Papillote Press
Good Night My Sweet Island 9781838041595 has had a feature.
]]>The leading sales and marketing agency for independent literary publishers, Inpress offers print, ebook and audio representation to the book trade with a USP of supplying publishers with business development as well as its key offering of sales representation. Working with 70 of the UK’s most vibrant and innovative independent publishers, Inpress has an excellent reputation within the book trade and has consistently achieved sales growth year on year. Inpress also runs the Poetry Book Society, an organisation committed to promoting the best published contemporary poetry to a national and international audience.
This funding will allow Inpress and the Poetry Book Society to continue to support the growing independent publishing sector, authors, poets and poetry publishers.
Sophie O’Neill, managing director of Inpress said, “It was not a given that Inpress would receive an offer of this funding, so we are relieved and thrilled that Inpress and the Poetry Book Society can carry on our work of supporting independent publishers and bringing the best in contemporary literature and poetry to readers worldwide. We look forward to working with Arts Council England to embed their Investment Principles into our work and support the organisations and practitioners we work with to do the same. Inpress publishers and those associated with Inpress and the Poetry Book Society have always had diversity and inclusivity at their heart, with this ACE support we can look to continuing this work and build on environmental concerns also. There is lots to be done!”
Chairperson, Joanna Reynolds said, “This is fabulous news. Inpress work with some of the best diverse and inclusive independent publishers in the UK, with this offer of funding we can continue to support these brilliant publishers in their essential work. We look forward to growing the membership of the Poetry Book Society and bringing new and innovative poetry to readers across the country.”
]]>John started working with Inpress nine years ago this month, we were desperate for some proper sales coverage in London, he came highly recommended and was happy to start immediately. I have just been re-reading some of the original correspondence and his email style remained the same from the first to the final emails:
Very to the point.
New line for each sentence.
Always polite.
We met for the first time at London Book Fair before he signed up as our freelance London and SE rep, and then at Kings Cross in August 2013 - that was the first time I was regaled with some of his stories of his time repping in London for the great and the good of British publishing, there were many tales! He spent a large portion of his career at Pan Macmillan and the latter years as a freelance rep for variety of independent publishers (he gave me some lovely Indian cookery books…). John was always generous with his knowledge and his time and so many people have commented quite rightly on what a gentleman he was. John did a great job introducing Inpress publishers to the major London Indies and we are forever in his debt for starting us on the successful sales trajectory that has continued to date.
He was not a young man when he joined Inpress in 2013! It became clear in the last few years that physically John was not as hardy as he had been – it was harder for him to commit to travelling to Newcastle for sales conferences and we were worried about him getting out and about in his rep area. I tried to talk him in to retirement, but it was clear this was never going to happen. So we agreed John would continue to work for Inpress in a reduced capacity until his wife Valerie deemed it no longer acceptable (!). That was where we left it just before lockdown, and he was still meeting customers and selling books up until he had a fall and was taken into hospital in March.
I feel really lucky that we had the opportunity to work with John, gain the benefit of his experience, hear the tales of his working life, and to keep working with him until this year. Reflecting on our conversations, I have remembered what a sharp sense of humour he had alongside his quite quiet (but chatty) presence, we laughed a lot. He will be really missed by all of us at Inpress.
The funeral will take place on Friday 22nd July – his family have asked for no flowers, they would like any donations to go to Great Ormond Street.
Memories of John from Inpress publishers:
‘He was old school in the best sense of the term: belief in the product (books, all of them) and belief in personal contact as the best selling tool. I guess that’s why he never quite felt able to retire: the lure of the next book and its possibilities is an addiction that afflicts us all. He was, as you say, a very generous person, and engaged with so many things. I’ll remember him as a seller of books and as a storyteller who passed on information, and his long experience, in our conversations.’ Mick, Seren Books
‘John was affectionately respected and will be much missed.’ Sandstone Press
‘What a professional and gracious person’ Jan, Cinnamon Press
‘Booksellers always spoke well of him’ Cherry, Arachne Press
‘John will be much missed, what a wonderful character’ James Benson, rep
‘I was struck by his kindness and genuine interest in what we were all up to; no mean feat given the number of books and publishers he must have had to process as a sales rep. One always felt, talking to John, that you had his total attention.’ Tom, Penned in the Margins
‘I remember him telling me at one of the famous Festival of Publishing dinners that booksellers were starting to recognise my anthologies, which meant a lot to me just a few years into publishing.’ Emma, The Emma Press
'Everytime I was moaning about our catalogue he would always remind me that he used to make the Faber catalogues by hand - cutting and sticking the information onto the page without the luxury of InDesign. That always shut me up! He was always so kind and will be a big miss.' Rebecca, Inpress
'John was always very patient and had a calm presence that was always good to have in the room. It was a pleasure to work with him.' Emily, Inpress
'John was an absolute legend from publishing back-in-the-day and into the 21st century- I can’t think of anyone else in publishing whose career spanned so many decades and who sold so many books. Completely unique and much missed.' Jane, Inpress
]]>A poetic reckoning with Turkish history, fuelled by mysticism
In 1938, in the remote Dersim region of Eastern Anatolia, the Turkish Republic launched an operation to erase an entire community of Zaza-speaking Alevi Kurds. Inspired by those brutal events, and the survival of Kaygusuz’s own grandmother, this densely lyrical and allusive novel grapples with the various inheritances of genocide, gendered violence and historical memory as they reverberate across time and place from within the unnamed protagonist’s home in contemporary Istanbul.
Kaygusuz imagines a narrative anchored by the weight of anguish and silence, fuelled by mysticism, wisdom and beauty. This is a powerful exploration of a still-taboo subject, deeply significant to the fault lines of modern-day Turkey.
5th November, Tilted Axis Press, £9.99, 9781911284291
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It’s a new season, and new books are here to enthuse you! After featuring exciting and thought-provoking works of fiction, a short story and a poetry collection in the previous months, we are awarding the title of Inpress Translated Book of the Month in September to a thrilling, magical YA novel.
This month read The Wild Book by well-known Mexican writer Juan Villoro, translated by Lawrence Schimel. It’s a book about books, about the beauty and the power of knowledge: the perfect gift to celebrate the beginning of the new school year, and also the perfect Christmas present for a young avid reader!
The Wild Book is the incredible story of thirteen-year old Juan. After his parents’ separation, our young hero is sent away for the summer holiday to his uncle Tito, a book-obsessed recluse living inside a mysterious library… a strange place where weird things happen… books move on their own, and magical secrets are going to be revealed…
The Wild Book by Juan Villoro (HopeRoad)
Read more about the book on HopeRoad’s website here and check out all their YA books - and also our interview with Nicky Harman, the translator of HopeRoad’s previous YA book in translation White Horse by Yan Ge.
HopeRoad is promoting inclusive literature with a focus on Africa, Asia and the Caribbean and promoting often neglected voices.
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Loop by Brenda Lozano (8th October, Charco Press)
A love story narrated from the point of view of a sort of contemporary Penelope, a woman waiting for her boyfriend to return from a trip to Spain. Instead of knitting only to unknit, she writes and erases her thoughts in a notebook.
Coma - Life in Another Time by Arturo Croci. Patrician Press.
Coma – Life in another time by Arturo Croci (9th October, Patrician Press)
An intriguing account of what happens to a mind in a drug-induced state: anything is possible, imagination is everything, the distinction between reality and unreality is no longer apparent.
An Orphan World by Giuseppe Caputo. Charco Press.
An Orphan World by Giuseppe Caputo (24th October, Charco Press)
A book about poverty and the resourceful ways in which people confront poverty, a reflection about the body as a space of pleasure and violence and, above all, a brutally honest love letter between a father and a son.
Of Strangers and Bees by Hamid Ismailov. Tilted Axis Press.
Of Strangers and Bees. A Hayy ibn Yaqzan Tale by EBRD Literature Prize winner Hamid Ismailov (24th October, Tilted Axis Press)
The new novel from the author of The Devil’s Dance. Uzbek writer in exile Sheikhov follows in the footsteps of the medieval polymath Avicenna, who shaped Islamic thought and science for centuries. While plying the same route, his troubles are distinctly modern as he endures the petty humiliations of exile.
The End. And Again by Dino Bauk. Istros Books
The End. And Again by Dino Bauk (24th October, Istros Books)
A novel about war, romance and rock ‘n’ roll taking us back to Ljubljana and the Balkans in late 1980s and early 1990s through the reminiscences of an embittered bureaucrat, a corrupt manager and an eternal runaway.
Every Fire You Tend by Sema Kaygusuz. Tilted Axis Press.
Every Fire You Tend by Sema Kaygusuz (5th November, Tilted Axis Press)
A densely lyrical and allusive novel grappling with the various inheritances of genocide, gendered violence and historical memory, inspired by the 1938 genocidal massacre in southeast Turkey.
The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara. Charco Press.
The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, author of Slum Virgin (14th November, Charco Press)
A unique rewriting of the story of gaucho Martín Fierro from José Hernández’s epic poem from a feminist, LGBT and postcolonial point of view, charting the adventures of Fierro’s abandoned wife. A reformulation which is both humorous and critical of how societies come into being and how they venerate mythical heroes.
We have interviewed the author Karen Havelin to hear what’s behind this personal book – also recently shortlisted for the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize – which is a reflection on themes such as the female body, sexuality, pain, motherhood and relationships. Also, written twice, in two languages, and published simultaneously in three countries, it is the very honest end result of a very unique writing process.
What is Please Read This Leaflet Carefully about and how did it come to life?
Please Read This Leaflet Carefully is a novel told in reverse about a Norwegian woman living in New York City. At the start of the book she’s 35, has a daughter and is recently divorced from an American man. As the book progresses backwards, it explores how her life ended up the way it did, through past relationships, serious chronic illness, surgeries and travel.
I started writing it when I moved to New York City to get a Master of Fine Arts in writing at Columbia University. I changed genre from poetry, and language, from Norwegian to English as well as of course country. I had to start writing very quickly because I didn’t have a backlog of work in English, and parts of my life started bleeding through very quickly. I had been sick a lot in the years leading up to leaving and I had a huge need to write about those things. My life had changed until it almost exclusively contained those ingredients no one wants to hear about, that felt embarrassing and even shameful. It was important to me to write about it, also I kind of didn’t have a choice because I had to hand in a lot of pages quickly, and it was what I had. Only quite a bit later did I figure out a way to turn some of this material into a novel.
Do you have a favourite part of the book and why?
I have a special love for some of the physical descriptions of lovely things, particularly the yoga sections and the passages that describe what doing figure skating feels like. It was so enjoyable to write that stuff.
How was the book’s title chosen?
The title actually came from when I ran the instructions for a certain medication through Google translate – I needed a US nurse to give me an injection I had brought from Norway. Those three sentences were the first ones in the injection user manual, and I liked how they insist on your attention.
Please Read This Leaflet Carefully was written twice in two different languages, in Norwegian and in English. Can you say more about this and your relationship to the two languages?
Norwegian is my first language, I am Norwegian. When I was little though, I sometimes spoke English with parts of my family – I have an American aunt, and that’s where I got my American accent. Later, I had a boyfriend I spoke English with. And I would read a lot in English. So it was a language for intimate things for me. I think I also share with many Norwegians that since we watched so much TV in English and listen to music in English, a lot of things seem easier to say in English. Norwegian is also a pretty terse language, one that doesn’t encourage any kind of indulgence or silliness. So when I was writing poetry, I developed this method where I would write in English, and then translate and edit into Norwegian. I could get it down on the page in English, and then my strict Norwegian eyes could judge what was fit for public consumption. With this book, the first parts of the writing process happened in New York City, in English. Later, when I was back in Norway and shaping it into a novel, I re-wrote it in Norwegian and kind of finished it in both languages simultaneously. It was kind of a crazy thing to do, and I’m not sure I recommend it. Still, it was plenty interesting. As I was reworking parts of the book into Norwegian, I kind of discovered what I had actually written. Sometimes I was horrified! But it certainly kept me honest. Writing in my second language, under pressure, in a city far away, meant that I wrote very honestly. So I don’t think this particular book could’ve come about any other way. And I’m very happy with the end result.
How do the two versions of the book relate and contrast? Did you need to adapt any particular aspects to the different cultures and languages? Did you have any difficulties in the writing process?
My editors and I gave it a lot of thought, but in the end there were almost no changes to make readers understand things. I think for a US reader, it reads as a commentary on Scandinavia. And for a Scandinavian reader, it reads as a commentary on the US. And I think it works in both ways, it is both of those things. For readers who are neither, it’s maybe just a universal story. All of that works. Though people have a lot of feelings and extremely varied takes on this book.
How different is it to write for Norwegian and English-speaking readers?
Honestly, I can’t really think about who I’m writing for. But for me, it may be easier to write for an English-speaking audience.
You are both an author and a translator. What was your journey to becoming a translator and an author, into Norwegian and into English?
I took a translation class as part of my MFA with Susan Bernofsky, which was great. I’m not sure I’m really allowed to call myself a translator, though. I love the work and I’ve done shorter pieces and quite a bit of poetry that has been published in literary magazines, particularly by the brilliant Danish poet C.Y. Frostholm.
We kindly thank the author Karen Havelin for her contribution to our blog.
Karen Havelin is from Bergen, Norway. She attended Skrivekunst-akademiet i Hordaland, and has a Bachelor’s degree in French, Literature, and Gender Studies from the University of Bergen and University of Paris Sorbonne. She completed her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University in May 2013. Her work has been published both in Norwegian and in English. Her first novel, Please Read This Leaflet Carefully was published simultaneously in the US, the UK and Norway in spring 2019, from Dottir Press, Dead Ink Books and Cappelen Damm (norsk tittel Les pakningsvedlegget nøye).
]]>Language is the underlying theme of the collection: Mamiaith is a deep reflection on the author’s relationship with the Welsh language, the ‘mother tongue’ (as mamiaith translates).
Author and translator, the poets Ness Owen and Sian Northey, have kindly answered a few questions for us regarding their inspiring work. Keep on reading to discover how Mamiaith came to life and what such a unique book may symbolise.
How would you describe Mamiaith in a few words?
Ness Owen: Mamiaith is for me a journey into language, place, family and politics.
Sian Northey: It’s a book that made me realise that you don’t have to choose between being a Welsh poet, an English poet, a bardd Cymraeg, an Anglo-Welsh poet (a term which is by now almost the equivalent of the n word!), a Welsh poet who writes in English or ‘any other label’ poet… You can simply accept with pride that you are a poet and ‘begin with fearlessness’.
The collection title, Mamiaith, means ‘mother tongue’. What does this symbolise and what does it mean for the author in particular?
NO: Firstly, I’d say that Mamiaith refers to the Welsh language and my yearning to be able to write more freely in it. To me there is an enormous difference between speaking and writing Welsh especially in poetry. Coming from a family that was losing its language, I could have called it ‘Nain-iaith’ (grandmother language) as growing up it was my grandmother, who lived with us, and one of her sisters who lived next door that were the most fluent.
I think it also refers to the language we choose to use or not to use to communicate with each other and the voice we need to find so we are heard. Mamiaith is about beginnings and moving forward.
SN: I wouldn’t venture to speak for Ness, but for me my mamiaith is Welsh and that’s the language I feel in. I guess my English is fluent enough, almost all my education after I was 11 was in English, but something is missing when I write in English. Playfulness perhaps.
Although the majority of the poems are in English, this is a bilingual collection. How do languages and meanings interweave in the book?
NO: I didn’t quite realise how much I write about language and voices until my editor Cherry pointed it out. She also asked why I didn’t write the poems I’d sent to her in Welsh which I hope the collection goes in some way to explain.
Living in a bilingual community, language switching is as natural as breathing. Often, my work starts as a word in Welsh but continues as to what that means in English.
SN: As a first language Welsh speaker it’s a bilingual collection because I see myself, my world, in the English language poems. It’s both reassuring and disorientating. In some ways that makes it, for me, more of a bilingual work than the actual presence of the poems that have been translated.
Five poems in the book have been translated from English into Welsh. Who translated them and how did the process work?
NO: I translated them into a first draft of Welsh then sent them to Sian who kindly looked over them and made suggestions for improvements and clarity. She also pointed out any ‘camdreiglo’ (missed or incorrect mutations) that I’m guilty of and where I tend to mix the formal and informal.
From my side, it felt like a free and easy conversation and I felt incredibly lucky that Sian had agreed to do it being an accomplished Welsh poet and translator amongst many other things. I’d attended Sian’s workshop about translating and it opened my eyes to the different ways of approaching the process. In particular, I took on board the idea of looking deeply into meanings and feelings before starting to translate.
To see and read the poems in Welsh was a very emotional experience and I only wish that my grandmother would have lived to see them.
SN: Ness created the original translations and I then worked on those, mainly changing things where grammatical errors led to lack of clarity of meaning. The poet Siôn Aled also had a look at them and made suggestions. Ness of course, since she is a Welsh speaker, had the final say.
What are the specific challenges relating to translation into and from Welsh?
NO: For me when translating into Welsh there is an intense pressure to ‘get it right’ the first time. Mistakes almost feel painful. This leads me towards feeling defeated before I begin, so I have to try and remind myself that this is drafting and it doesn’t matter!
SN: I’m not sure what challenges are specific to Welsh, only because I have no other languages to compare with. Either I’ve translated from English to Welsh, more rarely from Welsh to English, or into Welsh from other languages using English as a bridge language. In Ness’s work I found the line breaks and punctuation, or lack of punctuation, the most difficult element.
Ness Owen lives on Ynys Mon off the North Wales coast. Her poems and short stories have appeared in a variety of journals including in Red Poets, Mslexia, Poetry Wales, Ink, Sweat & Tears and Culture Matters and in anthologies published by Arachne Press, Mother's Milk Books and Three Drops Press. Her poetry collection Mamiaith was published by Arachne press in August 2019.
Sian Northey was one of the Hay Festival’s Writers at Work in 2016 and 2017 and last year visited India as a member of a poetry translation workshop arranged by Literature Across Frontiers. Her latest book is a novel, Perthyn (Gomer, 2019). She is currently working on a volume of essays, and also, thanks to support from the Royal Society of Literature, some short stories based on food banks. She met Ness when they both attended a drama writing workshop run by the company Dirty Protest.
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Croatian writer Marina Šur Puhlovski has answered a few questions for our blog, taking us through her career as a literature-loving self-made writer, her work, her characters, her past and future projects.
Can you tell us more about yourself and your journey to becoming an author?
I became an author when I published my first story – when I was twenty-five. But I started writing much earlier. I cannot recall a time when I wasn’t obsessively reading and writing. Until I was eighteen, I wrote poetry, and then I encountered T. S. Eliot – and, to my horror, had to admit that I will never be able to write such powerful poetry. So, I won’t write poetry anymore, I told myself, and turned to prose. However, I didn’t want to follow fashionable postmodernist trends, I had other criteria, I was looking for “my voice”. Moreover, I thought my generation of writers was slowly but surely sinking into kitsch. I separated myself, resisted, got left all alone and – unrecognized. I wrote nine books before I managed to get my first one published in 1991. I was 43 then and the war just broke out in former Yugoslavia. Publishing days were over. After the war, and nearing fifty, I found myself in a situation where I had been writing my whole life and I authored just one book. It looked hopeless. But when writing is your life – there is no despairing. I managed to publish all of the books “from the drawer,” as well as those I wrote later on. A few years ago, I met an extraordinary editor, Drago Glamuzina (from V.B.Z. publishing house) and I am finally on track. I published three books in the span of a year and six months – all written earlier. And Wild Woman, my twentieth book, became a hit – for our standards, of course.
Was there a book/author in particular that inspired you to become a writer?
There wasn’t. In my earliest childhood days, I discovered the world of the unreal – and wanted to remain there. First as a reader, then as an author. That does not mean there aren’t any writers who have formed me. I studied comparative literature, which means world literature, and that was my “writing school”. There were none back then. We learnt from the masters whose books weren’t eaten by time. They were my support in difficult times when I couldn’t find a publisher. There I found an affirmation of my understanding of literature – as a search for truth. I didn’t think of literature as a game and a fun way to kill time. I didn’t think that mastering the craft and letting the words lead you was enough. If the author isn’t present in every word they write – they are nowhere… Then art doesn’t exist anymore. All that remains is empty form. Words without concepts. I studied Goethe, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Kafka, Joyce, T. Mann, Camus, and many others – but, you see, they were all fathers. And mothers? It took some time for me to realize and wonder about my world. A woman’s world. A world of different experiences, different views. I didn’t have a role model there. I formed myself.
How did Wild Woman come to life? What motivated you to write this story?
Events from youth… All my novels and stories belong to the same life. I never made up stories – they came on their own. In my youth, an astrologist told me I will live a life filled with events and above average in terms of intensity of experience. She was right. Life offered me an abundance of material – and it was up to me to discover the truth of what happened, to pierce into destiny. Which I feel as my own – not someone else’s, as most of today’s writers do. The protagonist of Wild Woman, Sofija Kralj, is the main character in my three other novels – Nesanica (“Insomnia”), Ljubav (“Love”) and Igrač (“Player”). They represent three lives of the same character, told from different perspectives and through different relationships. In Wild Woman, Sofija Kralj is twenty-seven, in Insomnia – fifty-seven. The story from Wild Woman is present in Nesanica, as an episode. That episode grew up to become a novel. Many side characters from the novels have been given a story in one of my five story collections. I’ve built an entire world that way, with all of the social and political connotations. All of those novels and stories function independently from each other, you don’t have to be familiar with any of the others to understand one of them.
Did you have a particular audience in mind when writing the book? And how does it feel to know that your work has been translated into a global language such as English?
I never have an audience in mind. I don’t write novels with targeted, attractive topics. I don’t write genre prose. As I said already: I am building a world. I am striving to come ever closer to the Secret. I am seeking truth without hope that I will ever reach it, but, who knows, maybe that is precisely where the meaning lies, in the search. Because, as Kafka said, “Truth is perhaps life itself.” But that doesn’t mean I don’t consider the reader at all; I stick to Horatio’s “Dulce et utile” (enjoyable and instructive). Literature isn’t a philosophical debate, nor is it only an entertainment tool: it is both, in its own way. And I am sure that the “language” of truth is universal, that it knows no limits, that truth alone is enough to capture readers – if it manages to reach them. If literary politicking doesn’t “steal” its audience.
Regarding the second question – for a writer who has been marginalized in a small environment for half a century, it is incredible to suddenly reach the readers of the world. Like turning from an ugly duckling into a swan. Somewhere around forty I wrote in my diary: “I think my literary failure is just a joke which will be funny one day.” So, it happened, and I am laughing…
What is your experience of being a translated author?
This is the first time one of my books has been translated – I have no experience in that regard.
Are you working on any new projects?
Yes, I am. I am writing a fifth book about Sofija Kralj – the sequel to Igrač and Wild Woman. Once again from a new perspective. I have also found a “misplaced” novel which I have written twenty years ago – Wild Woman before Wild Woman, a portrait of an artist as a young woman, to paraphrase Joyce. It will be published next year. I am also arranging the publication of my five-hundred-page diary which I wrote between the ages of thirty and forty-five. It is not the usual everyday kind of diary; it is literature in itself. Deliberations on life and literature. Because I haven’t been writing just novels, stories, travelogues, I contemplated literature through diary entries and essays. I wrote about literature. I am also preparing a poetry collection which I wrote recently in one great wave of inspiration. I have returned to my first love.
Are there any Croatian writers you would like to recommend to our readers and/or would like to see translated into English?
Since postmodernism has cancelled the difference between art and kitsch – literary production became enormous. I can’t follow everything; I follow sporadically. But, you see, we are a very small literary scene, we all know each other, and every recommendation of one author is an insult to the one who hasn’t been recommended. So, I better refrain from making any kind of recommendation. I have already incurred two lives worth of displeasure for my “hard” literary stances which I took in my essays “Književnost me iznevjerila” (“Literature Let Me Down”). I would like to save what’s left.
Read an excerpt from the book here!
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This is a new, very innovative anthology, which aims to be more comprehensive than previous publications on the topic. It includes poems about the Holocaust written in many languages -German, Dutch, Polish or Yiddish, but also Greek, Norwegian, even Japanese- and not only those written by Jewish Holocaust victims across Europe but also those written by people who were targeted on other grounds.
Jean Boase-Beier, one of the anthology’s editors, has answered our questions thoroughly to tell us more about this big, very important project, how it differs from previous ones, and what it means, from a personal, human, historical and technical point of view, to translate and study Holocaust poetry.
What makes this new anthology unique, different from previous ones?
I and my co-editor, Marian de Vooght, set out to collect poems that were representative of the broad range of people who became victims of the Holocaust. While it is true that the main targets of Nazi genocide were Jewish people, there were many, many other victims.
Some poets wrote out of a sense of foreboding, as laws were passed in Germany to shut Jews and other sections of society out of everyday life. Some people wrote about being victimised for their political or religious views. Once the transportation of Jews, political prisoners and others to be killed or used as slave-labourers had begun, people wrote about their experiences in camps, ghettos, prisons, or in hiding. We wanted to try and capture these very varied situations and to honour the fact that people wrote under the most difficult of circumstances.
Our research had shown that, when readers think of Holocaust poetry, they think of poetry written in camps, and indeed there are anthologies of the poetry of specific camps or ghettos. But not everyone knows that poems were written by those in prison awaiting execution, or those who were about to be deported, or those who had to come to terms with the loss of their family after the war. Readers will be familiar with some of the well-known Holocaust poets such as Paul Celan or Nelly Sachs but even in these cases they are likely to know only a few poems, because the same poems tend to be collected in different anthologies.
But Holocaust poems were not only written by well-known poets. Some were written by those who perhaps would have become famous if they had not died. Not all Holocaust poems were written in German or Polish or Yiddish. We specifically searched for poems in other languages: in Norwegian, or Greek or Lithuanian.
So this anthology is broader in scope than earlier ones and contains poems that relate to many more aspects of the Holocaust.
How were the poems for the anthology selected?
Besides aiming to select poems by less well-known poets, or relatively unknown poems by more famous ones, we also chose poems that were not too long, so that we could include more. Inevitably, it was easier to find poems in German and Polish, French and Dutch, than in languages such as Japanese or Spanish. So we particularly looked for poems that were from other languages not so often represented in Holocaust anthologies. We also tried to find poems by or about victims whose voices are not often heard: the man imprisoned for being friends with Communists, the Polish Resistance fighter confined to a wheelchair from birth, the contemporary poet with Down’s Syndrome reflecting on the Nazi murder of those with Down’s, the child writing in terror.
It was important to assemble an anthology that worked as a collection of poetry in English. So we chose good poems, and poems that fitted well together. We translated some ourselves and called on very large number of other translators for languages in which we are not competent.
Translator and editor Jean Boase-Beier.
Can you tell us more about the peculiarities, challenges and importance of translating poetry of the Holocaust?
Every translation is a retelling of someone’s story. A translator will always try not to misrepresent the original author’s words, but the words of the translation are different words. Rather than seeing the changes translation brings as a necessary evil, it makes more sense to see them as an important addition to someone else’s way of seeing the world and expressing particular thoughts and feelings. When you translate a poem you are showing that you value it and that you think your readers will value it. You are giving voice to someone who is not able to speak, or not able to speak in your language. You are taking their words and passing them on to a new audience, with your own particular slant, your voice, your interpretation added. This is important, because it’s how stories survive.
We know far too little about the Holocaust. We might know, or easily be able to find, the bare facts. But poems are not pieces of documentary evidence. They might bear witness, but they are not witness statements. They tell us how people felt, how they coped. For all these reasons poetry has an important role to play in our understanding of the Holocaust.
Holocaust poetry has its own particular language and images, irrespective of the language it is written in. Images of snow, stars, darkness, black and white, feature in many of the poems. Images of nature -- sometimes an escape from the dreadful situation of writing -- are common. Perhaps unexpectedly, a certain boldness, almost a flippancy of tone, as in Alfred Kerr’s ‘The Most Afflicted’, is not unusual. It contrasts uncomfortably with the momentousness of the events unfolding, especially as seen by us, later. It is crucial not to smooth over such contrasts. It is also important to keep the details and the way they are described: Catherine Roux’s “I have no hanky”, in Tim Adès’s translation of a poem that describes the process of losing everything on entering a camp (her clothes, her hair, her name) is extremely haunting. You have nothing, so you don’t have a hanky, but what do you do if you need one? And will you need one or are you about to die in a moment?
These details of place, date, time, attitude, are all crucial and present particular challenges. You want to be ironical, if the original poet was, but not lose sight of the subject matter. You have to put yourself in the position of the person writing. This, for me, was the greatest challenge, and it was not a linguistic one. You must imagine you are standing naked on a ramp, or that your child has just been killed. You never must lose sight of the fact that you have not actually experienced those things, whereas others have. But still, it is emotionally draining.
What was your journey to becoming a translator, a poetry in translation editor, and an expert in Holocaust poetry in translation? What motivated you throughout your career?
I now translate mainly from German but I first realised that I loved translating when I had to do translations from and into French at school. When you were translating into French you were trying to be a French person. We had a French teacher, Miss Mitchell, who would put on the different voices of Agrippine and Néron for us when we were reading Racine’s Britannicus. And her voice not only changed with the character, but became French. The idea that you could take on another nationality and voice was exhilarating, and I experienced it again later when I was in the drama group at Regensburg University.
When you were translating into English it was something quite different: you found you could mould and form the English and make it do all sorts of things. I realised this was what I wanted to do. When I went to live in Germany at the age of 19, I both wanted to become a German person and also to stay English. I translated German folk songs into English as part of my first job as a student assistant. You had to try and fit the music as well, an added challenge.
At German universities, at least in the 1980s, you had to choose 5 or 6 topics for your “Magister” oral exams. Most of mine related to poetry, but one was “Translation Theories”. And I made a discovery: the theory showed me things about the practice I didn’t know. By the time I finished my degree I knew I would keep translating.
Then, while I was still living in Germany, I saw an exhibition of Holocaust photographs. There was the main street in Regensburg, there were Jewish people being marched away, there were the nervous citizens watching out of the windows of the flats above the shops I knew so well, many of them the same shops in 1943 as in 1983.
I remembered then how my parents had talked about the Holocaust back in the early 1960’s, when I was a small child in England. Those things – the sense that the people looking out of the windows should do something; the certainty that the people in the street were going to be killed; the feeling that you ought to explain all this to others – led me to research Holocaust literature.
When I had finished my PhD in Regensburg, I taught poetry, stylistics, linguistics, German for foreign students and translation theory, and all were linked by translation. After we came to England in the early 1990’s, and I took up my post at the University of East Anglia, there was enormous pressure to research and publish. At that point I remembered the people looking out of the windows in the Maximilianstraβe in the photo of 1943 Regensburg and began to translate the Holocaust poets Rose Ausländer and Volker von Törne, in both cases together with the theatre translator, Anthony Vivis.
It was a conversation with the late Max (W.G.) Sebald that led to my editorship with Arc. He suggested a series of translated poetry books. I phoned Tony Ward, who had published Ausländer in English, and the series “Visible Poets” was born.
Can you tell us more about your role as Translations Editor at Arc Publications?
Discussing other people’s translations with them is great fun. Over the years I have worked on poetry translated from Norwegian, French, Polish, German, Hungarian. Whether or not I speak the source language, my main concern is with whether the poem in English works. Because I trust the translators I work with to understand the original. That is not my job. Of course, if it’s a language I speak I often think I would have done it differently. But that is neither here nor there. My job is to be a second pair of eyes, a partner in discussion. The things I have learned, and keep learning, about other languages and cultures and other translators’ way of translating are endlessly fascinating.
But working with translators on their translations is only part of what I do, and the degree of my involvement varies greatly. Before we get to this stage I first read what the translator has submitted and look at it together with the original (if I can). Not all translators are equally good or experienced but I trust them all to have done a serious job. Sometimes I don’t like the result. Sometimes it would not fit any of our series (I edit 4) and sometimes I think the original poetry is too weak to carry the weight of a translation. In those cases I suggest to Tony and Angela at Arc that we reject it. Very often I can see the work is excellent but I can also see we have no room in the programme. I hate having to tell people this, but often I have to.
I prefer to deal with the translator, even if the original poet is alive. We are publishing the words of the translator and the translator is a poet who has thought deeply about what the original poet says, and how to say it in English. Sometimes, though, I do discuss things with both the translator and the original poet, and such exchanges are always fascinating. A discussion with Iain Galbraith and Jan Wagner about quince jelly comes to mind. I was sure that, when you cook quinces, the result is jelly rather than paste, whatever some English chefs might say. And, more than this, “jelly” fitted the sounds in the poem so well. But the translator always has the final say.
Do you have a favourite poem from this anthology?
It is hard to speak of favourites when the subject matter is so horrible. Abraham Sutzkever’s ‘To the Child’ is certainly one of the most affecting. I read it recently at the Ledbury Poetry Festival and I could not stop thinking what it must have been like to actually say these words, originally written in Yiddish. Other poems become better the more often you read them. András Mezei’s ‘Gustav!’, in Thomas Land’s translation from Hungarian, describes a brief episode, in which the reader’s perception changes in the final line. But maybe I like the Yiddish poems in particular because the Nazis wanted to destroy Yiddish along with the Jews who spoke it. Translating from Yiddish feels like a little act of defiance.
Are there any other Holocaust poems/poets that could not be included in the anthology that you would like to suggest to our readers?
There are many poems and poets we could not include. Some are well-known and have been translated many times: Primo Levi or Jerzy Ficowski, or Yevgeny Yevtushenko. All these poets are worth reading, and there are excellent translations available.
There must also be poetry we have not yet found. We were expecting more poetry by disabled people or those who had been taken from hospitals by the Nazis to be murdered before the main killing of the Jews began. We have found little such poetry, but it is possible it is still held in Germany or Poland in archives. The planned murder of disabled or sick people was known as the “Euthanasia” or “T4” programme (after Tiergartenstraβe 4 in Berlin, from where it was organised) and we still hope that in the future such poems might materialise. Disabled people have often been forgotten as Holocaust victims, though there were at least 200,000 such victims in Germany, and an unknown number in Poland and Russia. We have also found no poems written by people incarcerated for being gay, though we have included one long poem “The Rag”, about these victims.
Perhaps readers of this interview will have ideas for poems we might not know?
Jean Boase-Beier is a translator and editor of poetry, and an academic writer. Her poetry translations (all by Arc Publications) include the collections by modern German poets Ernst Meister (2003), Rose Ausländer (2014), and Volker von Törne (2017), and she has just co-edited (with Marian de Vooght) Poetry of the Holocaust: An Anthology (2019).
Her academic work focuses on translation, style and poetry, and recently on the translation of Holocaust poetry. Academic publications include Stylistic Approaches to Translation (2006, Routledge; to appear in a revised, enlarged edition as Translation and Style, 2019), Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust (2015, Bloomsbury), and the co-edited volumes Translating Holocaust Lives (2017, Bloomsbury) and The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Translation (2018).
Jean Boase-Beier is Professor Emerita of Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia, where she founded the MA in Literary Translation in 1992 and ran it until 2015, and is also Translations Editor for Arc Publications.
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What makes Point of Honour special?
Maria Teresa Horta is one of the most revered writers of modern Portugal and this dual language book, published by Two Rivers Press, is the first anthology of her poetry containing both the original poems and facing-page English translations. The 90-plus poems were selected by the poet herself from each of her volumes of poetry published over a writing career that spans six decades.
The book also includes a critical essay by my friend and colleague, the Portuguese academic Ana Raquel Fernandes: it enables an anglophone readership to acquire a sense of the formal, emotional and intellectual power and significance of this poet’s work.
And for me personally, the book underlines the importance of creating and sustaining literary connections between the UK and the continent of Europe as the UK makes preparations to leave the European Union.
I am most grateful to Peter Robinson, Editor at Two Rivers Press, for his belief in this book, which is the first dual-language volume published by the press.
Can you tell us more about the influential, contemporary Portuguese poet Maria Teresa Horta and her impact on Portuguese literature?
Maria Teresa was born in 1937 and began writing before the 1974 ‘Carnation Revolution’ that deposed the brutal Estado Novo regime then under President Caetano; her early work was banned for being ‘an outrage to public morals’. With Maria Isabel Barreno and Maria Velho da Costa, she was one of the Three Marias who in 1971 co-authored the extraordinarily imaginative, erotic and experimental collaboration Novas Cartas Portuguesas (New Portuguese Letters), a book composed of letters, poems and dream-like stories that has remained central to the feminist literary canon. The book’s publication in Portugal led to the authors being arrested and the book banned and confiscated, though its English translation drew admiring reviews and a wide readership across Europe and the USA. The work was hugely influential on the literary development and expression of second-wave feminists, and is now being re-discovered by later generations.
For me as a young woman in the 1970s, the book challenged my sense of what literature could accomplish, formally as well as psychologically and politically; in a real sense it changed my life, because my first published book of poetry, Christina The Astonishing, was a collaboration with the poet Jane Draycott – both its form and content were inspired by New Portuguese Letters.
Maria Teresa has continued to publish novels, short stories and journalism, although she considers herself a poet above all: her first collection Espelho Inicial (First Mirror) was published in 1960 and her latest collection, published in May this year, is called Eu Sou a Minha Poesia (I Am My Poetry).
Point of Honour: Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta, translated by Lesley Saunders (Two Rivers Press, May 2019). Front cover.
Was there a poem that you found particularly difficult to translate and why?
Maria Teresa is an elliptical, allusive and uncompromising writer, with a strong vision of her own work – it is powerful, political, erotically charged, almost visionary, and I suspect would have been a challenge for any translator. I was lucky enough to have the constant help and support in making the translations, not only of Maria Teresa herself, but also of Ana Raquel Fernandes and of Luís Barros, Teresa’s beloved companion, who acted as a critical friend and consultant. There were many drafts and re-drafts of several of the poems; though I do remember two that were particularly difficult, ‘Oponho’ (‘I Oppose’, from Candelabro) and a poem from Feiticeiras (Witches) – the latter poem didn’t make it into the anthology, because I felt its imagery of an active inquisitorial Catholicism were too far from contemporary English experience: I found I simply couldn’t translate it into modern English.
With ‘Oponho’, I understood the individual words and lines, but I couldn’t fathom what they meant! I ended up asking Maria Teresa what experience lay behind the poem, and she recounted a particular time in her life when everything was turned upside down. I won’t divulge what she told me, because the whole point is that the openness of the poem (shown in its structure as well as its language) is the opposite, it seems to me, of self-exposure, of the ‘poem-as-confessional’. We are offered psychological closeness, an almost propulsive intimacy, without any conventional autobiographical detail.
You are a poet too. How did this influence the translation process?
I would say almost completely – I believed making a good poem-in-translation would depend much more on my experience as a poet and editor than on my (limited) expertise as a linguist. In some ways it helped that Teresa’s poetic – dynamic compression, parataxis, declamation, the location of white spaces/silence – is quite different from mine, so I was not tempted to turn her poetry into something I might have written.
Read more about the translation process in Lesley’s Translator’s Note in Point of Honour!
What was your journey to becoming a poet and a translator of poetry? Have you ever met the poet in person?
My journey towards becoming a poet (a journey I’m still on) started when I studied T. S. Eliot for A-level English, though I didn’t begin writing poems myself until I was in my twenties. I went on to read Classics at university, and translation into, as well as from, Latin and Greek, was an integral part of the syllabus.
I don’t consider myself a translator, however; so, as far as translating Maria Teresa’s poems is concerned, it was a much more personal story. As I said, New Portuguese Letters has stayed with me as an influence throughout my life. Eventually, as a much older woman and with little knowledge of Portuguese, I decided to try my hand at translating a few of Maria Teresa’s poems. Extraordinarily enough, one of them, ‘Poema’ (‘Poem’) won the 2016 Stephen Spender prize for poetry in translation. And then I had the strong feeling that I wanted to meet Maria Teresa. The long chain of connections that the internet makes possible resulted, via email contact with various colleagues, in my acquaintance with Ana Raquel Fernandes, who then kindly organised a rendez-vous for the three of us in the Café Namur in Lisbon. (The French word is relevant here because French was the language Teresa and I shared at that point!)
We met several times after that initial rendez-vous: Maria Teresa and Luís were kind enough to invite me (and my husband) to their apartment so that we could sit down at the table with Ana Raquel and discuss my drafts in great detail. I saw Maria Teresa most recently this May, at the three-day conference organised in her honour in Lisbon; I’m delighted to say that Point of Honour had its official launch there!
I will be forever grateful for the warmth, patience and encouraging support shown to me by Maria Teresa, Luís and Ana Raquel.
(Left to right) Ana Raquel Fernandes, Maria Teresa Horta and Lesley Saunders in Café Namur in Lisbon in 2015.
What are your favourite verses by Horta?
It’s very difficult to choose, though I do love ‘Rosa Sangrenta’ (‘Rose That Bleeds’), a sequence celebrating menstruation, in which this once-taboo (still taboo?) subject is couched in passionate and flamboyantly lyrical images. It’s a profoundly affirmative series of poems, not least in its expansive length, but one that doesn’t wield an overtly political programme. The whole sequence is framed by a unifying metaphor: the rose that bleeds, an image that surely has intentional associations with the sacred symbols of the bleeding heart (of Christ’s Passion) and the Rose without thorns which is a symbol of the virgin Mary (about whom I gather it is a matter of theological dispute whether she menstruated), or even of Christ himself. There may perhaps also be a resonance with the rose that represents the chalice of the Grail which conceals the mystery of the essential centre. Whatever the case, the poems’ composition, their pace and diction and imagery, is realised with what I feel impelled to call courtesy: the sequence reads like an enactment, albeit a highly unconventional one, of that courtly form of love for the beloved, the lady of one’s heart. A definition of courtly love given by Francis X. Newman as ‘a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent’ seems to me to touch on something fundamental about this particular work of Maria Teresa’s.
We kindly thank poet and translator Lesley Saunders and Two Rivers Press
for their contribution to this blog.
This unique, multilingual poetry anthology explores Holocaust poetry from an innovative angle, aiming to be more comprehensive than previous volumes on the topic, from both a historical and a linguistic point of view.
The poems selected were written in different periods and also from different perspectives. These poems, divided into three sections, explore the beginning of the Holocaust, life in ghettos, camps, prisons and the outside world and life afterwards, focusing on the extreme horrors of the Holocaust and the personal and historical traumas caused by it. Not only poems written by members of the Jewish communities across Europe are included, but also poems by those who were targeted on other grounds, for example because of their disabilities, sexuality, religion or political views.
Furthermore, the collection includes poems translated from a variety of languages, for example Polish, German, Dutch, Yiddish and Hebrew, French and Italian, but also Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Greek, Estonian, Ladino, etc., and even Japanese. All source text poems are included.
Arising from the AHRC-funded project ‘Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust’, as explained in the anthology’s introduction, this publication wants to - quoting the editors - "give voice to victims we may not have heard of" and "to show that there is more to Holocaust poetry than we suspected" (Jean Boase-Beier & Marian de Vooght). It is also an extensive study on this type of poetry and on its translation.
If you’re looking for more poetry in translation this month, Arc Publications are also publishing the following collections: The Unknown Neruda, poems by Pablo Neruda never before published in English, edited and translated by Neruda’s biographer Adam Feinstein; To the Outermost Stars by Norwegian poet and playwright Stein Mehren, translated by Agnes Langeland; The Iron Flute: War Poetry from Ancient & Medieval China, a collection of work by 50 Chinese war poets spanning across sixteen centuries, edited by Kevin Maynard.
For sources and more information:
Today, Arunava Sinha, who has also translated Bandyopadhyay’s previous novels Panty and Abandon for Tilted Axis Press, answers our questions on this prominent figure in feminist literature , this must-read and his experience of translating it.
The translator Arunava Sinha.
What is The Yogini about? What does Bandyopadhyay want to tell us and how? Read about all this and more from the translator’s perspective.
How would you describe The Yogini? What is it really about?
This novel, like most of Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay's works, is located in a unique space somewhere between the objective everyday world and a landscape, with all the appearances of reality, inside the main character's head. If there's a theme, it's the question of whether an individual – specifically, a woman – can defy fate even while she's convinced her life is controlled by it. But that is too reductionist a way of looking at the novel.
What is ‘The Yogini’?
I'm not sure, and I think the reader needs to draw their own conclusion. But it would be best not to relate the title to any specific religion or religious practice.
What would you say are the main features of Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s writing and how does The Yogini fit within her work, from your perspective?
Sangeeta's writing is, to borrow the title of a novel by another author, a 'fever dream'. It is driven by an energy bordering on the manic, and is yet extremely controlled in its choice of words, phrases and sentence structure. All her novels explore central questions of existence facing an individual woman, and The Yogini works along the same lines. However, each of her novels has a distinct form and plays with a unique situation and experience, and to that extent every novel is different from the rest.
What was your journey to becoming a translator, and, in particular, how have you become the translator of Bandyopadhyay’s Panty, Abandon and The Yogini?
I no longer remember how or why I started translating. Initially it was for my own pleasure, but once my work began to be published, I started reading extensively for books to translate. That was how I came across Bandyopadhyay's works. At that time – some six or seven years ago – there weren't many people translating from Bengali into English, and those that were looked mostly at classics rather than modern or contemporary writing. So I got the job easily enough.
What is your experience of translating Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s novels?
I'll quote (roughly) my own tweet here: it is like being in the middle of an extended hallucination.
How has your relationship with the author evolved in these years and how has this influenced you as a translator?
I have always had conversations with Sangeeta about her work. Not about individual details in the text, but about where she's coming from as a writer. Like many good writers, she keeps her author self and personal selfs distinct, so it's not just a matter of understanding her as a person, but more a case of understanding her writing impulses. I use this understanding, such as it is, to gauge the outcome of my translations of her works, rather than letting it affect the process.
Did you have any linguistic and/or cultural difficulties while translating The Yogini?
Not really. The Yogini is, arguably, the most direct and, to that extent, easiest to translate, of the four novels of her that I've translated.
Do you have a favourite line or passage from The Yogini?
This passage is one:
She had often poked her fingers into the pirate’s eyes, asking, ‘How do you get so horny in your sleep?’
Hoisting her on top of himself, the pirate had replied,
‘It’s an automatic machine, not some cosmic consciousness or revolution.’
Who would you particularly recommend this book to and why?
I'd recommend this to anyone who is convinced their lives are in the hands of powers outside of themselves, powers with a purpose, that is. Not for validation, but for a challenge to that assumption, so that the reader is forced to confront the question and arrive at a solution.
We thank the translator Arunava Sinha and Tilted Axis Press for their contribution to this blog.
More about the translator:
Arunava Sinha is the translator of Panty, Abandon and The Yogini. He has translated over fifty books from Bengali. Winner of the Crossword translation award, for both Sankar’s Chowringhee and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen, and of the Muse India translation award for Buddhadeva Bose’s When The Time Is Right, his translation of Chowringhee was also shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His translation for Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay's The Yogini has won an English PEN award. He was born and grew up in Kolkata, and lives and writes in New Delhi.
A Girl Called Eel by Ali Zamir (Jacaranda Books). Front cover.
A Girl Called Eel by Ali Zamir, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Jacaranda Books)
A translation of huge global cultural importance: a novel from the Comoros.
Winner of the Prix Senghor 2016 and of the English PEN Award
A French Institute Book of the Week
A moving story of self-determination. In the Comoro Islands, a curious 17-year-old girl named Anguille wishes to discover the world beyond the understanding of her despotic father All-Knowing. She realises what she must do to liberate herself.
Anguille leaves her island. While drifting at sea, confronted with imminent death, she tells the story of her life in one long, continued breath and last sentence.
The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada (Charco Press). Front cover.
The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada, translated by Chris Andrews (Charco Press).
Reverend Pearson is evangelizing across the Argentinian countryside with his teenage daughter, when their car breaks down, leading them to the workshop and home of an aging mechanic and his young assistant. As tensions between the characters ebb and flow while a long day goes by, beliefs are questioned and allegiances are tested.
Wild Woman by Marina Šur Puhlovski, translated by Christina Pribichevich-Zoric (Istros Books).
An anti-love story set in 1970s Croatia against a background of economic hardship
After rushing into the romantic dream of marriage, a woman from a poor family background soon finds herself in a nightmare. The idyll is destroyed after she finds herself victim of a lazy, deceitful man. She realises she must go wild and liberate herself from the “prisons” imposed on her by her family, community and tradition to free herself from him.
The Yogini by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay, translated by Arunava Sinha (Tilted Axis Press).
A hallucinatory and explosively sensual new novel from the author of Panty and Abandon
Winner of the English PEN Award
Our selected Translated Book of the Month in July!
Homi is a modern, middle-class woman living in Kolkata. She has a stable marriage and a fast-paced job in a TV studio. But, one day, she meets a yogi in the street and her life is disrupted by this appearance. Being convinced this is a sign of fate, Homi becomes desperate to prove that her life is ruled by her own free will.
For sources and further information:
https://charcopress.com/
http://istrosbooks.com/
https://jacaranda-boooks.myshopify.com/
https://www.tiltedaxispress.com/
“I know it’s ultimately fate that drives us, and nothing else. You can do what you like, but really, you’re nothing more than a fish caught in a net.” – From The Yogini
How would you react to such a statement? Do you believe your life is ruled by fate? And nothing else?
After overhearing and then joining a discussion on fate between two colleagues in her workplace, the busy studio of a 24-7 TV channel, Homi asks herself these same questions. What does she believe in? Then days go by and her modern life in Kolkata moves on. She is a strong, young woman, with a fast-paced job and a very passionate husband, called Lalit. But, one day, everything changes, as she becomes slowly obsessed with the idea of fate and its force. On the eve of her first wedding anniversary, a bizarre, frightening figure, appears to her: a hermit only she can see, with matted locks and a beard, a blanket around his shoulder. He is calling her, whispering to her, strangely arousing her. Homi’s life is inevitably disrupted, haunted by what she is convinced is a manifestation of her own fate, which she goes on to fight with all her strength to prove her free will. How will her battle end?
After publishing Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s previous novels Panty and Abandon, Tilted Axis Press bring back this talented writer and her new thrilling, sensational novel. Here is the newest work from a writer who has positioned herself as a central and ground-breaking figure in the literary exploration of the themes of identity and female sexuality. Many thanks to Tilted Axis Press for bringing us the best and most innovative world literature which would otherwise not make it into English, like the incredible Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri, translated by Morgan Giles, our Translated Book of the Month in March!
Take advantage of Tilted Axis Press' offer to celebrate this new publication and get two or all three books by Bandyopadhyay for 30% off! Read more here!
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Selfies by Sylvie Weil, translated by Ros Schwartz (Les Fugitives)
Taking selfies is not the exclusive preserve of millennials.
In Selfies, Sylvie Weil gives a playful twist to the concept of self-representation: taking her cue from self-portraits by women artists, ranging from the 13th c. through the Renaissance to Frida Kahlo and Vivian Maier, Weil has written a memoir in pieces, where each picture acts as a portal to a significant moment from her own life and sparks anecdotes tangentially touching on topical issues: from the Palestinian question to the pain of a mother witnessing her son’s psychotic breakdown, to the subtle manifestations of anti-Semitism, to ageism, genetics, and a Jewish dog...
Isabella, poems by Isabella Morra and translator Caroline Maldonado (Smokestack Books).
This collection is the first complete UK edition of poems by the powerful sixteenth-century Italian poet Isabella Morra. Living in strict isolation in the family castle of Valsinni, Isabella was murdered by her own brothers in an honour killing at the young age of twenty-six. Poet and translator Caroline Maldonado explores Morra’s life and fate, her time and her space in the South of Italy. Maldonado’s own poems are an attempt to ‘find’ Isabella and to show how her tragic experience is very relevant to us today.
You can read our interview with Caroline Maldonado here, where she explains how she discovered this forgotten young poet and how this challenging translation project started and developed.
The Last Walk of Giovanni Pascoli, translated and introduced by Danielle Hope (Rockingham Press).
We are glad to announce the publication of the only English translation this side of the Atlantic (apart from Seamus Heaney’s limited edition) of poems by the great Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli. This book is made up of poems and vignettes of rural life, the latter illustrated by Frances Wilson, who is also the front cover’s designer.
The Olcinium Trilogy by Andrej Nikolaidis, translated by Will Firth (Istros Books).
This unique collection brings together three previous short novels by this acclaimed author: The Son, The Coming and Till Kingdom Come. In Nikolaidis’ stories, the ancient town of Olcinium is a place where mystics have prophesized, regimes have plotted against their citizenry, and ordinary people have resorted to crime. You will simply love this writer’s precise and bitingly funny prose and his novels’ hopeless and misanthrope protagonists.
If you are particularly interested in fiction from the Balkans in translation, read our interview with experienced and talented translators from Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian Christina Pribichevic-Zoric (here) and Celia Hawkesworth (here). Our congratulations to Celia who has just been awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2019!
Transfer Window by Maria Gerhardt, translated by Lindy Falk van Rooyen (Nordisk Books).
Our Translated Book of the Month this June, Transfer Window is the utopian re-imagining of the North-Copenhagen suburbs as a walled, luxurious hospice for the terminally ill, drawing upon and re-elaborating the author’s experience as a terminal cancer patient, mixing dream and reality to create a compelling piece of fiction.
The translator from Danish Lindy Falk van Rooyen has helped us to explore this unique book’s structure and features in her very interesting interview (read here).
Yeoyu: the full set (Strangers Press).
Strangers Press’ new translation project is here! We are very excited to launch Yeoyu: a series of eight exquisitely designed chapbooks showcasing some of today’s best Korean writers, featuring the work of both new voices and established writers such as Bae Suah and prize-winning Han Kang. The eight titles have been selected in consultation with trailblazer and publisher-activist, award-winning Deborah Smith.
New for children this month is Super Guppy by Edward van de Vendel, illustrated by Fleur van der Weel and translated from the Dutch by David Colmer (The Emma Press).
This new illustrated children’s book is a funny, contemporary collection of children’s poems about home life, perfect for curious children who have a lot of questions about how the world, and everything in it, works! The book also includes writing prompts to let children write their own poems!
Are you a curious person too and are you wondering what it means to translate a poetry book for children? Do not miss our interesting interview with Super Guppy’s translator David Colmer (read here)!
A poem from Super Guppy by Edward van de Vendel (The Emma Press).
For sources and further information:
“I know I look young in my sports attire and tattoos. I could have been in my prime. I could have been happy-go-lucky, before I came through that door.” – from Transfer Window by Maria Gerhardt, translation by Lindy Falk van Rooyen.
Young, Whitstable-based, independent publisher of modern and contemporary Scandinavian fiction Nordisk Books is publishing a new book this month. After Henrik Nor-Hansen’s shocking Termin, here comes another unique and thought-provoking book: Transfer Window by Danish author Maria Gerhardt, translated by Lindy Falk van Rooyen.
A bestseller in Gerhardt’s home country, Transfer Window reimagines the wealthy suburbs north of Copenhagen as a walled, luxurious hospice for the terminally ill. In such a place, everyone wears white, new-age nuns grow organic cannabis on the beach, music is not allowed, nor is the internet, but you can swim in the icy sea in the winter.
“But this was different. And you could see it in my eyes. My body knew pain, which the body can’t bear.” – From Transfer Window.
But imagination mixes with reality, revealing the harshness of life – and the unavoidability and the incomprehensibility of death.
In Transfer Window, the author provides us with a series of fragments of different lengths. Some are visions, thoughts, dreams – and these mix with the author’s overwhelming memories of being a terminal patient. Maria Gerhardt, who sadly died in 2017, shortly after her book was published in Denmark, takes us through the devastating experience of a life with cancer, of a short life, of not being able to plan her future with her family, to grow old with her partner. Yet, as the translator points out in her interview (read here), although “this book is a very personal one”, the author would have wanted it to be read “as a fictional work of art, rather than a memoir or a deathbed diary”. It is definitely a lot more than that.
It is a short book, but the deepest and toughest you’ll read this year. Do not miss this must-read, get your copy on 27th June.
]]>“My sweetheart, you are not to see my lying here sobbing… My sweetheart, I wanted to be your best, but we had just a short season, and no matter how many walls we built, how many mattresses we piled up, the pea always made its way, mutated, sailed along the drains and sprouted in clumps of disused potential. Life is not fair; death comes into its own.” – My favourite lines from Maria Gerhardt’s Transfer Window.
While waiting for Transfer Window to be released on 27th June (pre-order it on Nordisk Books’ website here!), read our interview with the translator Lindy Falk van Rooyen and discover more about this powerful book and the author, who sadly died of cancer in 2017.
Transfer Window is a peculiar book. How would you describe it?
Yes, peculiar in a good way, though. It’s a very personal book of short fragments, no longer than a page each, which read like ‘attempts’ to articulate deep-seated feelings that reminds me of the tradition of Montaigne’s Essays, albeit in a very compact form. We know from the first page that the narrator is in the final stage of terminal cancer, and even though death is certain – sooner for the narrator than it is for most of us – the overall tone is not as bleak as one might expect. The prose has a meditative rhythm, which draws you into a universe that is not didactic or intellectual at all, even though the subtitle suggests that Maria Gerhardt intended her book to be much more than an autofictive re-imagining of her experience of terminal cancer. Maria Gerhardt was a DJ and a poet, but also an author with a political conscience. And I loved the unexpected playfulness of this book, Maria’s self-effacing humour, the tension between the gravity of death and a certain lightness of being; the narrator is terminally ill, but she reminds us that she is still alive, a human being, who loves and laughs and hurts. And she doesn’t suffer fools with their well-meaning, yet often inane attempts to comfort her.
What can you say about the subtitle 'Tales of the Mistakes of the Healthy'?
Subtitles can create certain expectations with the reader, and the word ‘fortællinger’ used in the Danish original subtitle also suggests some kind of genre classification. I toyed with options like ‘stories’ or ‘sketches’, which is probably the closest translation, if you’re interested in categories, but I don’t think that Maria Gerhardt was particularly interested in the niceties of genre, certainly not in this book. Rather, I think the subtitle points to our awkwardness in relating to death and the dying, to our own human fallibility. I settled for a relatively literal translation of ‘fortællinger’, and I’m indebted to a friend for suggesting the word ‘tales’, which I felt was the best translation for Maria Gerhardt’s unfussy, down-to-earth style of ‘telling’ or sharing her episodes from a life in a hospice that she re-imagines as an idyllic village for the terminally ill on the stretch of Danish coastline north of Copenhagen, expropriated by the Danish government for this particular purpose. Life can be very grave at this Hospice, but the author’s quips and conversations with fellow patient and friend Mikkel is from the real world experience of death. ‘Tales’ has the added advantage of the phonetic correlation to ‘fortællinger’, which also sounds similar to the English word ‘foretell’. Our awkwardness with death is our human ‘fejl’, which I again chose to translate in the literal sense of the ‘mis-takes’ we make in life: when I read this book, our lives feel like a ‘stage’, but her life is not; for the narrator, death is more than a fear of mind, it is imminent reality.
“… as a translator, I was constantly asking myself: where is she writing from, exactly? But I think that’s the magic of this book, if not the whole point: the narrator is writing from a ‘Transfer Window’, which can mean many things to many people.”
The translator Lindy Falk van Rooyen
on Transfer Window
And how would you describe the structure of the book?
It consists of passages or fragments of varying length from one sentence to a maximum of one page and is roughly divided into three ‘books’ or sequences. From the outset, the title itself, actually, there is a very strong sense of place in the book. And, as a translator, I was constantly asking myself: where is she writing from, exactly? But I think that’s the magic of this book, if not the whole point: the narrator is writing from a ‘Transfer Window’, which can mean many things to many people. In the first fragment, she is sitting on a bench in garden, smoking. What does she see? I kept coming back to this image, as she tells me her story, shares her memories, her hopes and dreams of the future she could have had.
The author Maria Gerhardt died of cancer in 2017. What does this mean for the translator? Did this affect the translation process and how?
Due to Maria Gerhardt’s death I never had the opportunity to meet her during the translation process. Every translator has his or her preferred method to tackle the immense responsibility and privilege involved in the act of literary translation. It is very important to me that I can relate to the original text on a personal level, which includes the author, but my particular modus operandi depends on the nature of book, rather than the author. If I’m translating a highly literary book, I usually contact the author during the translation process in order to get a better sense of the author’s intentions, or to discuss aspects of style. It is clear that this book is a very personal one, but I approached this translation in a way that I think Maria Gerhardt would have intended it to be read: as a fictional work of art, rather than a memoir or a deathbed diary.
Did you have any particular difficulty in translating this text? If so, which parts of the text and how did you solve them in your translation?
I have never lost a loved one to terminal cancer, and thankfully I am one of the ‘healthy’ that Maria Gerhardt addresses in her book. Reading the original, I soon became aware that the author and the narrator often have a specific addressee in mind in the individual fragments, and yet there is a sense that she is talking to me, her reader, personally. Also, starting with the tone of the subtitle, there is a sense that the narrator is acutely aware that, more often than not, our own fears overshadow or interfere with our concern for the well-being of the terminally ill. So I think the particular challenge I faced in translating this book was deciding how to convey this undefined emotional undercurrent - part appeal, part ridicule, part self-effacing irony - into English. I can only hope that I solved this problem in a way that is faithful to the original as well as to Maria Gerhardt’s memory. The author’s two previous works – also deeply informed by the author’s personal life – gave useful insight into the way she saw the world. I don’t think it’s meaningful or even possible to list the wealth of emotions driving this book – each reader will experience their own – but for me, as translator, the second greatest challenge was the rendering of the author’s humour or ‘lightness of being’, as I experienced it, alongside defiance, courage, anger, bitterness, intense sorrow and ultimately, a profound gratitude to be alive.
I noticed that the epigraph of the translation is different to the one that appears in the original Danish?
Yes. Unfortunately, we weren’t permitted to publish the epigraph that appears in the Danish original, a line from the lyrics of ‘Don’t give up’ (1986) by Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. So the epigraph that introduces the translation is a departure from the original. But I hope that our epigraph, one of Maria Gerhardt’s own poems from her debut collection, is still in line with the spirit of the author’s original intention. And it is intended as an homage to Maria Gerhardt and her art as an author and poet.
Do you have a favourite passage from the book?
Yes, I do. There are many passages that moved me deeply, but the rhythm and heart of the first image stays with me:
“I wait for the sun, smoking cigarettes while I wait, smoking cigarettes, even though it’s not allowed. When I close my eyes, I’m roused by the sounds.”
We kindly thank Nordisk Books and translator Lindy Falk van Rooyen
for their contribution to our blog.
Transfer Window is the second book published by Nordisk Books in 2019, following Termin: An Inquiry into Violence in Norway by Henrik Nor-Hansen (May 2019), our selected Translated Book of the Month in May, translated by Matt Bagguley, whom we’ve also interviewed (read our interview here) to explore the text’s style and tone’s peculiarities and how these are handled with in translation. Transfer Window and Termin were launched last month at Whitlit.
More about the translator:
Lindy Falk van Rooyen is a Danish/South African translator of Danish fiction. She holds an LLM in Commercial Law and an MA in English and Scandinavian Literature. Her translations have appeared in Blue Lyra Review, Asymptote, The Missing Slate, and Lunch Ticket Magazine. Book-length translations include What my body remembers (Soho Press, 2017) by Agnete Friis, which was short-listed for the Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year 2018. Most recently, she was awarded a PEN Heim Translation Grant in 2018 and an excerpt of her translation of Up Close & Distant (Nær og Fjern, Gyldendal, 2015) by Dorrit Willumsen was short-listed for the John Dryden Translation Prize 2018. She is based in Hamburg, Germany.
]]>The translator has answered our questions and told us more about his experience of translating a children’s poetry book.
The translator David Colmer. Photo credit: Michele Hutchison.
What was your experience of translating Super Guppy?
The poems in Supper Guppy are mostly quite short, with short lines that often turn on a particular word or phrase. That can be quite difficult because English might not have a similar expression or there might not be a good rhyme that works in the same way. Initially I thought I would need to take a lot of liberties to make the poems work in English, but in the end I felt like I was able to stick surprisingly closely to the Dutch originals. Once I’d finished the translations I discussed them with the author, Edward van de Vendel, and, with his gentle encouragement, reworked them until they were as good as I could possibly get them. Sometimes this took a while as I was a bit too fond of some of my solutions and reluctant to let them go. I think both Edward and I can be quite stubborn, but that’s not a bad thing when you’ve worked hard on something and want it to turn out well.
Do you have a favourite poetry book for children in translation?
Oh, that’s quite a hard question. Looking back on my own childhood I remember prose translations I was very fond of, but I can’t think of any translated poetry I read when I was little at all. And living here in the Netherlands, the children’s poetry and translated children’s poetry I’ve been exposed to through the education system and my daughter’s reading when she was younger was mostly in Dutch. I guess I’ll have to spread my net a bit wider in English and get back to you on this one!
Are there any Dutch children's books in translation you'd like to recommend?
Pushkin have published some fabulous children’s books in recent years, among them quite a few Dutch ones, including Tonke Dragt’s tremendously successful Letter for the King, translated by Laura Watkinson, which is an exciting adventure and a great read. Laura has also translated another potential classic, Annet Schaap’s Lampie and the Children of the Sea, which is due for release any day now. And if I can mention my own translations I would say two books by Annie M.G. Schmidt, the queen of twentieth-century Dutch children’s lit: Tow-Truck Pluck and The Cat who Came In off the Roof, also published by Pushkin. These two books are very different, but both funny, warm and entertaining, with a strong emotional and social core. I can’t recommend them highly enough.
We kindly thank The Emma Press and the translator David Colmer for their contribution to our blog.
More about the translator:
Nordisk Books: “Mental health is at the heart of your book […]. Do you think this subject is treated enough/well in the arts today?”
Gine Cornelia Pedersen: “I think the human psyche, and the troubles of living, are subjects that get as much exposure in literature/art as love. And also, as love, subjects that will never get old.”
– An extract from an interview with Gine Cornelia Pedersen, Nordisk Books
Zero by Norwegian writer and actress Gine Cornelia Pedersen is an impressive debut novel touching upon the theme of mental health. Winner of the prestigious Tarjei Vessas First Book Award, Zero was compared in Norway with a ‘punk rock single’.
“Uncompromising, unfiltered, disquieting.” – The translator Rosie Hedger on Zero
Zero, translated into English by Rosie Hedger and published in 2018 by Nordisk Books, has been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2019!
Founded by Lord Weidenfeld and supported by New College, The Queen’s College and St Anne’s College, Oxford, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize is awarded to book-length literary translations into English from any living European language to recognise the art and the value of translation. The winner will be announced this weekend: the prize will be awarded on 15 June at Oxford Translation Day at St Anne’s College. Well done to everyone on the shortlist!
While waiting for Saturday, we have interviewed the translator Rosie Hedger to hear more about Zero from her perspective. With our blog, we also aim to highlight the importance of translation and to give translators a voice, to acknowledge their expertise and praise them for their hard work as mediators between cultures, languages, histories and societies, as well as literary traditions.
Rosie tells us today about her experience of becoming and being a translator and, in particular, about her experience of translating Zero – a clearly challenging text to transpose into English, as “purposefully confusing or grammatically ‘incorrect’” in its original version, as Rosie explains. Read below how she skilfully and boldly tackled what she calls “breaks in logic” and “grammatical oddities” in the Norwegian text and collaborated with the author Gine Cornelia Pedersen to convey the novel’s meanings and intention to English-speaking readers. In other words – see how she has well deserved her place on the shortlist and she definitely has what it takes to win the prize!
How would you describe Zero in a few words?
Uncompromising, unfiltered, disquieting.
Zero has been shortlisted for the 2019 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. What is the role of translation prizes today?
Translation prizes draw attention to books that often go under the radar - an author's name might be totally unfamiliar and therefore struggle to attract the attention of readers and reviewers, or a publisher may only have a small marketing and publicity budget. In best case scenarios, literary prizes have the potential to boost the translation of literature from an entire region, or at the very least to draw attention to work that is already being published to very little fanfare, and that can be transformative.
What was your journey to becoming a translator? What languages do you translate from and how did you start translating?
I translate from Norwegian (both of the two official written forms, Bokmål and Nynorsk). I took Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and I was fortunate to study under Kari Dickson, an experienced translator (and all-round delight) who picked up on my interest in literature and translation and helped to point me in the right direction. I spent my third year of study living in Norway, did a summer au pairing in Denmark, and after graduating I taught English in Sweden for a while. After that, I spent a few years teaching university students in the UK, but I plugged away at shorter literary translation jobs and dabbled in commercial work during that time. For a long while, I felt that I was lacking direction and had no idea how to progress in the world of translation, but now I look back on that time as really valuable unofficial training. In 2011, I was selected as the Norwegian candidate for the BCLT mentorship programme, working with Don Bartlett for six months and meeting other emerging translators and industry professionals, and it was transformative for my practice (and, perhaps more importantly, for my confidence). I can't underestimate the role that other translators have had in helping me on the path to where I am - there are huge reserves of kindness, generosity and knowledge among colleagues of all experience levels, and connecting with other translators has been one of the most enjoyable aspects of the job over the past few years.
Did you face any particular difficulties translating this book? How did you overcome them?
This was one of my toughest translations to date - the fragmented nature of the writing left so much open to interpretation, and the poetic form and use of very short sentences further intensified this. Norwegian sometimes allows for a greater ambiguity expressed in very few words where the same thing in English would seem long-winded in comparison – I found that leaving time between re-reads helped me to edit more brutally, and as my familiarity with the text grew, I felt bolder about making those kinds of decisions.
The narrator's unreliability and poor mental state also had an effect on the translation process – through emotionally draining highs and lows, her grasp on language would sometimes disappear completely. Translation is often described as a very (very!) close reading of a text, and I battled with the desire to impose logic whilst processing this. When the original text is purposefully confusing or grammatically 'incorrect', working out how to accurately convey these breaks in logic or grammatical oddities can be a long and drawn-out process. I mulled over sentences like 'they not happy now' for hours, trying to decide if they adequately embodied the character’s voice whilst being only just as jarring to the reader as they came across in the Norwegian original. Gine was very open to talking things over, and I discussed these kinds of things with her during the process. She spoke of writing almost as if on autopilot - I sensed that it was difficult for her to 'unpack' certain sections or sentences in a way that might satisfy a translator's obsessive need(!) for explanation. Gine was wonderful to work with - she had a great deal of respect for the translation process and the choices I made, and was happy to offer her insight.
We thank the translator Rosie Hedger and Nordisk Books for their contribution to our blog.
Rosie Hedger was born in Scotland and completed her MA (Hons) in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Most recently she has worked on translating Helga Flatland's contemporary family saga, A Modern Family (forthcoming from Orenda Books), and her translation of Agnes Ravatn’s The Bird Tribunal won an English PEN Translates Award in 2016. Ravatn’s novel was later selected for BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year. Rosie was a candidate in the British Centre for Literary Translation’s mentoring scheme for emerging translators in 2012, mentored by Don Bartlett, and has worked on a range of fiction, non-fiction and children’s literature.
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New from Istros Books (May 2019) is Faruk Šehić’s collection Under Pressure – a novel in fragments – a collection of brutal and heart-wrenching stories from the Bosnian war frontline. Waiting to welcome him to London later this week, Under Pressure’s translator Mirza Purić has answered our questions on his experience translating this book and working from a so-called ‘smaller’ language.
Can you describe Under Pressure, its content, style and form, in a few sentences?
“Under Pressure is Faruk Šehić’s first work of fiction. It’s a fragmentary novel or a collection of loosely connected stories set mostly in the far north-western part of Bosnia during the 1990s war. It’s about pressure and decompressing, war, alcohol, poetry, love, war again. Under Pressure is poetic, poignant, funny, witty, rebellious, snarky, minimalist and bold.”
What is your experience of translating a book of stories from the frontline? Did you face any particular difficulties?
“Just my glitchy brain. The fact that the stories take place in the trenches was the least of my worries, I’ve read tonnes of wartime literature and I used to be a military interpreter. The biggest difficulty was finding the official, published translations of all the poems and novels that are quoted or referred to in the text to lift the quotes from. There is no English library in Sarajevo so I had to search the dankest corners of the Internet and pester friends who live outside the noose.”
In particular, did you face any specific challenges related to the cultural specificity of the story and the author’s experience?
“In many ways this is a very local book. For instance, most of the dialogue is in a rather rustic local dialect which can be barely comprehensible to most outsiders. I grew up a bike ride from Faruk so this was no problem. I originally had broad Yorkshire there, as I thought the socio-linguistic status and distance from the standard were about right, but there were concerns that the readers would have to work a bit too hard to make sense of all t’ clipped articles, funny syntax and obscure words, so in the end I had to go with some kind of generic non-standard English. I’m a bit of a stickler for heritage languages and dialects and I’m not too happy about this, but it had to be done.”
The translator Mirza Purić. Photo credit: Stacy Mattingly.
More generally, what can you say about being a translator from so-called ‘smaller’ languages?
“A banal point perhaps, but I find myself explicating much less when I translate from German, or into the multinominal Balkan language. When I worked mostly from English, every now and then leaving things untranslated and unglossed seemed a viable option, or even the best solution. I can’t do that very often now, I have to work harder. And of course there is the perennial issue of no opportunities, few or no literary magazines, an off-putting publishing scene, the ‘smallerness’ of everything.”
What is your favourite passage from the book and why?
“The final paragraph of Undertakers’ Yarn is one of the most poetic bits in the book that are not outright poetry. I don’t want to quote it here, but it wraps up four or five pages of cringy sexual banter, and is just crushingly sad.”
“…That’s how he [Faruk] fits. He towers.” - The translator Mirza Purić on Faruk Šehić
How does the author fit within Bosnian literature?
“His version of the war doesn’t quite chime with the official interpretations, the stuff that you find in sanctioned, subsidised literature. Our lads in Under Pressure are shitfaced all the time, they swear like stevedores, fornicate, eat pig, smoke weed, take drugs and beat prisoners. The official – nationalist – narrative is that they were as chaste as Sir Galahad. So while the book was an instant hit with the readers, for reasons which I hope are obvious even in my translation, some didn’t like what they read, I imagine. Faruk has put something on the line for his art, not too many people here do that.
I’d always considered Bosnian literature terribly pedestrian and parochial, with the exception of a few greats. Faruk was the first modern Bosnian poet/writer I thought was exciting and relevant. Most of the previous generation were a shower of old men in dad jeans with absolutely nothing of interest to say, and I religiously avoided everything they wrote. When his debut collection Pjesme u nastajanju (Poems in Progress) came out in the early noughties, it towered. That’s how he fits. He towers.”
What other books by Bosnian authors would you like to recommend? Are there any books by Bosnian authors you’d like to see translated into English?
“Moja fabrika (My Factory) by Selvedin Avdić, author of Seven Terrors, is a lovely non-fiction book about his home city of Zenica. Senka Marić has a harrowing novel about cancer titled Kinsugi tijela (Body Kintsugi), I’ve just started working on an excerpt and I’m humming with excitement. Nihad Hasanović’s first novel O roštilju i raznim smetnjama (On Barbecue and Sundry Disorders) is an important book to me, I’d love to see it in as many languages as possible. Lamija Begagić and Lejla Kalamujić write phenomenal queer fiction. Darko Cvijetić is an extraordinary language poet. Marko Tomaš and Mehmed Begić are rather underrated. This is a very good time to be a translator of poetry from these parts; a new generation of women poets is taking over, they are tremendous. Some names to remember: Anita Pajević, Dijala Hasanbegović, Lidija Deduš, Selma Asotić, Šima Majić, Zerina Zahirović. Yes, I’ve left somebody out, sorry.”
We kindly thank the translator Mirza Purić for his contribution to our blog.
Mirza Purić is a literary translator, editor and bassist.
Faruk Šehić is coming to London this week to talk about his writing: come meet him, together with Bosnian author Alen Mešković, at the Impossible Territory panel series on 6th June at 18:00 as part of the UCL Festival of Culture (book your place on 6th June here) and at the Yunus Emre Enstitüsü on 7th June at 18:30 for a book launch and talks (book your place on 7th June here).
The events are free, but registration is required.
Faruk Šehić is also the author of Quiet Flows the Una (Istros Books, 2016), translated by Will Firth. This autobiographical novel is the story of a man trying to overcome the personal trauma caused by the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. Find out more on Istros Books’ website here and at the events mentioned above on 6th and 7th June.
Experienced translator Christina Pribichevich Zoric answers our questions about her experience as a translator from Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (B/C/S). If you’re interested in the world of translation from ‘smaller’ languages, join us on Thursday 6th June for the Impossible Territory panel series as part of the UCL Festival of Culture.
Christina Pribichevich Zoric will be on the first panel Translating the War – Bosnian Writing through English and other languages at 18:00 with translator from Danish, Paul Russell Garrett, exploring how experiences of the conflict in former-Yugoslavia travel the world through other languages and translation. Join us there and come meet Bosnian authors Alen Mešković and Faruk Šehić!
The event is free but registration is required. Book your place here.
What was your journey to becoming a translator from B/C/S?
“I came to what was then Yugoslavia as an American graduate student, planning to stay a year. I stayed for over twenty. I picked up the language along the way, although it helped that my father was from the region so there were some words that I already knew. I started honing my skills as a translator when I got a job as a translator/broadcaster with the English Service of Radio Yugoslavia. Eventually I moved on to translating works of literature.”
How else have you used your language skills in your career?
“Language skills open all sorts of doors. I had studied French at the Sorbonne before coming to the former Yugoslavia, which was helpful when I came to head the Language Service at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, where the official languages were English and French and the working language was B/C/S.”
What have been the biggest challenges you faced as a translator from so-called 'smaller' languages?
“Enabling readers of the English translation to understand cultural and historical references that may be unfamiliar to them.”
How have you evolved as a translator from your first to your last translation?
“When I started translating I had to look for quotes, references and even terms wherever I could find them. The internet has made that so much easier, allowing me to spend more time on the translation itself.”
What is the current state of B/C/S literature in translation in the UK?
“Translated literature is still a poor relation in the English-speaking world. There was a spike of interest in B/C/S writers during and right after the wars in the former Yugoslavia, but that has tapered off yet there are still many classics and contemporary writers who more than deserve to be read in English.”
What suggestions would you give to emerging translators from B/C/S?
“Choose books to translate that you feel you can do justice to and read as much as you can in English to develop your style.”
Do you have a favourite book in translation from B/C/S? And/or is there a book not yet translated that you hope to see translated for the English-speaking public?
“I don't know about a favourite book, but I would love to see more of Borislav Pekic's work translated into English. He was an acute observer of the world, combining erudition with an almost British sense of humor.”
We kindly thank translator Christina Pribichevich Zoric for her contribution to our blog.
Christina Pribichevich Zoric has translated more than thirty novels and short-story collections from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and French. Her translations include the award-winning Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić and the international best-seller Zlata’s Diary by Zlata Filipović. She has worked as a broadcaster for the English Service of Radio Yugoslavia in Belgrade and the BBC in London and was the Chief of Conference and Language Services for the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
]]>While waiting to meet the authors themselves on Thursday, we have interviewed the translators of Alen Mešković’s Ukulele Jam and Faruk Šehić’s Under Pressure to gain an insight into the world of translation from so-called ‘smaller’ languages and learn more about these two fascinating books.
Today, translator Paul Russell Garrett answers our questions about his experience of translating Ukulele Jam from Danish. Mešković’s novel tells the story of a Bosnian teenager, named Miki, and his family, who are fleeing their home during the Balkan war.
“…There is a youthful innocence that is uniquely captured in Ukulele Jam, broken up by the outbursts of humour and maturity that teenagers often surprise adults with.” - The translator Paul Russell Garrett on Ukulele Jam
Can you describe Ukulele Jam, its content, style and form, in a few sentences?
“Ukulele Jam centres on the daily activities of a teenager living in a refugee camp, with war raging in the not so distant background. The war is constantly discussed in letters, phone calls and at family reunions, but through the bulk of the story, the reader follows Miki on his quest to find new friends, music, and of course, girls. There is a youthful innocence that is uniquely captured in Ukulele Jam, broken up by the outbursts of humour and maturity that teenagers often surprise adults with.”
Do you have any favourite passages from the book?
“One of the chapters that I translated early on in the process, simply titled ‘Sweden’, is still fixed in my mind. Miki’s friends at the refugee camp are leaving one by one, a number of them granted asylum by Sweden. He daydreams about Sweden and of moving there with his older brother, even though he has absolutely no idea what Sweden is like, to him it’s just the knob at the top of the globe. But when his friend mentions music libraries in one of his letters, Miki’s mind is made up. Of course this leads to arguments with his parents, who have no interest in moving even further away from their home. A teenager’s simple desires versus the practicalities of adulthood.”
“Literature has a vital role to play in ensuring society remembers its past atrocities and hopefully learns from them.” - The translator Paul Russell Garrett
Did you have any difficulties translating this book? In particular, did you face any challenges related to the cultural specificity of the story and the author's experience?
“I’ve met up with Alen a few times in Denmark, and we’ve had a great rapport from the get-go. I recall thinking once about how much I had in common with Alen, but of course I’d never lived in a war zone and hadn’t been forced to flee my homeland. But Alen and I connected on a human level, which is one of the things I think is so powerful about Ukulele Jam–it allows people who have never experienced the horrors of war or genocide to connect and relate with a character who has. Literature has a vital role to play in ensuring society remembers its past atrocities and hopefully learns from them.”
What languages do you translate from and how did you become a translator?
“I translate from Danish and Norwegian, and occasionally dabble with Swedish poetry. When I finished my degree in Scandinavian Studies, I had no idea what to do, and so I continued working odd jobs until one day, on a jaunt to Copenhagen, I stumbled upon a play script and decided I wanted to translate it. Things kind of fell into place, and within an incredibly short space of time, I was translating entire novels! It was completely unexpected and unplanned, but now it feels like it was always meant to be.”
What is your experience of translating from so-called 'smaller' languages?
“Smaller languages are often represented by cultural institutions that work to widen the reach of the literature from the various countries. Not only do they support the publication and promotion of books translated from their languages, they also provide translators with the opportunity for grants, cultural excursions and career development. Denmark and Norway are particularly good at this, and I hate to think what would have become of me and my Scandinavian Studies degree if these options had not been available.”
We kindly thank the translator Paul Russell Garrett for his contribution to our blog.
More about the translator:
Paul Russell Garrett works from Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, translating fiction, theatre and poetry into English. Translations include Lars Mytting's The Sixteen Trees of the Somme (long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award 2019), Christina Hesselholdt's Companions, as well as her forthcoming novel, Vivian, a fictionalised account of the life of enigmatic American street photographer, Vivian Maier. Paul also mentors emerging theatre translators, teaches Danish and plays handball in his spare time.
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