Women In Translation Month is here again. This event, in its third year, was started by the blogger Meytal Radzinski. The idea came out of a number of posts she wrote in which she used The Three Percent website’s yearly translation database to determine the percentage of books in translation written by women which are published each year. The 2014 and 2015 results were depressing and this year seems to be a continuation of previous years’ trends.
In case you’ve forgotten: the goals for Women In Translation Month are simple –
- Increase the dialogue and discussion about women writers in translation
- Read more books by women in translation
- And if you’re a blogger or reviewer (or both) – BE AWARE! Make sure you’re reviewing women in translation. If publishers aren’t sending you the books, then start requesting them. It’s our job to let the readers know what they’re missing.
Want to be a part of the discussion? –
- Look for blog posts tagged Women In Translation and follow the hashtag #WITMonth on Twitter.
- There’s a wonderful interview with Meytal, aka Biblibio, aka the founder of #WITMonth on the ALTA (American Literary Translators Association) blog.
- Alex Zucker and Allison Markin Powell did a nice write-up over at the PEN America website – and it looks like PEN will be taking part. They’ve already done a post on women who have won the PEN Translation Prize.
- And, of course, regular updates can also be found at Biblibio’s blog: Life In Letters.
I’ll be reading and posting about Women In Translation all of August. And while I probably won’t get to them all, here’s a peek at my TBR list –
READER AT LARGE 
I hope to get a few women in translation in this month but I have a review read and some targeted reading around grief that is either not female or not in translation. However this is the second time I have seen La Superba in a pile of WIT suggested reads. Ilja, upset that his poetry was not getting enough attention asked: What do I have to do, pose naked on the cover? He did and the image is seared in my mind. It leaves nothing of the imagination, least of all his sex.
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Roughghosts –
While I always love receiving notifications that you’ve left a comment – THIS PARTICULAR ONE may be my absolute favorite comment of all time. I just went looking for that cover (with a huge grin on my face)… and sadly could not find it. But thank you for the brilliant correction!
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I accidentally stumbled on it in a Twitter conversation between the Deep Vellum publisher and someone else before the book came out. If you have seen his photo now, imagine him on a sofa with one leg tucked under his knee in all his, uh, glory. Priceless!
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I’ve heard of none of the authors you have in your stack which just reinforces why we need initiatives like WIT month. I’m going for for a more modest reading list since it also joining a Virago reading project.
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Good morning! Most of the books on that pile are from a few very small US publishers who specialize in translations, so they’re new to most English readers (myself included!).
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Ah, so they’re going to be tough to get here in uk I suspect
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Not necessarily. I believe the UK has a better record for publishing translated lit than the US, so they may already been published over there by British publishers. And there’s always the Book Depository.
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Hi Tara, I’ve been tracking my translations by gender, and sad to say, that while my reviews in general run at about 45% female/ 55% male, for authors in translation it’s a different picture: only 20% of authors I’ve reviewed are female. (Ok, that’s skewed by my Zola Project and my participation in the IFFP Shadow Jury where most of the nominations were by male authors, and also by my fondness for Hans Fallada and Ismail Kadare, but still….)
Anyway, *chuckle* I hope to finish Svetlana Alexievich’s (very long, very grim) Secondhand Time in time for #WIT, and I am almost finished The Lover by Marguerite Duras, and maybe I’ll find time for another one or two during the month if I can.
Cheers
Lisa
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Morning from North America Lisa! I read so slowly that I usually don’t check my numbers until closer to the end of the year. But last year I was pretty much in line with the 30% average. But then, we’re in different publishing markets I imagine. How closely is Australia’s publishing industry tied to the UK?
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