Deborah Smith
Source: LA Review of Books
‘Literary translation can both resist and perpetuate cultural imperialism; as translators, we need to stay aware of our own biases, and of the plurality of approaches advocated by those whose biases and aims are other than ours.’
The winner of the inaugural International Man Booker in 2016, Deborah Smith discusses the politics, poetry and pitfalls of translating Korean for an Anglophone readership.
Emily Wilson
Source: Twitter
‘The Loeb (again, said to be the “literal” prose version) translates στομάτων as “lips”. The word means “mouths”. It does not mean “lips”. It just doesn’t. There’s no reason I can think of to turn a mouth into lips, UNLESS you want to make sure the Sirens sound sexy.’
In this thread Emily Wilson gives a powerful illustration of how meaning can be manipulated through translation.
Khairani Barokka
Source: Modern Poetry in Translation
‘Translation requires more than just broad political understandings that are transplanted from the contexts of majority English-speaking countries and supposedly applicable to all. It requires an understanding of the existence of truly hundreds of different feminisms in a country like Indonesia, and that unequal power dynamics operate in and among each.’
Khairani Barokka’s inaugural essay as Poet in Residence at MPT calls for an end to the Orientalist myth-making of a ‘national canon’ of Indonesia, and the exclusion of voices that results
Source: PEN Transmissions
“Indigeneity is a word I return to often. It describes, for me, a framework for living that might sustainably accommodate the wellbeing of myself as an individual, and that of the world around me — by destroying any concept of division between the two.” – Victoria Adukwei Bulley
In a conversation about the power structures at play within and between languages, and the power language has to rethink this structures, Shadow Heroes board member Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, and Damian Le Bas explore the complex relationship between their identity and the languages of their heritage.
Source: Pen Transmissions
This concern about putting voices out there – who are not amplified or picked up easily within the Anglophone discourse – has been a motivation behind my choice of projects.
Meena Kandasamy illustrates the importance of translation to fill a void in the English feminist and political discourse, in this interview for English Pen.
“A lot of the ways in which world literature is framed are about building bridges. But that denies the political, historical and economic violences that subtend cultural contact-zones. It’s totally fraught, and there’s no easy answer.” –Nick Glastonbury
This interview with Sema Kaygusuz, author of Every Fire You Tend and her translator Nick Glastonbury, shows a confluence of authorial and translatorial projects in choosing language that accommodates plurality and challenges prevalent colonial and capitalist narratives.
Nariman Youssef and Sawad Hussain
Source: Words Without Borders
“[…] one cannot write about real-life experiences from the place of the “I” without laying claim to a place in the world. The pieces included here—like most genuine, impactful life writing by good writers of all genders or none—cut across the private and public spheres to give us stories that can be surprising, shocking, or eerily familiar and relatable.”
Sawad Hussain and Nariman Youssef introduce a selection of contemporary female voices from the Arab world, challenging mainstream tendencies to generalise and make assumptions about both women’s experience, and the language with which they express it.
Source: The Rumpus
“I am interested in forms of translation (and relation) where we don’t simply demand the other to assimilate, where we meet each of us, all of us, on unfamiliar ground.”
Interviewed in The Rumpus, Madhu H. Kaza, editor of Kitchen Table Translation, investigates the hierarchy so often implicit in the criteria by which an English translation is judged good. She offers a radical alternative: a mode of translation that celebrates both disobedience and intimacy, setting this meeting point between cultures on fairer terms.
Source: Korean Literature Now
“It’s a feminist act to question everything. To recognise that every utterance has a context, every speaker has a perspective and a position. To pay attention to these things and make them seen, whether in translating a text, in the discourse around translation, or in daily life.”
Deborah Smith reflects on the importance of intersectionality when it comes to gender politics in translation, as well as the importance of giving value to the voice of personal experience.
Asad Alvi, Amna Chaudhry, Mehak Khan, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Geeta Patel, and Haider Shahbaz
“What is revealed in this collection is true of Urdu feminist writing in general: that it has as many different faces, tones, concerns, and aesthetics as there are ways women have learned to hold one another up.” In the introduction to this issue, Asad Alvi, Amna Chaudhry, Mehak Khan, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Geeta Patel, and Haider Shahbaz address the “radical instability” of categorising Urdu feminist writing, offering a selection of translated literature and poetry from Urdu, with the aim of moving readers beyond exlusionary definitions and to open up the way for new approaches.
