“As a translator I remain outside the container, in that the novel remains the brainchild of a fellow writer. It is liberating in that I don’t have to fabricate anything. But I am bound to a preexisting text, and thus aware of a greater sense of responsibility. There is nothing to invent but everything to get right. There is the challenge of transplanting into a different language what already thrives, beautifully, in another.”
from Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay “Containers: Introduction to Ties by Domenico Starnone” in Translating Myself and Others
And so we find ourselves in the last day of August, in the final hours of Women In Translation month. The bookstagram community has overflowed with some incredible recommendations of translated literature—the reels are endless and you can scroll through stacks of books, flat lays, and books tucked away in bags for hours if you aren’t mindful of the time or the discomfort in your thumb. This outpouring has not only added a few more books to my wishlist, but it has recognized and celebrated the translators and the publishers that bring these writers and these texts to new audiences—I think it’s fair to say that we all now want to see translators acknowledged on the front covers of books!
In Translating Myself and Others, Jhumpa Lahiri tackles the prevalent assumption that translations are secondary to the original text “and thus creatively inferior in nature.” Lahiri untangles this hierarchy between original and translated texts, and outlines that “translation, it seems, is considered imitative as opposed to imaginative. […] This hierarchy, sadly prevalent, between what is authentic and what is derivative […] influences not only how we regard literature but how we regard one another.” If we stick to this mindset, we cut ourselves off from a variety of voices and we draw a thick border around ourselves that limits the opportunity for diverse narratives to populate our shelves.
I held this strange assumption a few years ago and missed out on some incredible texts, on the more theoretical but no less vibrant writing surrounding issues in translation, and on some authors who are now ones I look out for in libraries and bookshops. While it is a privilege to know, to speak, to read, to write, and to communicate in more than one language, we can’t possibly read every single book in its original language.
*enter translators, centre stage*
Yes, that’s where translators come in. They read and reread texts, and they spend countless hours poring over words and lines to capture the voice, the tone, and the style they felt in the original work in order to bring these books and these authors to new readers. They foster a dialogue between readers, make stories all the more accessible, and reveal the very specific and surprisingly universal themes that flow throughout literature, regardless of borders and barriers.
There’s something quite intimate about reading a translated work, isn’t there? It’s like a friend giving you a book they’ve just finished and loved, “here, you have to read this, I just know you’ll love it!” You can tell from the cracked spine that it’s been read before, from the pencil markings that they too enjoyed that line, and from the softened page corners that they took it with them everywhere. Translation is then not only a textual or linguistic act, but an offering from one reader to the next of a work they know so intimately and have enjoyed so deeply. Perhaps we can all agree that in addition to being important and necessary, translators and their translations hold a certain quality that can only be described as magical.
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Women in Translation was founded by Meytal Radzinski, if you’d like to read more about the movement, check out their website and follow #WITMonth and #womenintranslation.
I’ll include a list of all the books pictured above, hopefully you’ll find one to pick up even if August has come and gone so quickly…
Hiromi Kawakami’s Strange Weather in Tokyo, translated by Allison Markin Powell
Choi Eunyoung’s Shoko’s Smile, translated by Sung Ryu
Jokha Alharthi’s Narinjah (The Bitter Orange Tree), translated by Marilyn Booth
Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s A Girl Returned and A Sister’s Story, translated by Ann Goldstein
Anne Cathrine Bomann’s Agatha, translated by Caroline Waight
Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translating Myself and Others
Natsuko Imamura’s The Woman in the Purple Skirt, translated by Lucy North
Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena Knows, translated by Frances Riddle
Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light, translated by Geraldine Harcourt
Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart, translated by Alison Entrekin
My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women
Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, translated by Jenny McPhee
Kim Thúy’s Ru, translated by Sheila Fischman
Sydney K Erickson 
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