In this conversation, translator Allison M. Charette discusses Malagasy literature with author Michèle Rakotoson.
Published in the United States in 2020, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals is the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author, poet, independent scholar and Afro-feminist activist whose work exists at the crossroad between decolonial ecology, critical theory and collective care. Undrowned presents itself as a hybrid and innovative blend of poetry, marine biology, and political meditation in which Gumbs explores the notions of survival, collective care, and liberation. The text brings together climate justice, feminine experience, the human condition and more largely the mammal experience. Breathing appears simultaneously as a physiological necessity and antiracial and anticolonial praxis.
Contemporary Reunionese literature remains significantly underrepresented in the English-speaking literary world.[1] This observation informed our decision to translate Nathalie Hermine’s ‘Le verbe se fit chair,’ from her collection Ma plus grande douleur sera de ne pouvoir te secourir (Saint-Denis de La Réunion: Éditions Poisson Rouge, 2021), for the present special issue, as part of a broader translation dynamic that seeks to contribute to the greater visibility and circulation of Reunionese writing beyond its original linguistic and geographical contexts.[2] This project follows two other recent collaborative translations of Reunionese novels – the translation, for the Irish and UK markets, of Gaëlle Bélem’s first two novels, There’s a Monster Behind the Door (Sligo: Bullaun Press, 2024) and The Rarest Fruit (Sligo: Bullaun Press, 2025) – which similarly aimed to participate in expanding the reach of these works and fostering new encounters between Reunionese literature and international readers.
“The Word Became Flesh” is a short story by Reunionese writer Nathalie Hermine, originally published in French as “La vie se fît chair,” and translated into English by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert.
My first experience in literary translation was when I was asked by Dapper publications to translate The Counting House, a novel by the Guyanese writer, David Dabydeen, into French. It is a very powerful novel about a country with a colonial history very similar to that of Mauritius, despite the discrepancy in size between the two countries. I therefore understood it at a very deep level and was fascinated by the choices David made in telling that story. But when I came to the final part of the novel, written entirely in Guyanese English, I realized that this represented an almost incommensurable challenge: Guyanese English, despite having its own specificity, was understandable to anglophone readers, perhaps in the same way that Salman Rushdie’s Hinglish passages were.
Denis Pourawa is a Kanak (Indigenous) writer born in 1974 in Nouméa, the capital city of Kanaky/New Caledonia, a French-speaking archipelago situated close to Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia in the Pacific Ocean. In 2003, he wrote his first children’s book; since, he has published (and performed) in a variety of literary genres, including poetry, theatre, short essays, and slam poetry. A member of the Mérénémé tribe, Pourawa’s work is influenced by his childhood memories, Kanak tradition, and his first encounter with “occidental thinking” through literature, which encouraged him to dedicate his life to the arts.
As the title indicates, this rich volume is entirely devoted to Afrodiasporic transgender experiences, but editor and contributor Michaëla Danjé specifies that it does not seek to construct a new, normative, monolithic, inalienable identity category. In fact, the Trans in AfroTrans is capacious and fluid enough to welcome transformation, transmigration, transoceanicity, and, germane to this special issue, translation. Conceived as an open space for trans artists, activists, and intellectuals from all corners of the African diaspora to constitute, bear witness to, and preserve their own archive, the volume organically stretches out like an archipelagic community with submarine ties connecting the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
The fact that “Incerta glòria” (Uncertain Glory) was published in 1956 did not mean that Sales stopped working on it. The French translation by Gallimard in the early 1960s (undertaken at the suggestion of Juan Goytisolo) was already based on a more extensive version. And the first Spanish translation—done by Carlos Pujol, in collaboration with Sales, in 1971—worked from a manuscript that had grown so much that the final section, set in Francoist Spain during the 1960s, would eventually be published separately in Catalan as El vent de la nit (The Wind of the Night). A decade ago, Peter Bush translated both novels into English. Earlier this year, the Catalan novelist Gonzalo Torné published a new Spanish translation of the first volume.
I began thinking about how I was going to dispose of my copy of the sixth and final installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical novel, “My Struggle,” co-translated by Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken, when I reached page 155 of the Archipelago Books edition. Because of its length, 1,157 pages including bibliography, and square format, the novel—published as “The End” in the U.S.—dwarfs the books on the only shelf where I had space for it, including “Buddenbrooks,” “The Magic Mountain,” “The Brothers Karamazov,” and Katherine Mansfield’s short stories.
“Balkan Rhapsody” follows the internal and external exile of the author’s fictionalised grandmother Miriam and her young family during the 1920s and 1930s, a time of turmoil after the Balkan Wars and the First World War—when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, new states emerged, borders were redrawn and hundreds of thousands of refugees were forced to migrate. The novel plays an elegiac rhapsody to these forced displacements across today’s Albania, Greece, Romania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Turkey.
José Saramago spent much of his working life as a metalworker, a civil servant, and a jobbing translator before becoming, in his fifties, one of the most distinguished European novelists of the twentieth century. An atheist and a lifelong communist, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998 for fiction the Swedish Academy characterized as “sustained by imagination, compassion and irony.” It could easily have been described as a long-standing argument with the institutions of church and state, both of which depend on specific forms of assent. Saramago’s increasingly open conflict with these institutions intensified, and eventually cost him dearly, with the controversy surrounding “O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo” (1991), translated into English by Giovanni Pontiero as “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” a novel that retells the life of Jesus from conception to crucifixion.
“Adelaida” is a marvelous book that left me breathless; I intentionally slowed down while reading its last pages, since I didn’t want it to end. A slim book of 142 pages, it mixes together many disparate genres: it is at once a diaspora story that portrays the lives of Argentinian political activists living in and out of exile during the late twentieth century, a historical account of the crimes perpetrated by Argentinian dictatorships, a cultural essay about the Buenos Aires literary scene in the fifties and sixties, a personal history of the friendship between the author and his protagonist, Adelaida, and, finally, a testimony to the role played by women in history and art.
In two stories, written approximately three-quarters of a century apart – “Dino Buzzati’s “Qualcosa era successo” (“Something Had Happened,” 1949) and Sandro Veronesi’s “Qualcosa era successo” (2026) – an ordinary train ride becomes an allegory about fear of the unknown and powerlessness in the face of inexplicable events.
Not only alert to the German, the main medium of the collection, Kesici-Ayoubi carefully treats the other three languages that largely contribute to its multilingual texture: Turkish, Arabic, and English. She provides a brief foreword called “Translator’s Notes” that draws attention to the poet’s “linguistic world” and explains no more than seven terms or references.
Translating “The Craft of Living” into English presents the singular task of transposing Pavese’s eloquent thoughts about life and literature into the language that inspired many of his points of view in the first place. By the time Pavese began publishing works in prose, in the early 1940s, he had already penned the Italian translations of works by Melville, Anderson, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Joyce, Defoe, Dickens, Lewis, and Stein and was in the process of translating Faulkner.