Category Women in Translation
From Ocean to Ocean, a Translator’s Note by Jean Anderson
Jean Anderson offers a reflection on her translations of Marie Tamole Keletaona’s poetry in memory of her home island of Futuna.
Translating “The Mermaid of Black Conch,” an interview with Gerty Dambury
Through this brief overview of Dambury’s work, I wish to show how her work operates at the intersection of linguistic, cultural and historical worldscapes, powerfully manifesting the archipelagic francospheres this issue seeks to amplify. And unsurprisingly, my conversation with Gerty Dambury about her translation of British-Trinidadian author Monique Roffey’s novel The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020), published in French by Montréal-based publisher Mémoires d’encrier in 2023 as La Sirène de Black Conch, centered on the challenges of rendering distinctive forms of speech, navigating complex identities, and creating spaces for linguistic, cultural and literary cross-pollination.
“The Word Became Flesh” a short story by Nathalie Hermine, Translated by Karen Fleetwood & Laëtitia Saint-Loubert
“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.
A Bi-lingual Review of “Non-noyées (Undrowned)” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs in French Translation
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.
Ritual sites of communion and community: Marosia Castaldi’s “The Hunger of Women,” translated from Italian by Jamie Richards
The novel is narrated from the perspective of a fifty-year-old Neapolitan widow, Rosa, whose daughter’s coming independence and plan to move to France lead to Rosa’s decision to start a restaurant in small-town Lombardy. Rosa’s restaurant becomes a source of orgiastic frenzy for the Lombard villagers, who devour her traditional Neapolitan cooking in a kind of carnal ecstasy.
Women in Translation Month: Violence Against Women Is Not an Afterthought
Trigger warning for rape, sexual violence, femicide, and gender-based violence. Although it has been more than two years since its publication, I am regularly given a reason to revisit “A Stench That Won’t Subside,” an article on sexual violence by Kosovo-Canadian lawyer Hana Marku. Marku wrote this piece in February 2019, as Kosovo and Albanian […]
Women in Translation Month: Writing Won’t Save Us, but It May Help Us Survive
By Barbara Halla Is it intertextuality? Or is it perhaps that, both consciously and subconsciously, the books I pick tend to broach similar themes? Russian poetess Maria Stepanova would say that I am trying to find patterns where there are none—because like all other human beings, I take comfort in meaning, even if I have […]