I started blogging about this because I noticed a wildly successful writer (Alexander Chee) did so. (He's a hard act to follow!)
Looking back on this year, I find there's not much published writing to consider! Not much writing, period -- but a lot of translation.
This was the year I completed my first book-length translation manuscript. (See cover mockup at left).
And like all of the short stories and poetry that I've translated and published, the book is by a woman author. Thanks to Paul Dry Books for continuing to invest in Edith Bruck, an important transnational Italian writer!
I did publish a little writing this year -- including a Tiny Love Story in The New York Times! -- and an essay about the Brat Pack documentary for CNN.
But mainly, I plugged away at the monumental task of revising, polishing, proofing and publishing a translated book. And I'm thrilled it's a translation of a book by a woman.
Translate women.
It's all I've done in the seven years that I've been translating Italian literature.
It’s not surprising that I would come to think of this as my mantra, my purpose. Women's achievements inspire me. They make me feel as though I have vicariously achieved something, so I've enjoyed discovering emerging Italian women writers and also overlooked authors.
(It’s also easier for me to confine my translation projects to women authors: I don’t work full-time as a literary translator.)
I stumbled into the field after earning an MFA and seeing the literary world as a potential home not only for my original writing but also for translated works of literature. Specifically works written by Italian women writers that I could smuggle into English.
Women and men, of course, share many of the same concerns, emotions and hardships, all of which can fuel the best writing.
But because the circumstances of their lives have often been different – a focus on caregiving for women, fewer work opportunities historically, mortality related to bearing children -- the experiences they've drawn from are often fundamentally different. In the case of the Holocaust narrative I’m now consumed by, women who were deported to Nazi concentration camps had to contend with the same inhumane conditions as the men -- meager rations, freezing temperatures, disease, evil guards -- but also fear of sexual predation, clandestine pregnancies and decisions regarding separation from their children that frequently hinged on the mother or the child headed for certain death.
There are many others focused on promoting translated works by women, including the Women In Translation initiative, which sponsors Women in Translation month every August.
But we still have a long way to go.
(My translation manuscript, "Into the Shadows," isn’t finished but I plan to return to the project in 2025, after shepherding This Darkness Will Never End into print; I won a PEN grant for the manuscript-in-progress and I remain grateful for it!).
That project gave me my mission: paying special attention to works by women overlooked by the literary world.
Here’s some of the work I’ve done so far to advance this mission:
*An article for the journal, American Scholar, on overlooked women writers who survived the Holocaust:
"The Forgotten Writers of the Shoah"
*An essay for Ploughshares about the ways Mariateresa Di Lascia's work anticipated the #MeToo movement:
*Translations of Edith Bruck's poetry, including one poem that made it into The American Scholar's Read-Me-a-Poem podcast:
https://theamericanscholar.org/at-the-american-express-office-by-edith-bruck/
(More poetry translations published last month by The Common at Amherst College here)
*Translation of a short story by Edith Bruck that will appear in This Darkness Will Never End (and which won the Hunger Mountain Translation Prize)
https://hngrmtn.org/issues/hunger-mountain-27/translation/
Here's to women and the unique stories they have to tell in all the languages of the world!
