What is Women In Translation Month? Well…the official website of the initiative says this:
What is WITMonth?
WITMonth stands for “women in translation month”! It’s a month in which we promote women writers from around the world who write in languages other than English.Why do we need this separation? Why focus on women in translation?
Approximately 30% of new translations into English are of books by women writers. Given how few books are translated into English to begin with, this means that women are a minority within a minority. The problem then filters down to how books by women writers in translation are reviewed/covered in the media, recognized by award committees, promoted in bookstores, sent out to reviews, and ultimately reach readers themselves.While imperfect, WITMonth gives many publishers the chance to promote their existing titles written by women in translation, while also giving readers an organized means of finding the books that already exist. WITMonth ultimately serves to help readers find excellent books to read… those books just happen to be by women writing in languages other than English!
I thought a fun way to talk about this is to highlight one book I’ve read, the book I’m currently reading, and one book I’m looking forward to reading.
If you’re looking for more SFF translated books by women I suggest you check out our Goodreads Book of the Month nomination thread for some great suggestions. For a lot of recs and links about translated SFF books, look at our Bingo Focus Thread – Translation.
Read: Vita Nostra by Marina Dyachenko, Sergey Dyachenko
Now, according to our criteria for the bookclub this wouldn’t actually count, but it’s one of my favorite books and I’ll take any chance to talk about it.
This is from my review:
Vita Nostra is weird, and this review is gonna be pretty rambling, this book is hard for me to put into words. Yes it’s a magic school book, but ohhh boy oh boy, it is not a normal magical school book. I could say it plays with and twists the usual magic school tropes, but throws them out the window in a cosmic horror vortex might be more accurate. It also did things to me, three times I dreamt about it and woke up in the middle of the night feeling exactly like the main character after doing her schoolwork. And this is not the “I’m waiting for my letter from Hogwarts” wish fulfillment kind of story, this the “I’m so thankful this shit ain’t real” kind.
It starts cheerful enough, a girl enjoying a seaside holiday with her mother. But then she meets Farit Kozhennikov, and her free will becomes a thing of the past as she is forced to attend this mysterious school or face life-threatening consequences for her family.
Did I mention it was weird? The beginning was weird, the middle was weird, and the ending felt a bit ambiguous. But it works, it worked really well for me. Someone else was saying how judging by the normal criteria we use when talking about books, it sounds lacking. It takes ages for any character except for Sasha to get contoured, the plot is slow and half the book revolves around trying to study, you never get information when you want it, the setting isn’t particularly developed, the worldbuilding only gets vaguely explained. But put together, it works amazingly, it made me deeply relate to Sasha, even getting her tunnel vision, focusing on schoolwork to the detriment of interpersonal relationships, and general life. It was interesting how we only got to see the other characters through Sasha’s lens, and how my perception of them changed as her goals changed. I think that, frustrating though it certainly was during the first third, the way the information was revealed ended up working really well for me.
Currently Reading : Kalpa Imperial
This is the first of Argentinean writer Angelica Gorodischer’s nineteen award-winning books to be translated into English. In eleven chapters, “Kalpa Imperial”‘s multiple storytellers relate the story of a fabled nameless empire which has risen and fallen innumerable times. Fairy tales, oral histories and political commentaries are all woven tapestry-style into Kalpa Imperial: beggars become emperors, democracies become dictatorships, and history becomes legends and stories.
But this is much more than a simple political allegory or fable. It is also a celebration of the power of storytelling. Gorodischer and translator Ursula K. Le Guin are a well-matched, sly and delightful team of magician-storytellers. Rarely have author and translator been such an effortless pairing. “Kalpa Imperial” is a powerful introduction to the writing of Angelica Gorodischer, a novel which will enthrall readers already familiar with the worlds of Le Guin.
Reading this for our GBotM on r/fantasy. It’s quite lovely, a collection of tales told by different storytellers about a great empire. I really like the different storytelling voices and how weird and complex this empire is. But I am desperately not in the mood for short stories right now, and the often distant voice of the stories is really not drawing me in. It’s more a wintery tale, one that makes you imagine being snuggled up by a fire with someone telling stories, rather than a beach read, and my mind is in beach read mode.
Here are our intro and discussion posts for the book club, final discussion to come
To be read: The Gray House by Mariam Petrosyan
The Gray House is an astounding tale of how what others understand as liabilities can be leveraged into strengths.
Bound to wheelchairs and dependent on prosthetic limbs, the physically disabled students living in the House are overlooked by the Outsides. Not that it matters to anyone living in the House, a hulking old structure that its residents know is alive. From the corridors and crawl spaces to the classrooms and dorms, the House is full of tribes, tinctures, scared teachers, and laws—all seen and understood through a prismatic array of teenagers’ eyes.
But student deaths and mounting pressure from the Outsides put the time-defying order of the House in danger. As the tribe leaders struggle to maintain power, they defer to the awesome power of the House, attempting to make it through days and nights that pass in ways that clocks and watches cannot record.
This is a book I really want to read but also really keep putting off. I really want to read it because of how much Para loves it, and we often have similar tastes. I keep putting it off because it’s a chonker, and I’ve been warned not to try in audio because it’ll be hard to follow, and just no, I can’t do hard to follow atm. I might have to order it in paperback because I find that easier to focus on than kindle.
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay