Tag: WITMonth

August 30, 2022

“Seoul, So Far Away” from Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

Park Wan-suh

“Suddenly a blinding flash shot from a building straight into my eyes. The light was unlike any I’d seen before. There was no fire, but it was more intense than any flame. I clung to my mother in fear. She...

August 31, 2021

Does Literature Have to Be Monolingual?

Ellen Jones on Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel and Multilingualism in Translation

Japanese writer Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel was originally published in 1995 under the title Shishōsetsu: From Left to Right, to huge uproar. It is a reworking of the traditional “shishōsetsu” or “I novel,” a modernist Japanese autofictional genre that is...

August 24, 2021

Q&A: Juliet Winters Carpenter on Translating Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel

Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel, published in 1995, radically broke with Japanese literary tradition by liberally incorporating English words and phrases and printing the entire text horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left....

August 17, 2021

Where Are the Women Writers?

The Missing Literature of Japan’s Edo Period

By G. G. Rowley

Writing by Japanese women flourished from the late tenth through the early fourteenth centuries. Almost all of the surviving works from this period have now been translated into English, some more than once, and many are available in editions suitable...

August 10, 2021

Mongolia’s Women Writers

By Simon Wickhamsmith

Since the Soviet-backed 1921 revolution, Mongolia’s writers have worked to find responses both to traditional genres and themes and to the Russian and Euro-American styles, and the three women writers whose work is translated in Suncranes and Other Stories—S. Udval...

August 3, 2021

An August Cemetery and the Ridiculous Task of the Translator

By Maria Vassileva

Maria Stepanova’s essay “Over Venerable Graves” is the very last text in our volume The Voice Over, but it opens the collection in which it was first published in Russian.[i] Its first paragraph serves as the cover image of that...

August 1, 2021

Women in Translation Month 2021! A Journey from East to West

By Olivia Treynor

Welcome to Women in Translation Month 2021! Seven years ago, blogger and academic Meytal Radzinski took a critical look at the publishing landscape and noticed that the world of translated literature was heavily male-dominated. Reflecting on this gender disparity and...

May 13, 2021

Q&A: Minae Mizumura on An I-Novel

Minae Mizumura is one of Japan’s most respected novelists. Published in 1995, her An I-Novel— a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s—radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. In this Q&A, Mizumura...

April 22, 2021

“You Aren’t the Center, but the Radius”

Irina Shevelenko on Maria Stepanova’s Kireevsky, with translations by Eugene Ostashevsky

“The chill of having no place […] is the only thing that gives poetry a chance not to participate in the parade of general achievements, not to wind up as a passkey that opens the doors for a third-party, external...

August 27, 2020

Q&A: Ch’oe Yun and Chungmoo Choi on There a Petal Silently Falls

“Ch’oe is a versatile writer who cloaks stark perceptions of individual and social trauma with elegant craft, poignant metaphor, and occasional, sardonic flashes of humor.” ~Barbara Lloyd McMichael, Seattle Times We’re closing out Women in Translation Month with a Q&A...

August 25, 2020

The Timeliness of Julia Kristeva’s The Enchanted Clock

By Armine Kotin Mortimer

“Kristeva deftly weaves together multiple strands of a narrative that links a presently degraded state of France, Europe, and the world, in the grip of violence, fanaticism, rigid identity politics, anti-intellectualism, a general loss of quality of life, to the...

August 13, 2020

Book Excerpt! Social Appearances: A Philosophy of Display and Prestige, by Barbara Carnevali

“Barbara Carnevali’s concept of ‘social aesthetics’ is tremendously powerful, and explains a lot of otherwise baffling phenomena. Carnevali makes me think that the rise of Orban and Trump and the Brexit movement is better understood as a matter of social...