WITMonth Day 14 | On the need for intersectionality | Thoughts

One of the things I've found that saddens me most within this women in translation project is when people ask me about intersectionality. "You've mentioned it..." they'll say. "You raised it when comparing overall translation rates..." "Is it something you care about?" "Do you feel this is important?"

These questions hurt not because there's something wrong in them. On the contrary. These are exactly the questions that need to be asked. No, what saddens me is that I've done a poor job in expressing the need for intersectionality. Because here's the thing: a project like women in translation cannot exist without intersectionality. It is meaningless without intersectionality.

For those who aren't familiar with the terminology: Intersectionality (sometimes referred to as intersectional feminism, though the concept is not limited to feminism) is a theory that seeks to study feminism (or any other social order) at its intersections with race, sexual identity, gender identity, religion, class, physical ability, etc. The theory argues that it is impossible to separate one social order from another, effectively demanding of its proponents to seek all possible intersections when looking at a certain problem.

And so it should not come as a surprise to anyone that I feel the women in translation project is meaningless without intersectionality. To talk simply about a lack of women writers in translation without noting the huge gaps between translation rates from different countries (namely: European countries versus the entire rest of the world) becomes almost silly. What does it mean to replace one imbalance with another?

I want to make it very clear: The stunning disparity in countries of origin for literature in translation is not something that can be shrugged aside. There are obvious practical and cultural reasons for the huge imbalances (for instance: traditions of teaching French, Spanish and German literature in English-language universities due to an age-old Euro-centrism), but that doesn't mean we can ignore what the stats are telling us. That doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for equality - and at the very least awareness - on all fronts. Similarly, the difficulty in finding queer narratives (or books by queer authors) is not coincidental and also cannot just be swept under the rug.

The 2015 statistics displayed fairly clearly that there was no significant demographic bias when it came to translating women writers (that is, you cannot simply blame those "other" parts of the world). However, the overall publishing bias towards Western Europe is deeply disturbing. French is the 18th most spoken language in the world, yet it makes up the decisive leader in literature translated into English. Even within Spanish - the second most spoken native language in the world - a sizable chunk of the books translated are only from Spain, and not the much more populous Latin America.

Even within Euro-centrism, Western Europe dominates while Eastern Europe languishes. Asian languages - among the most spoken languages in the world! - seem like an afterthought relative to their actual strength. And this is simply regarding country and language of origin. Now look at ethnic groups. Social class. Religious minorities (or majorities...). LGBTQIA+ authors and narratives. Physical ability.

When we talk about women in translation, it is critical that we don't forget these other factors. That we don't simply start translating more French and German women writers, while leaving Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, and Bengali women behind. That we don't exclude queer narratives by women. That we understand the marginalization that non-binary or transgender writers face (and that we fully include them in this project, despite use of the word "women"), rejecting a purely binary world and giving space to these writers. That we examine stories from different backgrounds. That we recognize stories that represent all social classes and castes. That we truly explore the world in all its glorious multitudes. Including writers from every single one of these groups.

WITMonth Day 13 | Memoirs of a Woman Doctor by Nawal el-Saadawi | Review

If I had to give Memoirs of a Woman Doctor by Nawal el-Saadawi (translated by Catherine Cobham) a one-line review, I'd probably say that it was an interesting (if forgettable) book that didn't really move me much in any direction.

That makes writing a review a bit difficult, particularly in light of the long gap between when I read it and the time of writing this review. I recall the feminist message of Memoirs of a Woman Doctor fairly clearly (particularly the fact that it doesn't always resemble "Western" feminism), as well as the relationship the narrator had with her brother. But that's about it. It's only by browsing now that I recall the narrator's failed marriage, the struggles she has in establishing her practice. The way the role of a woman within Egyptian culture is central to the plot. Even the narrator's musings on the failings of modern medicine in relation to her own desires.

This sort of amnesia doesn't bode very well for this novella. Truthfully, it's not all that good on a technical level. That is... conceptually, it's a powerful, interesting narrative, with a strong message about women's roles and feminism in an at-times unyielding world, alongside a central theme of mother-daughter relationships. But the writing is awkward, the story is that weird balance of not-fully-fleshed and poorly-padded. Parts of it felt like they were written too directly, thoughts to page without any literary adjustments along the way.

Memoirs of a Woman Doctor is a great example of a book that is improved by its context. Under normal conditions, there is little to recommend here (especially since the book is extremely slight, and the font surprisingly large...), yet the content - and the complex world this content lives within - is almost important enough to justify giving the book a second glance. No, it's not particularly well written (though there are a handful of beautiful lines and images), nor is it an inherently moving text. But its position as a frank literary piece chronicling a somewhat unique position alongside a rarely heard feminist worldview makes it interesting. And also, yes, important. Its voice may wobble, but it has something to tell.

WITMonth Day 12 | Comet in Moominland - Tove Jansson | Mini-review

It didn't take me long into Tove Jansson's Comet in Moominland (translated by Elizabeth Portch) to figure out that I had perhaps chosen the wrong book. The characters were never introduced, the plot seemed to bounce just a little too quickly, and the vibe was quickly that of... a sequel. Oh dear.

Of course, this being a children's book, the order of the stories doesn't seem to have mattered all that much. Possibly because the plot doesn't really make much sense anyways. Comet in Moominland is more of a silly romp than a complex narrative. I was, however, surprised by how text-heavy the story is. For some odd reason, I'd always assumed the Moomins stories to be mostly in comic form. This being my first foray into their baffling world, I'm still not really sure.

It's always hard to review children's books as adults, but I try to read them through the eyes of childhood me. And I realized pretty quickly that childhood me would have probably rolled her eyes very early. The book didn't make me laugh enough to justify its silliness (a comparison that popped to mind was the absolute absurdity of Penguin's Progress, one of my childhood favorites), but I couldn't help but enjoy its lighthearted tone and the playful drawings. There's a reason this one's a classic of the genre.

WITMonth Day 11 | Parity versus equality

In October 2015, the night after the women in translation panel I took part in at ALTA, I spoke to my sister about something that had somewhat bothered me on the panel. "They kept saying 'parity'", I complained, "and it sounded like 'parody'!"

But the truth is, the word parity carried with it a lot more discomfort for me.

Parity is in the present tense. It looks at the current state of women writers in translation and says let's do the simplest thing. Let's reach 50:50. It's a goal I love, a goal I champion, a goal I've been pushing for quite emphatically since beginning this journey three years ago. Parity is great. But parity is not equality.

This is something that many feminists note frequently, that having equal representation from a certain (usually very delayed) point and onward is not actually equality. Many feminists will further argue that it's not enough, sparking accusations of misandry and man-hating, as it were. These sorts of attacks seem to force "moderate" feminists to settle in many cases, not wanting feminism to be framed as something other than equality. This leads to demands of parity as the fair solution to gender imbalances.

It's a question I struggle with. On the one hand, I firmly believe that our ultimately goal should be gender parity. Feminism means equality in its simplest terms, and that means that in an ideal world, men and women would be translated at equivalent rates, published at equivalent rates, recognized by awards at equivalent rates, and read by men and women alike at equivalent rates. In an ideal world.

The world is not ideal. 31% women writers in translation is thus far the highest I've seen, with historical rates obviously far lower. VIDA counts which place recognition of women writers in the 35% range as well are also in our modern, "post-sexism" world. If we look at history as a whole, women have been severely underrepresented. To take the political example: Electing a woman for president of the United States every other election from now until 2100 will not be equality. Equality would be electing only women presidents from now until ~2280.

This seems like an unreasonable demand, and maybe it is. The goal is, after all, true equality. Perhaps that demands parity. But on the smaller scale, I wonder if it isn't asking very little. Let's say publishers only translate books by women writers for three years... that still won't make a dent in the overall historical imbalance! Or even the imbalance from the past four years. "Settling" for parity now will be wonderful going forward, but the gaps in the backlog will remain forever.

We seem to have decided that parity is the right way to go. Don't rock the boat. Don't upset those who would call you a misandrist (and they will, rest assured). But I also choose to view it through the positive lens: Let's look forwards and not backwards. Let's do what we can. Let's make every effort to reach our optimal goal, even if it can never be "perfect".

In an ideal world, I want equality. But in this imperfect world, parity will have to do.

WITMonth Day 10 | The Vegetarian - Han Kang | Review

Pretty much everyone in the world of literature in translation has heard of The Vegetarian (translated by Deborah Smith) by now. Rightly so. The novel won the Man Booker International Prize and has appeared at the top of quite a few reader's WITMonth recommendation lists. It's a good book, deserving of praise and recognition in circles well beyond just "literature in translation".

I'll start by pointing to the image on the left: this is the cover that I have. My first introduction to The Vegetarian was through a comment focused on the cover (I honestly cannot remember where I saw this, unfortunately), noting that while the flowers initially look pretty and elegant, the image quickly becomes grotesque and rather disturbing. And this was what happened when I got the book and finally read it: The story at first seems like it could progress normally, but it slowly loses bits and pieces and forms a very different puzzle. The more toned-down later covers (like the rather noble-looking US cover below) lose some of that creep factor, but they also find a way to present the book more wholly to a wider audience. The original cover... well, it's really uncomfortable to look at. The book might be uncomfortable in many ways, but it's a more subtle form.

I won't bother to summarize the story, not least because dozens of far more insightful readers have unpacked the plot and the morals and the ideas. Suffice to say that The Vegetarian is very much about the notion of rebellion, about feeling wrong in your skin and losing yourself.

The book is comprised of three sections - novellas, really. They follow Yeong-hye's gradual loss of control - first in her repulsion to meat (a shock to her family in a culture in which vegetarianism is largely non-existent), then her discomfort in her physical form, a gradual aversion to food of all sorts, and finally a physical and mental state that hovers on the ethereal.

The Vegetarian is Yeong-hye's story, yet she is not the narrator or its primary source. Each novella looks at Yeong-hye's descent (ascent?) from a different angle, always slightly distant and shaded by the primary narrator (her husband, brother-in-law, and sister, respectively). We never hear Yeong-hye's thoughts directly, instead getting her description of a disturbing dream from her husband, observations of her bodily discomfort from her brother in law, and an understanding of mental illness from her sister. It's a trick that keeps The Vegetarian almost in check, never getting overly emotional or sentimental. The style reminded me a bit of Yoko Ogawa's Revenge, mostly in that it's all a bit disturbing and weird, but in a really crisp way. It work.

It helps that the book is written in such a way that you can't help but want to devour it. Crisply written and beautifully translated, The Vegetarian hooks you quickly and refuses to let go. Luckily, the book is fairly short, but it's not exactly a quick read. There's a depth to this story that demands attention, care and space.

There's really not much more to say. While the book is somewhat disturbing in the themes it explores (and specifically the way it explores them), it's the sort of unsettling feeling that makes a book last longer in your taste buds. I imagine some readers might find even this level of - shall we call it? - horror unpleasant and not to their taste, but I personally enjoyed it (and I detest horror). The Vegetarian is thought-provoking and beguiling and exactly what everyone promised it would be: a really, really good book.

WITMonth Day 9 | A short interlude

A few quick links from around the web with some really cool WITMonth-related content!

• Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading wrote up an excellent list of classic and contemporary Latin American women writers in translation
• The Bookseller compiled several UK bookstores currently participating in WITMonth... and perhaps there are more to come...!
• PEN America rounded up all PEN Translation Prize Winners by women writers (sadly a very low proportion of the overall winners, but excellent choices regardless and a great place to start!)
• The London Review Bookshop also curated a fantastic and diverse list of women writers in translation to get you started
• Publisher Deep Vellum is offering all titles by women in translation at 20% off throughout the month of August
• There's even some artwork involved!
• Rachel Cordasco (@rcordas) has been tweeting out sci-fi women writers in translation

...and as always, far more content. I could never do justice to you all, but check out the Twitter tag #WITMonth and see all the awesome reviews, recommendations, discussions and posts!

WITMonth Day 8 | Ancient writing and untranslated classics | Thoughts

Earlier this year, I stumbled across The Penguin Book of Women Poets in a wonderful used bookstore (it was there I picked up a gorgeous two-volume edition of The Mill on the Floss from the early 20th century for what even the bookseller admitted was way too little money). I leafed through it, expecting a text that would - like almost all anthologies -  focus on Anglo-American writers. At first glance, it seemed like the anthology was actually quite diverse and I impulse-purchased it.

It was only later when I got home that I realized how diverse this collection actually is. The collection starts in what they call "The Ancient World", but it's not limited to our typical scope of "classics" - alongside the predictable Greek poetry (and Sappho fragments), there's Egyptian, Israelite, Chinese and Tamil poetry too. The book then progresses to the "Middle Period" (600-1500), which includes writers from Ireland, Wales, England, Arabia, Sanskrit India, Japan, Germany, Korea, China, Moorish Spain... And onward in history: Italy, and Sephardic ballads, and Vietnam, and Mexico, and Sweden, and Cuba, and Turkey, and New Zealand Māori, and Native American. It's a stunning display of what the world has to offer, even when certain literary traditions (African, for example) are completely ignored.

The collection is imperfect in many regards, but the thing that struck me most was how practically every writer in the collection is by this point "classic". The collection was published in 1978 - even the contemporaries of the era are now classics. But many of them remain untranslated overall.

I talked about classics a lot last year, as well as the problem of untranslated masterpieces. There's something extremely frustrating in going through lists of women writers from around the world (and from vastly different eras of history) and discovering that only a handful have been translated. The same process happened with The Penguin Book of Women Poets - dozens of women writers from almost all walks of life, with rare collections here and there.

Perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, in any given collection of men (or... any given collection that dubs itself generic and then has only 15% women writers), many writers will also only have recognition within the context of the collection. Women are not unique in facing almost insurmountable difficulties in getting translated, we know this already. Yet the gap seems ever more frustrating with women writers because of how senseless it remains in the modern context.

When rediscovering writers today, why don't we look at those underrepresented women writers? What's stopping us from bringing to light those classic works, those classic writers?

Women have always written: in ancient times, in modern times, in medieval times. Did they always write as much as men? Of course not, there have been periods in history where women were not taught to read and write. (On the flip side, women today seem to write more than men by most measures and yet here we are.) I could never expect perfect parity when it comes to classic translations. But I do expect basic representation. I do expect publishers of "undiscovered classics" to identify those texts that were written by women writers as well. I do expect literary and historical scholars to commit as much attention to women throughout history as they might to contemporary men.

It's this sort of discrepancy which makes me desperately want more publishers to take part in the Year of Publishing Women. Yes, you'll probably always have more classics by men than by women. Most years will probably see only one undiscovered classic by a woman writer brought to light. But can we have one year when we get some of those well-deserving classics by women writers? One year when we can focus on how women demanded rights, criticized slavery and built abolitionist movements, fought in revolutions, ruled countries, fell in love, lived lives, wrote songs and poems and stories, and existed? Throughout all of history, across the entire world?

Is that too much to hope for...?

WITMonth Day 7 | The Mountain and the Wall - Alisa Ganieva | Review

There are so many parts of Alisa Ganieva's The Mountain and the Wall (translated by Carol Apollonio) that I could focus on. I could talk about how otherworldly it felt (not least because I read the book while floating in a hammock under a flawless blue sky, a bright green tree with blooming pink flowers, and the most gentle breeze swinging me from side to side), or about how the book introduced me to a part of the world that has otherwise been completely off my radar, or about how the politics reminded me so thoroughly of my own local messes, or about so many other small moments in this surprisingly packed novel.

The Mountain and the Wall devotes a pretty significant portion of itself to religious extremism (specifically Islamic). It's a narrative that made me slightly uncomfortable at times, if only because much of it is framed by how quickly the extremism spreads and takes hold in a formerly not-so-religious society. It was almost too familiar, too sharp-eyed and critical of something that is too often lost in political shenanigans (see: US Elections 2016). Something that many of us - rightly, I believe - tend to frame in less aggressive tones because of the implications we might carry. Reading it made me pause and reflect quite a bit, but not always in the ways I wanted to.

The book isn't just defined by its politics, though. While the plot itself is a bit messy and at times felt like it tried to do too much in too little space (it's pretty dense, to be honest), there's a strong urgency in following this thread of characters. The writing is also a bit messy, with rather jolting shifts between very elegant, poetic bits (including actual poetry, which was gorgeous) and flat, sometimes oddly stilted dialogue. There are moments where the writing also feels like a seventh grader who was just told off by the teacher for over-using the word "said": Upon randomly opening the book now to a dialogue page, the words "rasped", "roared", and "stammered" all appeared. And these words are fine in theory, but as I learned at age eighteen (or thereabouts), the word "said" is often the cleanest. All these rasped and roared and mumbled, etc. make the text feel needlessly bloated and awkward. Which is a shame, seeing as the descriptive sections are clear and sharp in the best way.

I loved that The Mountain and the Wall forced me to learn about a new place, a new culture, and a new set of rules. To me, that's what literature needs to be about - challenging our preexisting perceptions and assumptions, illuminating realities we wouldn't otherwise know. A few years ago, I realized that I will never be able to travel to every part of the world and meet people from every single background. But I would be able to read about as many of them as possible (or watch films/television/webseries/whatever). I would be able to explore other cultures and mindsets in the second most-pure way possible (other than living through it myself) - reading it through the eyes of another.

That's how The Mountain and the Wall felt. The book frustrated me at times for various technical/literary reasons, but I loved how much it made me think. I loved how much it forced me to look at my own world a little differently. I loved how much time I spent during and afterwards, reading about Dagestan on Wikipedia and wondering more about its culture. And most of all: I loved the otherworldiness. The book has flashes of fantasy, of incredible imagination that made me feel like I was being transported (not unlike the characters). It's one of my favorite literary techniques, and The Mountain and the Wall was no exception in hooking me through that.

This is not a perfect novel, but it's nonetheless something special. And in an intersectional WITMonth environment when I'd like to point to as many interesting and different and unique books as possible, The Mountain and the Wall is a worthy read.

WITMonth Day 6 | The Lais of Marie de France | Review

I need to open this review by criticizing this edition: As much as I normally like Penguin Classics (and for some odd reason, I've had a strong affinity for them since childhood...), The Lais of Marie de France (translated by Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby) disappointed in one simple regard: There is less than 100 pages of actual content. And the book costs as much as a 500-paged text. As much as I recognize the work that goes into translating this sort of text and I thought the introduction was fascinating, it felt absurd that such a slim volume should cost so much and furthermore that it should come with so little extra material (the end of the edition has padding in the form of two of the lais in the original Old French - super not-helpful for most readers).

Having gotten that out of the way, let's talk about these bizarre, fascinating, modern, ancient, and hilarious short stories.

I love reading old texts, I won't lie. There's something incredible about recognizing how utterly human humans have always been. We hold certain assumptions about cultures past, yet every time I explore literature from those eras, I discover that... nah, people have always been people. Cultures change, but humans don't. And so The Lais didn't actually feel all that old-fashioned.

Men and women fall in love. Women get awkwardly pregnant and try to hide it from their parents. Men and women try to awkwardly hide their affairs from their spouses. Sometimes they get caught. Sometimes "true love" prevails. Sometimes true love isn't so true after all. Sometimes a queen pettily "accuses" a knight of being gay because he brushed her off. Sometimes a young married woman complains about her crusty old husband.

Humans are humans, on full display in these stories. And they're weird stories, to be clear. A good portion lack happy endings (which rather surprised me, to be honest - I was expecting glossed over fairy tales at first), another set have ostensibly happy endings but pretty tragic developments, and then there are those that just... hey! Love story! Happy ending! Have fun!

Like most classic literature, I feel distinctly unqualified to make any scholarly remarks about these Lais. I'm sure wiser readers could comment on the morality tales, on the way sometimes infidelities are rewarded and other times dismissed, on the critique of marrying off young women to old men who hide them away in towers (a recurring theme which I actually found quite fascinating and would love to read more about), or even on the way some stories baffling just end in some horrific imagery.

But I can only point to the parts I liked. I liked when the women resisted predetermined fates, finding their own loves and lives (shockingly enough, right). I liked when parents were reunited with long-lost children, and there was no nonsense about them being "bastards" or any such talk. I liked when the stories ended happily, truthfully, because it often felt justified. Sure, the love stories themselves rarely make sense and there's a lot of descriptions of how handsome the knights are or how beautiful the fair maidens are, but these little stories often build warmly.

This isn't the greatest book I've read in the course of my classics project, nor is it the most consequential. But it's still a curious little collection that paints those familiar romantic epics in a new light. Perhaps not worth buying, but certainly worth reading or exploring if given the chance.

WITMonth Day 5 | Strange Weather in Tokyo / The Briefcase - Hiromi Kawakami | Review

It honestly felt like I was one of the last people to read Strange Weather in Tokyo (The Briefcase in the US edition, translation by Allison Markin Powell). The book had been extremely popular a few years ago, with almost everyone in the literature-in-translation crowd reading and loving it. Somehow, it escaped my interest for a long time and then... well, then I read it.

It's an odd novel, made odder by the fact that I liked it without really liking it much. It was simple: simply written, simply translated, simply engaging. I read it quickly and didn't dwell on it too much, one a sign that I enjoyed what I was reading, the other a sign that I didn't really like it all that much. The book lingers in my mind warmly enough, but it's a fairly empty space: since it's basically a collection of scenes and smaller pieces of a story, it's easy to remember bits while entirely forgetting others.

I struggle to define this as a book I liked largely because its central theme is supposed to be a love story, and it left me cold. Both characters - narrator Tsukiko (who is large
ly apathetic about most things, and very upfront about it) and former teacher Sensei are... well, they're distant. It's a significant part of their characterization, in fact. There's a carefully crafted separation between both Sensei and Tsukiko, and Tsukiko and the reader. Their relationship feels like it's locked up at the end of each chapter, each mini-story, each distraction.

So the story progresses slowly on the one hand (with small locked boxes at the end of each chapter), but also swiftly as the boxes accumulate. The book jumps lightly from season to season, tracking Tsukiko's growing infatuation and her almost self-destructive attempt to transform it into a fixed relationship. In this regard, I commend the book for playing so nicely with distance and emotional dissonance, but it's just not my thing.

Other reviewers found the book sweet, tender, sensitive. All words found on the back cover of my edition. None of these are words I would ever use in this example. There's a bittersweetness in the book's ending, yes, but it's wrapped in deliberate coldness and apathy. Hiromi Kawakami explicitly looks at a couple brought together by their love of getting drunk alone-together, brought together by unsympathetic and odd experiences, brought together by a significant age-gap and culture-gap. The end result - for me, at least - was equally uncomfortable. Not tender or warm. Distinctly cold. Emotional separation.

But again. There were aspects I couldn't help but love. I thought the slow build was marvelous and I loved the way the chapters fit together to make a whole. The flow was successful. The distance was effective. Tsukiko was the right kind of dry and interesting. I enjoyed reading the book and I enjoyed thinking about it. The problem is that I'm a reader with a clear preference for an emotional response, leaving me somewhat unsatisfied. I can certainly understand how the book became a bestseller and why other readers have liked it (even if I remain baffled by the descriptors they have used...), but for me: cold is cold.

WITMonth Day 4 | Undoing the trend

This is a post I've struggled to write for many months. I've actively avoided it. But it's women in translation month - year three! - and this is as important a time as any to discuss:

We all have a problem with women writers in translation. End of.

I spent several months at the start of the year fretting over my three-year "trend" results, working and reworking them. I emailed publishers. I tweeted publishers. I pondered the matter. I published the overall stats. I read arguments by publishers that perhaps people like me were being too rough on the "good guys" and that publishers were not, in fact, the central gatekeepers of literature in translation and thus devoid of responsibility.

The reality is this, again: We all have a problem with women writers in translation.

Let's start with publishers: many, many, many publishers are clearly trying the best they can within a broken system that makes it hard to even acquire books by women writers in translation, and struggling to reach parity. These are the sorts of publishers that participate in WITMonth, share the women in translation stats, commit to the Year of Publishing Women (2018). These are publishers that are - for lack of a better distinction - making an effort.

These publishers deserve to be commended and recognized for their efforts. Truly. Some of them have abysmal rates themselves, but frankly I respect that they're nonetheless recognizing the broader problem and promoting those few women writers that they do publish. The next stage is correcting it - or first perhaps identifying its exact source and working on that - but any recognition of the problem is wonderful.

However, I do wonder at what point we need to start addressing the elephant in the room: That the problem of women writers in translation will not magically solve itself. Rather, it will require hard work, dedication, and commitment.

I'm always nervous during #WITMonth that it might seems as though I'm relegating the issue (and subsequent attention to it) to one month, rather than demanding equal care throughout the year. The fact that some publishers use WITMonth to promote their handful of women writers (out of an extensive and overwhelmingly male backlog) is great, until their stats remain static. The fact that some publishers give discounts on books by women writers in translation during WITMonth is awesome, until they refuse to change their approach to acquisitions and translations.

I have women in translation statistics going back three years: 2013, 2014, and 2015. Some publishers have shown marked increases; others have shown marginal shifts (going from 0% to 16%, for example). The overall yearly rates: 27%, 27% and 31%. I would love to believe that 2015's ~30% is a sign that things are improving, but it's difficult to ignore the fact that a solid factor in that increase is one publisher (AmazonCrossing; without them, the ratio drops to 25%). So the trend holds, at least for the past three years.

But publishing is not something that responds to immediate, minor whims. Publishing - particularly of literature in translation - is a long-game, with some publishers announcing their forthcoming titles a year or two in advance. The question becomes:

What happens now?

The lack of women writers in translation is a trend. If you go back far enough, you'll find various people over the years pondering the imbalance. Nothing came of it, unfortunately. Slight upticks, but we're still left with a huge imbalance. Now is our opportunity to change that. The 30% trend - as it were - can be history, if we choose it to be.

Readers: WITMonth can become WITYear. Why not have parity in our own reading? Why not make that one small change, at least for ourselves? (We wouldn't even have to sacrifice quality or complexity or diversity! Just gain new dimensions.)

Translators: Let us know what books we're missing! You're our eyes and ears in other languages, capable of pointing out fantastic literature by women writers that has maybe not been recognized yet by English-language publishers (or any other language publishers, for that matter - WITMonth applies to all languages/countries!).

Publishers: Seek out that which we know exists. We know there is always excellent literature by women writers, even if they're not always recognized as much as books by men. Yes, it might be a bit more difficult to find those books, but that would go a long way in guiding us towards the most basic gender parity.

A trend is only a trend if it lasts. We can stop it, but we'll have to work for it.

WITMonth Day 3 | Mother of 1084 - Mahasweta Devi | Review

It is odd to be writing this just as I learn that Mahasweta Devi has passed away. Almost as though my review now represents her entire body of work (which I have not yet explored) or must serve as a eulogy for a writer I've barely been introduced to. And made more complicated by the content of Mother of 1084, a book that deals so centrally with life and death and politics. Can I do the book justice in any way? Nope. I cannot.

Mother of 1084 (translated by Samik Bandyopadhyay) is one of only a handful of books I've read in recent years that I can classify as being exactly the right length. It is that rare novella that feels as fully fleshed out as a sprawling novel, without losing its narrative thread or themes. At 127 pages, Mother of 1084 feels like a several-hundred-paged novel, exploring mother Sujata's emotional response to the death of her Naxalite son Brati. There were no dangling threads or unexplored avenues that felt like missed opportunities, nor were there stories that dragged or stumbled.

It's a political text. Not simply the Naxalite/communist politics and denunciation of the bourgeois response, but in the way it highlights Sujata's role as mother and wife as well. Mother of 1084 emphasizes small moments in a woman's ordinary life, the erasure of her self and beliefs in favor of outward image. Even the title hints at this, reducing Sujata not simply to Brati's mother, but the mother of his corpse.

The writing is simple, disjointed at times, and loosely enticing. While this is far from my favorite style, I couldn't help but be sucked into the story, especially in the way the simple writing seemed to draw out both the narrative and the reading experience itself. Simplicity in this case bred a greater complexity, growing more unsettling as the story progressed.

It's a powerful story, and as I said: I cannot do it justice. It's not a book where I can point to something in particular that made it work, just the overall sensation at the end that I gained something very important. If literature is meant to teach and open our eyes, Mother of 1084 did that admirably, both in terms of historical events and contexts, as well as emotional resonance and contemplation on motherhood. This is a larger book than it presents itself, and I can only recommend it.

WITMonth Day 2 | WITMonth 2016 plans and reading list!

Hello friends! We're on our way, and here are a few plans I have for this coming month:

• Reviews! I've got tons of books that I've read over the past year or two that I never reviewed. It's about time I got to them. These reviews will cover books I liked, books I didn't like, books I loved, books I thought were interesting, classics, new releases, random finds... everything!
• Discussions! There are still stones unturned in the discussion of women writers in translation, and WITMonth is as good a time as any to turn them over... and then throw them at you all.
• Stats! Yup, there's more. There's always more.
• Reading lists!

To start us off with reading lists, here are just a handful of the books I hope to get to this month:

• A Temporary Sojourn and Other Stories by Nasreen Jahan (various translators)
• Fullmetal Alchemist: Volume 1-3 by Hiromu Arakawa (translated by Akira Watanabe)
• Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Keith Gessen)
• Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (translated by Grace Frick)
• Prodigies by Angélica Gorodischer (translated by Sue Burke)
• The Country Road by Regina Ullmann (translated by Kurt Beals)
• I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé (translated by Richard Philcox)

...and dozens more. Literally dozens of books, stacked precariously on the windowsill above my bed. Many languages, many regions, many perspectives.

Happy reading!

WITMonth 2016 Day 1 | Ready, set, go!

Happy August! Get ready for reviews, recommendations, lists, tweets and all around promotion of books by women writers in translation! Below are some of my favorite women in translation resources and posts from previous years:

• Women in Translation Stats | The Clickbait Version
• Places around the web
• Spotlight posts: Northern Africa, Argentina, the Caribbean, Mexico, Japan
• The Queer Literature Challenge
• WITMonth 2015 FAQ
• How (not) to address your imbalance (Dalkey Archive)

There's so much more ahead of us, so grab your books and let's go!

Women in Translation Stats | The Clickbait Version

Are women being translated less than men?

We decided to compare rates of translations into English for books by men versus books by women. You'll never believe the shocking results!

1. Approximately 30% of new translations into English are books by women writers

2. Most of the top publishers of literature in translation publish very few women in translation... and top publisher AmazonCrossing is the only one trying to make up for it!

 3. University presses struggle even more to promote women in translation...

4. The imbalance exists across many languages...

 5. ...and many countries!

6. "Sure, but SOME parts of the world are more sexist and old-fashioned..." NOPE.

7. "But women mostly write Genre, not Literature!" STILL NOPE.

8. These stats have changed little over the past three years. Isn't it time to fix it?

#WITMonth the Third

As the weather begins to turn, the time has come once again to prepare for the third annual Women in Translation Month! This year's goal is simple. No bells, no whistles, no drama.

Just read.

Three years into this project and the gap between translations of books by women versus men is still disturbingly wide. The amount of prominent literary voices either ignoring the problem or denying its existence is still too high. The number of readers still largely unaware of the plethora of books by women writers in translation is sadly too high as well. And the vast libraries of untranslated masterpieces by women writers from around the world from all historical periods is a constant reminder of how far we still have to go.

So all I ask of you is this tiny favor: Read.

Read women writers in translation. Share books you love. Seek out new ones. Learn about untranslated masterpieces. Look at the statistics posts, whether the ones on this blog or on womenintranslation.tumblr.com or any other site. Research and learn. Read.

And spread the word.

Logo courtesy of Charlie Coombe - thank you!!!

2015 Women in Translation Stats | Part 3 - Genre and original publication

Read parts 1 and 2

After a longer than intended break, we're back with the latest round of women in translation statistics. This set of stats aims to debunk a few more pervasive and utterly false claims regarding the global lack of women writers in translation, and also points to an area in which we can absolutely do better.

Methodology
As always, my work is based on the US-centric Three Percent database (heavily expanded in this case...), and thus only includes first-time translations of fiction and poetry titles. Genre and original publication year were determined on a title-by-title basis.

Original publication year was largely assessed through Goodreads data, however in many cases the provided year was inaccurate and further research was required. This means that the margin of human error (though uncalculated) is likely to be much higher for publication year than for other metrics, and it is entirely possible that older titles or posthumously published titles were given misleading years. Most publication years, however, were verified through copyright information and Wikipedia, suggesting that at the very least, the data should be ballpark representative.

Genre definitions were given by my own assessment of the title's summary, including several overlapping categories (crime, thriller, mystery, etc.) and reductionist labels. By and large, any title marketed as "genre" was given the marketed label (thriller, romance, mystery etc.), while only titles which were explicitly of a genre nature were labeled (fantasy, sci-fi, historical fiction, etc. for ambiguously marketed titles with obvious subject matters). While this too is an imperfect metric, it nonetheless captures the broader picture and should be largely representative given the sample size.

Genre
The Three Percent database provides two genres: fiction and poetry. While I've found this division hypothetically interesting in the past, the results boil down simply:

Basically: there is no significant change from the overall stats. Good to know! We can suggest from this data that women are slightly more likely to be published for writing poetry than fiction, but the difference is fairly minor.

This is all I'd ever looked at in previous years, but this time I decided to follow a hunch and do some more digging. As I described in the methodology section, I went through the database title-by-title and gave fairly generic genre descriptors: fiction, crime, thrillers, romance, sci-fi, fantasy, poetry, etc. As you can tell, these definitions are far from comprehensive or indeed unique. The idea wasn't to specifically pinpoint the genre of each title (such a task is frankly impossible), but to get an impression of what sorts of books are being translated into English.

Which means the first chart I'm going to show you ostensibly has nothing to do with women in translation:

From a general lumping-together of all "non-literary" genres versus "literary fiction" (with short stories cast as a separate category since collections may yet contain more than one genre and often include more than one writer), it's apparent that the world of literary translations is actually pretty evenly balanced between so-called "genre" fiction, and "literary" fiction.

This may seem like a random, quirky tidbit, but it's quite a bit more than that. Another of the most common comebacks to the standard ~30% translation rate for women writers is the claim that literature in translation is usually literature, and women are "just more likely to write genre" (this is a claim that's cropped up in comments, tweets and private conversations, often with publishers). The above chart disproves the first part of that claim. The next will disprove the second:

As you can see, the gender breakdown here is not all that different from the global one. Yes, women are slightly better represented in genre fiction than overall, but four percentage points is... not all that much. It's a difference of 11 books out of over 200 in the "genre" category. Certainly nothing compared to the "dominance" women allegedly have in genre fiction. This is almost identical to the ratio we see pretty much everywhere, and the excuse of "genre" stumbles once it's established that genre in fact makes up just under half of all fiction/non-poetry publications in translation.

This myth is important to bust for several reasons. First: The implication of a two-tiered quality ranking. Linking women writers to "genre" (often disparagingly, with outright statements of the lower quality) is no different than the old argument that "women just don't write as well". It's an attempt to discredit works written by women, as well as an obvious move to separate them somehow from a standard (which is inherently defined by men).

Second: It is simply false. Women, it's true, write a fair amount of fiction (of all sorts), but this is not translated (!) into translations. Let's just say for a moment that women were writing far more genre fiction than men (and it's entirely possible that they do; I genuinely do not know global publishing trends). That means that men - despite being a minority in their native languages - would be getting published at significantly prioritized rates than women!

Here I'll also bust another myth: AmazonCrossing's strength as a publisher of women writers does not simply rely on genre. While they are predominantly a publisher of genre fiction (66/75 titles), women make up 6 of their 9 purely fiction ("literary") titles. Another predominantly genre publisher, Atria, also see 2 out of its 3 non-genre titles as written by women. It's a trend that holds, and in fact with the exception of AmazonCrossing (always the exception), publishers that focus on genre fiction publish far fewer women writers than others! Below is a chart showing genre books by publishers (of more than two books in 2015) with majority "genre" titles (in percentages):

Not so women-dominated after all. Once again, AmazonCrossing carries most of the weight.

Original year of publication
The next metric - also new, and now specifically focused on fiction titles - stems from another set of hunches. Before I begin, I should note that I began collecting data with an idea in mind as to what the bias would be, and discovered that I was wrong. I initially expected to see a short delay when it comes to translating contemporary books by women writers, but soon found that there was no clear difference. I also noticed that some books had pretty significant gaps between when they were translated and when they were published in the US. I dropped this categorization while analyzing the data, because my initial hypothesis proved incorrect. I have to admit: I'm glad to know women writers don't face a clear delay when it comes to recent publications.

That said.

I divided the data into three time periods. The first was 2010-2015 and - as noted - there was no significant difference in terms of publication rates (for fiction or genre). On the contrary: women made up 36% of publications in that time period, somewhat pushed by the prevalence of recently released genre novels by both men and women.

The second was 1971-2009. Here a gap begins to open just a bit overall: 27% women writers. Once I looked only at "fiction" titles, however, the gap opened further, and women made up only 23%. So there is clearly some struggle in translating women's backlog literature.

The third time frame was pre-1971. This cutoff was effectively to create some sort of "classics" division, with 1970 chosen in large part because it's been 45 years, and I'm young enough that I genuinely view that as a long time ago (sorry if this makes anyone feel old! I promise it's intentional!). This division made me stop in my tracks and stare at the data for a long, long time. I'd had a hunch that women would be severely under-represented in the "classics" realm (despite these being, of course, first time translations), but that could not prepare me for the scope of the imbalance.

You see, of 38 titles I identified as having been published before 1970 (including short story collections I could solidly identify as predominantly of the era, such as Clarice Lispector's complete stories and poetry collections, here reintroduced), 4 were written by women. To put that in chart form:

This metric is unbelievably infuriating. One of my focuses during the 2015 women in translation month was classic titles, and I unsurprisingly struggled somewhat to find books, even more when seeking books which have been incorporated into the "canon". Meanwhile, I discovered a practical treasure-trove of untranslated works (including a plethora of explicitly feminist literature). True, not all would fall under the category of "fiction", but there's definitely a lot out there that's never been translated.

And there's the part that fills me with rage. The Three Percent database, I'll again note, only includes first-time translations. You won't find a new translation of War and Peace here. Sometimes there's a new collection of short stories by a famous author (in this year's example, a new collection of Chekhov works) which qualifies, but these are largely little-known writers and utterly unknown "rediscovered masterpieces". So why are they almost all by men? Why is the earliest book by a woman writer only from 1921, while men have 7 books from the 19th century and 1 from the 17th?

I can hear the arguments already: "But women didn't used to write as much as men!" You know what? Sure. Sure, let's say you're right, and only 10% of all pre-1970 literature was written by women. Why in the world should that impact which books we choose to translate and rediscover in 2016? These are not established books. With the exception of one book, none of these books were written by famous men, or men who left a lasting impact on literature. They are already unknowns. And I find myself wondering: why not take that opportunity in promoting an unknown writer and recognize the literally thousands of women writers history has almost purposely forgotten? We know an imbalance exists, has existed, and seems determined to continue to exist. Is this not an opportunity to right the wrongs? Is this not the opportunity to bring to light literally hundreds of regarded, important and historically relevant texts by women writers from around the world?

The utter lack of books for kids/YA
This one doesn't even need a chart. Out of 549 titles in the 2015 database, two were fairy tale collections and three were marketed towards young adults (though here I may have missed a title or two; we're still talking about 1-2% at most). Such a huge hole made me wonder if there wasn't something else hiding here or a problem with the source data.

I tweeted Chad Post about this imbalance and he explained that he does not include picture books in the database. This explains the glaring children's books gap, but not the lack of YA. Young adult and children's literature has been going through a targeted diversification process, with movements like "Diversify YA" and "We Need Diverse Books" leading the charge. It's critical that those efforts do not forget the importance of international and translated fiction, especially given the increasing tendency towards xenophobia in Anglo society. For literature in translation to cease being niche, it must be viewed as entirely normal by younger readers as well.

How does this relate to women in translation? On the one hand, it doesn't. This is simply another field in which a stark and deeply problematic imbalance is present. On the other hand, women writers are often credited with writing more books for kids and according to VIDA's Children's Literature count from 2014, women are generally more likely to win awards for children's books (indicating that perhaps women do write a majority of literature for children, especially if we assume the bias against women when awarding prizes crosses genres as well). While I cannot say for certain if this true worldwide, it may act as an indicator or guidepost that is without a doubt relevant to our overall conversation.

The emerging picture
A good deal of what I've tried to do with the women in translation project (and these stats posts) is identify various misconceptions that surround the lack of women writers in translation, as well as try to find the source of the problem. These posts can only ever look at that which is available in English and in that regard will forever be incomplete.

That doesn't mean they can't be representative of something. Yes, it means something when publishers year after year after year publish 30, 20, 10, 5% women writers. Yes, it means something when the problem stems not from one pin-pointed mark on the map, but across the entire globe. Yes, it means something when the problem spans genres and eras. The picture reveals a stubbornly consistent lack of women writers in translation, regardless of the metric thrown at the problem. This is deeply troubling.

Is there a single entity to blame? No. This is a problem that literally spans continents, centuries and concepts. It's a problem we'll only be able to solve by working together across borders and languages and ideas.

And to solve it, we need to know what we're up against. This is just another piece of that endlessly complex puzzle.

2015 Women in Translation Stats | Part 2 - Languages and countries

Read Part 1 - Publishers here.

I should point something out before I begin: This post will include some personal observation and analysis in addition to the hard numbers. When writing about statistics (particularly those that have a, shall we say, feminist nature), people will eventually try to prove that your numbers are actually wrong. It's hard to reject the publisher stats (though some have tried), but somehow people eventually reach a particularly toxic - and at times racist - argument.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

We left off with an industry-wide problem and an overall rate of translation at 31%. At this point, I decided to look more specifically at the language breakdown of the books published. Part of this is out of pure curiosity, but most of this has to do with the question of whether women are poorly translated worldwide, or if this is a geographically isolated problem.

Methodology
Once again, my numbers come from the US-based Three Percent database and are for first-time translations of fiction and poetry only. A single title by an author of unknown gender (translated from German) was removed for the sake of simplicity. The cutoff value for the country/language specific charts was at least 7 titles published, in order to better see the data. As always, there is a chance of some inconsistencies/inaccuracies due to human error...

Breakdown by countries and languages

Click to enlarge

As you can easily tell, the problem of translating women is not as a result of a certain country, rather the overwhelming majority have low rates overall (some more than others). It's difficult to measure how universal this is, mostly because of how many more translations there are from French relative to all other languages, and also because we again face the AmazonCrossing conundrum discussed in the previous post. Amazon has been shown to be a statistical outlier, and I knew from compiling these ratios that many of the titles had specifically been translated from German.

Languages, excluding AmazonCrossing

Note that German has gone from having more women writers translated than men, to significantly fewer, Korean has balanced out fully, and while Finnish didn't make the 7 cut in this case, it's actually the only one of the three to have retained an advantage for women writers (by one book). The differences really aren't all that major beyond German, but it's such a huge difference that I want to emphasize it: Of 37 titles by women writing in German, a whopping 27 were published by AmazonCrossing.

But what about countries, I can hear you ask? Surely languages aren't especially representative, since of course Spanish spans three or so continents, French at least three, Russian an entire swathe of Asia and Europe... surely there's some major difference with countries, right?

Not quite. France remains the overwhelmingly dominant voice, and since French translations remain dismally disproportionate in not-translating women writers, it's not especially surprising that the overall ratio looks not unlike France's.

And still, the rest of the world doesn't do all that well either. I decided to try to find the countries with the best track record, the area of the world so often touted as egalitarian and supportive of women and progressive and... you get the point. So yes, I looked only at the Nordic countries:

Hmm. Not that great either.

The narrative of "some parts of the world"
I think I need to pause here for a moment and explain what it is exactly that I'm trying to show. You see, there's this one argument I'm constantly told whenever I talk about this imbalance: The problem of women in translation is surely as a result of "some parts of the world being more oppressive to women". Western readers frequently imply that the entire project is meaningless, since of course there are going to be cultures in which women simply aren't valued as highly as men. This is almost always code for "the rest of the world is sexist, but the West has advanced beyond that".

This is a claim that has not only always angered me greatly because of how heavily racially coded it is, but more to the point angers me because of how distinctly false it is. Look at the charts above. Do you usually include France in your list of "oppressive to women"? What about Sweden? Boy, Spain sure does have a poor track record. And goodness me, Norway, that bastion of oppression!

By languages too. I have most frequently heard readers and industry-folk alike try to argue that Arabic would have significantly lower rates of translation than other languages. And while it's true that women writers make up only 23% of translations from Arabic, that's the same ratio you find for, well, French. It's the same ratio you find for Japanese (22%), only a little less than the ratio you find for Portuguese (27%) or Spanish (29%). Any claims that attempt to dismiss the problem of women in translation by limiting them to "certain parts of the world" are not only false, they are racist. They presume a cultural superiority by one specific slice of the world which - guess what - is doing just as poorly as almost everywhere else. At times, even worse, especially given how many more books they get translated per year.

This is what it looks like by continent of origin. Europe, the Americas and Asia all hover around the 31% (plus or minus), and Africa generally does lag behind. But of course, the entire African continent accounts for a grand total of 31 titles, making its lower rate of translations less prominent. Europe remains the primary source of all translations, and we're still left with a fairly global problem.

I also looked within Europe. This metric is probably the sketchiest and least accurate, because my definition of Western versus non-Western Europe was extremely vague. Basically anything east of Germany and the entire Baltic region got called "non-Western", but this is mostly just a guided attempt to show the differences between the two regions:

And here there is a marked difference - Western Europe at an unsurprising 35%, while the smaller countries (with far fewer translations) don't even reach 20%. That's something worth remembering for the future.

Final takeaways
I want to reiterate that these numbers are all extremely skewed, and to a certain degree almost meaningless. When one language and one country and one part of the world is so dominant in all of translation (a topic that should be discussed separate of the women in translation project...!), it makes it hard to recognize the weight behind any of the other numbers. French's 23% translation rate is obviously much more significant than, say, Tamil's 100% (which results from one book). But even with that, it's impossible not to recognize that there is no part of this world - no language or country or continent - that is doing well. The problem of women writers in translation is global, and while some countries technically have parity or even ratios above 50%, their weight is generally not so prominent (with the exception of German, where the numbers shift drastically without one publisher).

We cannot blame "some" regions of the world for a failure to give voice to women writers, and we cannot attempt to make this some sort of cultural distinction when it is effectively universal. We can only continue to discuss the gross imbalance and seek ways in which to rectify it across the board.

2015 Women in Translation Stats | Part 1 - Publishers

Unlike previous years, I found myself digging into the women in translation statistics a little more in depth in 2015. After almost three years of crunching these numbers, small patterns have emerged and I've begun to look at the big picture. Not that it's always easy when looking at publishers that release 4-5 books a year on average, but the more you look at the titles that are published (and who publishes them, and what genres they fall into, and who their authors are), the more you do start to recognize recurring themes, recurring problems, recurring offenders.

This will be a major theme in these posts; I have decided to dub a certain class of publishers "repeat offenders". These are the publishers who have not simply failed to translate books by women writers at similar rates as men, but also have shown a pattern of failing women writers, consistently falling below the already-low average. My hope is that these publishers will now join the 2016 Publishers in Translation challenge and commit to doing better, but for now let's start looking at numbers.

Introduction and methodology

2015 overall men:women rates of translation

As always, all data on published titles is taken from the Three Percent database. This collection of statistics is thus US-specific (and only for first-time fiction/poetry translations of original texts, so no retranslated classics looked at or nonfiction titles of any kind), though by all indicators is also fairly representative of the translation trends in the UK as well. Gender assessments are done one-by-one, based primarily on biographical information (Wikipedia, biographical information provided by publishers, personal websites and pronoun use, etc.). Anthologies were labeled "both" authors unless specifically noted as being all one-gender (one collection was exclusively women writers and was included as having been written by a woman).

The 31% overall rate may look a bit familiar there to long-time readers of this blog, since that's the same fairly disappointing number we encountered in 2014. As we'll see later (in the three-year "trend" stats), there is simply no indication that there's an improving trend. Yet. Put as kindly as I can possibly phrase it: 31% is embarrassingly low. It is not good enough.

What makes this 31% even more shocking is how very fragile it is. Because as you'll soon see, it's not that all publishers simply publish around 30% women writers in translation and are done with it. If only it were so simple.

The top 24 publishers

There's something to be said that even most of the "major" publishers of literature in translation haven't released all that many books. In order to tune in more sharply to publishers who "specialize" in literature in translation, I decided to look specifically at publishers who had released 7 or more titles in translation in 2015. At face value, the results seemed pretty straight-forward:

Perhaps not amazing, but 32% is at the average, indicating some level of consistency in the field. Except... not really.

Zoom to enlarge (?)

When it comes to publishers crossing the 50% mark, there are only two: AmazonCrossing (with 65.8% women writers) and Europa Editions (55.6%). Both publishers show an increase from their last year stats (from 52.3 and 31.6% respectively), though it is unclear how much of that has to do with the fact that Europa Editions published significantly fewer books in 2015, while AmazonCrossing published significantly more (and I'll get back to AmazonCrossing in a moment). A third publisher comes close to reaching parity: Atria sits at the respectable 45.5%, compared to a 2014 50% ratio - solidly balanced. Wakefield Press also comes in at a reasonable range, with 42.9%.

But let's look at Amazon again. Last year, I noted that AmazonCrossing seemed to lap other publishers of literature in translation when it came to publishing women writers in translation, and this has become disturbingly accurate this year. AmazonCrossing published 48 titles by women writers in translation in 2015 (a sizable portion of which were part of a series of German-language romance novels), while the next 23 publishers published a grand total of 51 titles by women writers. And in this sense, it suddenly became apparent that AmazonCrossing is simply a statistical outlier. In essence, if we want to see what publishing in translation largely looks like, we can't look at any ratios with Amazon in them, because Amazon skews those numbers far too significantly. Ouch.

The top 23 publishers (excluding AmazonCrossing)

So I decided to look at the overall men:women ratio without AmazonCrossing, and then the top now-23 publishers. The overall rate drops from 31% to 25%, the top publishers drops from 32% to 22%. While AmazonCrossing is of course the largest publisher of literature in translation these days regardless of gender, no single publisher should ever be responsible for that much of the gender divide. Especially when the immediate conclusion to be reached is: Other publishers are doing very, very poorly.

For example: The next largest publisher of literature in translation after AmazonCrossing is Dalkey Archive. Now Dalkey has long been one of the worst publishers when it comes to translations of women writers (see here) and they have also long avoided explaining how in 2014, the publishing house managed to publishing a stunning zero books by women writers (out of 30 titles released overall). Despite that criticism, their 2015 ratio is not particularly inspiring: 16%.

If we continue down the line, fellow heavyweight "literary giant" New Directions did only marginally better at 20%. And these are the stats we see among the non-Amazon top publishers, for example: Seagull Books at 12.5%, Gallic Press at 15.4%, Pushkin Press and Archipelago at 0% (!), Penguin and Knopf at 12.5%... Even seemingly more aware or "younger" presses like Deep Vellum and Open Letter scrape by with 33% and 30% respectively.

Suddenly it's not surprising that the overall ratio is 31% even with AmazonCrossing. With so many publishers barely translating 20% women writers (let alone 30% and certainly not 50%), it's unsurprising that the situation is simply not improving.

University presses

I also found myself checking a new metric this year: university presses. More precisely, I looked at the publishers whose names contain university names or the phrase "university press". Why specifically these? Why not any publisher that is distributed by or partially funded by a university? Quite frankly, I know that as a simple reader, a university press gives an air of... authenticity, a sort of quality control highlighting classics and canon-worthy titles. How do women writers fare in this elite world? Badly.

Not only is 19% well below the 31% average, it's even below the Amazon-excluded 25%. And before readers jump to inform me that of course university presses are bound to translate fewer women writers because women wrote significantly less prior to 1960 (which of course ignores the countless works of phenomenal literature written by women throughout history but I'll set that aside for a moment...), I'll shoot this in response: What purpose do university presses serve in new translations, if not to seek untranslated, unfamiliar and forgotten gems? Women have written plenty of those since the dawn of time, and precisely fit the bill when it comes to eye-opening new titles.

University presses publishing significantly fewer women writers than men means one thing: they are perpetuating an all-male canon. Publishers are gatekeepers. They carry responsibility. So this sort of huge gender disparity is not something to be shrugged aside or ignored.

Now what?

By this point, it should not surprise any readers why I have challenged publishers to release their own internal gender ratios, and to publicly commit to improving them. The fact is that even publishers who have expressed support of Women in Translation Month (WITMonth) failed to publish a single new translation of a woman writer in 2015, and hardly any of the rest did much better. Publishers are failing readers and it is high time we recognize that there is serious work to be done.

The 2016 Publishers in Translation Challenge

Happy 2016! Let's get down to business.

Before I publish the final 2015 women in translation statistics, I'd like to make a few things very clear: Things aren't great, some publishers are definitely doing better than others, and I don't for a moment want to diminish from the great work publishers of literature in translation do at large.

I'll be getting into more details about specific publishers and specific publisher patterns in future posts, but for now - at the onset of a new calendar year - I want to make one main request of publishers: do better.

The 2016 Publishers in Translation Challenge: Translate more women writers!

With even basic parity still a long, long way off and almost all major publishers falling all-too-comfortably below the 31% overall average (as you'll see more clearly in the stats post, of the top 25 publishers of literature in translation in 2015, only 5 were above 31% and only 2 reached/crossed the 50% mark), it's for publishers to show that they recognize this problem and they are committing to fixing it.

For the record: Some of the publishers with pretty abysmal rates have already expressed support for the women in translation project in different ways (WITMonth, the Year of Publishing Women, etc.), but this ultimately has not yet translated into concrete publications. While I continue to admire and support publishers who take part in the project, I also can't just ignore the lack of meaningful results.

The challenge is this:

• Acknowledge the problem!
• Publish your own translations rates (including backlog). Show us where you are, for good and bad. Give us the whole picture.
• Commit to working towards a solution.
• Publish women writers.

Many publishers will likely scoff at this point, saying that they choose only the best books, or the books that make the most sense for them to publish, or only books that fit with a certain "aesthetic" (a heavily coded word if there ever was one). I'll scoff back and say this: If you can't find books by women writers that fit your aesthetic or style, then your aesthetic or style is probably defined by being exclusively male.

We've passed the point of gently chiding publishers. We've passed the point of being baffled by ratios that make no sense. We've passed the point at which the claim that "women just don't write like men" is deemed an acceptable argument.

At this point, I want to see results. I want to see publishers owning up to the years in which they published zero books by women writers. I want to see publishers owning up to the fact that they have failed to give voice to women writers in equal measure. I want to see publishers recognizing that this was and is a problem, and saying: We are done being part of this problem.

You only pick the best books? Awesome. None of those books were by women? To quote the wise Rafiki: look harder. You'll probably find a gem.