I was so very excited. I really, really shouldn't have been.
You see, anthologies largely reflect the literary culture around them. Yes, you can occasionally find a book like Cubana (which I recently stumbled across and picked up at a used bookstore) that is dedicated to women writers in particular, but most anthologies give a broader spread. And most are so, so male.
Here's a quick rundown of the four anthologies I checked out from the library this week:
- Contemporary Georgian Fiction - 4 out of 20 stories are by women. 20%, less than the overall translation average
- Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories - 9 out of 52 stories are by women. 17%, less than the overall translation average
- Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories - 9 out of 35 stories are by women. 26%, just around the average
- Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused: Fiction from Today's China - 5 out of 20. 25%, just below the overall average
I won't pretend that I'm not discovering some old-new writers in these collections, or that because some focus on older literature it may justify the relatively low ratios. I won't pretend that they aren't doing good work for literature overall. I also won't dismiss them entirely, considering the higher male-to-female ratio in other anthologies (though when I say "higher", I mean around 33%...).
However. This is something we need to bear in mind. When we look at translations, we also need to look at short stories and at anthologies and at collections. Until now, I had sort of hoped that these collections would reflect better on translation rates than the current landscape. But it turns out that these collections - including more recently published ones, such as the Georgian collection (from 2012) - mirror the problems found elsewhere, and indeed often give us worse results.
I will continue to use collections and anthologies as a resource, for all writers. But once again we see the problem that led to the very initiation of WITMonth - where are the women writers? We keep searching, and we keep discussing. This is the only solution.
"Where are the women writers?"
ReplyDeleteSince your critique seems to hinge on the lack of gender parity in these anthologies, I think it's worth asking who you would include and leave out of the anthologies in question. Of the anthologies that you mention, for example, the one I'm most familiar with is The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories, and despite its 9/52 women writer numbers, it seems fairly representative of the Latin American short short canon in terms of including most of the big names among short story writers (note: I'm much less familiar with the Brazilian tradition). I would include many different writers than EcheverrÃa did if I were compiling my own personal anthology; however, I'm curious as to whether you think EcheverrÃa, a longtime comp lit professor at Yale, didn't know what he was doing based on your male/female ratio preferences alone or some other criteria that you haven't yet mentioned. In other words, is his book a fail for you because of the limited number of women writers included regardless of its other qualities?