WITMonth Day 16 | Selling women in translation

The world of literary translations - like all industries - ultimately boils down to one thing: Sales. Whether we're talking about a nonprofit, an academic press, a stable indie, or one of the major publishing houses, the bottom line remains the same. Books are published with the assumption that they will eventually be sold, at least in part. It may not be the only (or even primary!) motivation behind the work, but it is still one of them. And selling books also means that there's marketing. And marketing also means that there is a need to "sell" the books onto the readers. How do you convince readers to pick up your book specifically?

I'm not in the publishing industry (as you probably already know...), but I've spent enough years adjacent to it to have picked up on some of the tricks. The best known is also the one most frequently critiqued - the comparison. Whether in general design, blurb-styling, or direct comparison, books are often sold on the basis of "here's something that reminds you of this other thing that you like". It's a tried and true method because it's generally quite appealing. "[X] meets [Y]" is the fastest and easiest way to hook someone on your work. Shorthand and visual reminders as well.

The problem (as you probably guessed from the title of this post, and the fact that I'm writing it during August) is that these are occasionally very sloppily done. Many comparisons rely on the same few easily recognizable authors, regardless of whether or not it has any bearing. Japanese writer? Murakami! Italian woman writer? Elena Ferrante and Natalia Ginzburg! Are there even any other Italian women writers? Does it matter if they cover completely different styles and perspectives? 

The narrow scope that women in translation are permitted is maybe not the most important matter on the table, but it's still something worth thinking about. How do we sell women in translation? How do we frame women in translation? The above examples are specifically comparisons, but of course the question of how publishers frame women writers in translation for English-speaking markets (in this specific case, though I've seen similar issues across other languages as well...) extend to other marketing forms. Recall, if you will, Léonora Miano's criticism of the University of Nebraska's marketing/framing of her novella, translated into English as Dark Heart of the Night (a title she was unhappy with). Here was a case of a writer pigeonholed to fit what the publishers thought a book about African violence should be, rather than what the book actually is. Then, of course, there's the eternal problem of "the first book by a [X] woman translated into English", or "the first [X] woman author". Firsts are easily marketable and easily framed, particularly when there's an expectation of "otherness". They are often also misleading or extremely vague. (For example: I was and remain baffled by the marketing that claims that Duanwad Pimwana is the first Thai woman novelist to be translated into English, given that Jane Vejjajiva was translated quite a few years back; children's novel, yes, but... still? It's a question that has bothered me... Perhaps I'm simply missing something.)

Women writers in translation deserve, of course, to have their books sold. That means that one way or another, publishing will need to find some way to frame their works. In some cases, this will inevitably draw comparisons to the few women in translation who have paved the way before them. In other cases, it may be a regional divide. Sometimes, there will be racial biases and stereotypes that shape how a book is marketed or sold. (Black womens' silhouettes. Asian women from behind. Red cover for books about China.  The acacia tree for books from Africa. Burkas and hijabs for works relating to women across either the Arab or Muslim worlds.) While some degree of marketing is of course necessary, it's important that we ask at what point these do extreme disservices to the works themselves. And it's important that we recognize the extra damage inflicted upon writers already starting from disadvantaged positions.

WITMonth Day 12 | Why is WIT *still* so European?

Look, I don't have a better way to say this, but: The world of women in translation into English (and definitely among other languages I've screened) remains steadfastly, stubbornly Euro-centric. Why?

In the near-decade since I began work on this project, the matter of Eurocentrism in translations of works by women writers has always been very near the surface. The question posed in the title of this post is an echo to a question I started asking myself all the way back in 2013 - why are there so few women writers in translation? And as I started to collect data on that lack, I kept encountering another one: Among the relatively fewer women writers who were translated into English, the easy majority were consistently European women writers.

This pattern has persisted, even as overall rates of women writers in translation have ticked upward and there is now a much greater understanding and appreciation for the importance of including women's voices in translation. Somehow the newfound respect that many publishers and translators have for women writers from around the world only seems to extend so far as Europe, and occasionally Latin America (I'll delve into Latin American translations in a bit more detail soon...). Ironically, it is some of the worst-performing publishers (when it comes to actually bothering to translate women) who seem to have a greater appreciation for women writing outside of the confines of "traditional" European expectations. 

The imbalances aren't consistent, either. While literature from the (vast) continent of Asia is certainly lacking (both proportionally and just numerically), women's writing from countries like South Korea or Japan have actually done quite well. South Korea in particular is well-associated with women writers at this point, to the degree where I'm hard-pressed to think of a handful of books by Korean men which have been translated in recent years, but can easily come up with more than a dozen by women. This comes alongside the persistent lack of widespread translations from the Indian subcontinent (marketed outside of the subcontintent, at least). South and Southeast Asian literature in translation is woefully lacking across the board, and women writers suffer from this in equal measure. The situation grows even more concerning for African literature in translation, which remains frustratingly limited. African women writers working outside of English are still almost entirely invisible. Why?

I won't get into my theories on the matter, but the bottom line is the same no matter what: Publishing needs to do better on this front. While there is some positive movement (things like Tomb of Sand winning the International Booker), it is simply not enough. This year's WITMonth new releases list is disproportionately European. And while there is a thankfully impressive range of diversity within that European category (it's important to remember, as always, that Europe is not a cultural monolith!), it's still disheartening to see just how few books there are translated from any South Asian languages, translated from African women writers (also an incredibly large, diverse group that is simply not recognized in translation!), and so on.

I don't have much say in this, unfortunately, but I can continue to do what I've done until now: Make noise. In the same way that we fight for women in translation at large, it is crucial that we fight for the women who aren't getting translated. That we address these other imbalances and biases that have shaped the publishing industry. I can simply say that as a reader, I am desperate to read more literature from all across the world, reflecting all these different experiences. I want to buy these books, I want to read these books, I want publishers to publish these books.

Why is WIT still so European? Because we haven't finished our work.

WITMonth Day 8 | High versus low versus none

I've written about similar topics before, but it came up again earlier this week (as of scheduling this post in early July), and I find myself thinking about how limited the scope is for women writers in translation. How despite women writers existing in languages across the world, writing across all genres and literary styles, their works as translated (particularly into English, but not just) are often limited.

The highbrow/lowbrow debate is one that has existed for generations upon generations, and frankly it's one that no longer interests me. There is value in different forms and expressions of art, period. And there is value in different ways of experiencing said art, which may often come out in how "accessible" a work is and how it is meant to evoke a particular response in the reader. That's all there is to it. Every iteration of this same argument is only ever a rehashing of existing claims - for and against - that often deliberately ignore the value in the other school of thought. Yawn.

That being said, I feel that this is a conversation that still needs to be had within the context of WIT. The odd imbalance between high- and lowbrow literature in the translation world in general is worthy of its own discussion, but this is a WITMonth post, and so I'll focus on the unique state of WIT in this instance. Namely: WIT is extremely biased towards fiction (particularly contemporary fiction), with a smattering of poetry, nonfiction, and children's literature (and at most a handful of plays). This is in contrast to the general, English-language industry consensus by which fiction makes up a small fraction of annual releases. Now, obviously, the world of literature in translation is infinitely smaller than that of the wider English-language market, and indeed any language-specific market on its own. There are many books published per year that are unlikely to get translated, whether in the form of extremely specific academic nonfiction works, self-help books, cookbooks, self-published treatises, and so on. Moreover, I would expect a similar trend for books by men writers in translation, though perhaps somewhat mitigated by the fact that nonfiction in translation is overwhelmingly more likely to be by men, presumably narrowing the gap somewhat. (Because my data collection focuses on women wrtiers, I can't say for certain regarding men. Maybe someday!)

So let's focus for now on those WIT, whose works are overwhelmingly fiction, majority contemporary, and still overwhelmingly European (I will elaborate on the latter point in greater detail later in the month). Many of these works are what would be considered "literary" - fiction with a particular tenor and tone, often published by particular types of independent presses. Only a couple dozen are hardcore "genre" works - fantasy, sci-fi, thrillers, or romance - and even among these, there is often a softening of the genre's hard edges to make the book appear more accessible. (A personal note: I often override publisher definitions when it comes to books with "fantasy elements" that are nonetheless marketed as general fiction, especially when the description makes clear that it is, quite simply, a fantasy novel. Sorry, publishers!) Even more than genre literature, though, I am continuously baffled and stunned by the lack of children's literature by women writers in translation. How? Why?

And this leads me back to the topic of this post. In a nutshell: While that obnoxious debate takes place about whether it is anti-intellectual to reject highbrow books or snobbish to reject the lowbrow, women writers in translation aren't even being given a choice in the matter. While lowbrow books in English are frequently translated (and indeed, popular, widely-appreciated art from the Anglo world is a cultural staple worldwide, from literature to music through to film), there is no such equivalent space for women writers in translation. More than that, there isn't really space for the highbrow either; while it's not as if men in translation have tons of nonfiction coming out every month, women's nonfiction is just a blip on the radar, and rarely from a strictly academic bent (half of the women's nonfiction I've logged for the "WITMonth 2022 reading list" as of writing this post is in the form of memoirs, which fill a very different niche within the world of nonfiction).

The point of WITMonth is to highlight women writers from around the world. From my end, it's also an opportunity to reckon with the imbalances that also exist among the books that are translated. Particularly now, on year 9 of WITMonth and as many more publishers have gotten a lot better at publishing women writers, I find myself more frustrated by how limiting the range of books that get translated seems to be. When new readers want to take part in WITMonth and ask for "genre" type books, it's a struggle to recommend them. Want to get your 10-year old in on the action? Not all that many choices. Someone wants science nonfiction or books on history? Yeah, good luck with that.

It helps no one, to have a limited scope of books available, whether from a linguistic perspective, a cultural one, or stylistic. And WITMonth can't be limited like this, it just can't. I've said it before and I'll say it again - we shouldn't have go through all this effort, just to create other imbalances and biases in our reading. The world is rich with women writers from all walks of life, writing in all sorts of languages, telling all sorts of stories, and presenting them for all sorts of different audiences. These categories overlap and intersect in ways that are pivotal for our... existence as a culture, honestly. Even when engaging with "comfort", template-style stories, we still seek out the particular, unique twist that a new writer might bring an old story. We should continue striving toward a world in which we can actually get all of those stories.

WITMonth Day 4 | WIT in the curriculum

Any reader of this blog will know that I often rant about the canon. The canon is a concept that I find to be tenuous at best and largely shaped by whatever people want it mean at the time. It serves its purpose (at times), but it is often used as a sledgehammer against any "new" works, with that sledgehammer banging away even more tenaciously if the author is not... in line, shall we say, with the previously established members of that canonic elite. I've written about this more times than I care to admit, to be perfectly honest.

But today's post is less about that, and more about the parallel problem that exists alongside it. Just like the canon is often used to shape the narrative of what literature is and what it can mean, so too do academic curriculums. Whether college-level, high school, or in middle/elementary school, it is rare (in the English-speaking context, about which this post will focus) to come across literature in translation. It is even more rare to come across women writers in translation.

Now, to be clear, I have not spent all that much time in the literary-minded halls of academia. I am, in fact, on an entirely separate campus from them (my university believes in a strict separation of power: humanities/social sciences on one hill, science/math/computer science on another, and medicine/medical research on a third, and agriculture is literally in a whole different city). But I've made an effort to gain a better understanding of what is taught where, and how. And I did so rather explicitly on Twitter, not too long ago.

I was surprised by the wave of answers I got, spanning decades and continents and literary traditions. But an underlying theme emerged: Most people who studied literature in an English-language context specifically studied English-language literature. Many perceive the two as entirely equivalent to such a degree that they misread my question and assumed I had asked about people who had studied "English" (I phrased my question around "literature", rather intentionally). Others thought that I meant English in the context of England-the-country, and named various Irish, Scottish, and US-based English-language writers as exceptions. I was simultaneously amused and surprised, not having expected such a vast divide.

There were, of course, exceptions. Several people responded to emphasize that their programs had a major focus on post-colonial literature. Some said that they read "plenty" of translated literature, but could not necessarily say how many works were translated compared to not. Others similarly recalled having read "lots of" women writers during their respective degrees, though there was a recurring theme of people recalling that the majority of women writers that they read had been specifically under the purview of either feminist studies modules/courses, literature-adjacent minors, or courses that explicitly focused on women's writing. Bit by bit, with over 50 different responders, I found myself acknowledging what I had long suspected:

1. Academic, college-level literature in an English-language context overwhelmingly means works originally written in English (or proto-English languages). Even when expressly seeking to broaden horizons (particularly through the lens of post-colonial literature), it is heavily dominated by works originally written in English.
2. Most of the translated literature students had read was European and overwhelmingly written by men.
3. Exceptions were often from multilingual countries.
4. While it seems that there are some improvements over the decades, even very recent graduates described gender and translation gaps. 

It's not that these were remarkable or unexpected conclusions. I came into the question assuming that these were the answers. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who could offer exceptions, but these were still largely reflective of a larger, pervasive pattern. Having, for instance, elective courses that focus on "Latin American women writers" is wonderful, but how does it wash with the fact that the mandatory course "Latin American literature" features only 10% works by women? If a student can complete an entire undergraduate degree in literature without having read a single work by 20th or 21st century writer from a literary tradition outside of English, are they truly well-versed in literature? If the study of literary works from other languages and cultures are limited to foreign language degrees (or comparable cultural studies), how can the literary tradition ever truly grow, evolve, and learn?

And of course, women writers in translation are the ones hurt the most. Their separation into women-specific courses also serves only to hurt women writers, in place of elevating them. Women's writing, after all, is not relevant only to those studying works by women. And I am hard-pressed to think of any era of literary study that cannot be filled with relevant works by women writers, whether originally in English or not. (Unless it's an author-specific course, but that's quite obviously not what I'm talking about...)

Part of the normalization of WIT has to come early, and it has to come through the classroom. A high school student in the US might read a handful of women writers in the course of their studies, but dozens of men. The vast majority will be works originally from English, but they don't have to be. Nor do they have to be by a majority of men. The literary value of a particular work is not actually intrinsic, nor is it determined by an ancient consensus. This is the part where the fuzziness of the canon comes into play. We can just decide to introduce excellent literature from around the world (and by women writers, no less!) into the curriculum, for all the value they have on an individual literary level and as an extraordinary expansion of the young readers' horizons. Christine de Pizan as a discussion on the way literature served as a conversation and statement. Simone Schwarz-Bart as an introduction to an extraordinarily rich tradition of Caribbean writing. Elsa Morante as a representation of the balance between epic history and a small-scale family story. Qiu Miaojin as a reflection of a developing literary language and cultural touchstone. Nawal El Saadawi as a voice of feminist activism and powerful narration. Svetlana Alexievich as a voice for those who might otherwise go unheard. And so many others at the college level, across every genre and literary form.

As I said earlier: I'm not a literary academic. I barely studied literature in high school. I am - as I have long claimed - just a reader. I do this for fun. But I'm a reader who knows just how extraordinary my "experiment" in reading women writers from around the world has been. Who knows just how many things I've learned and how much I've had the privilege to be able to learn them. Who knows just how many things I have yet to learn, and how many still remain out of reach due to a language gap. I spent years not realizing how many incredible women writers I could have been reading. It took years of actively trying to correct this imbalance in order to tilt the scales back. It shouldn't be so hard. Literature from around the world and literature from languages other than English or a handful of other privileged languages should be a natural part of our life, not something that we explicitly need to seek out. And women writers should not be rarities among that as well. Having women writers included in the curriculums of high school literature courses and college literary degrees won't erase the existing problems, but it can certainly go a long way toward leveling the playing field. It's time.

WITMonth Day 18 | Assessing Archipelago

This post is a long time coming. It is also an extremely difficult one to write, but here we are.

I have long prided my independence as a book blogger. This is something I've written about separately, here and there, but the truth is that I've always wanted to remain strongly independent as a blogger, because I do not want to feel beholden to anyone in the publishing industry. Much as I respect and admire many voices within that framework (publishers, writers, translators), I cannot view myself as one of its ranks. And because of this, I also feel comfortable ostensibly burning bridges where necessary. This is why I felt comfortable pushing back against Dalkey Archive's absurd argument that they had said enough on the matter of women in translation, back in 2015. (Note that the link to the original thread is now dead, but Dalkey's responses remain up.) When push comes to shove, my duty is to truth and reality, not to any one publisher or voice in the publishing industry.

I have, however, largely avoided challenging publishers publicly and directly. For years, I've politely reached out to publishers to get their statements regarding the dearth of women writers in their catalogs. Archipelago were one of those that ignored me most frequently, rather outrightly. Eventually, I got a placid reassurance that they are working on the matter. That was 2019. Now, in 2021, I can rest assured that the benefit of the doubt that I gave them at the time was unwarranted. Enough is enough.

I have purchased plenty of books from Archipelago Books over the years. I have also recommended them plenty, seeing as one of my absolute favorite books of the past decade is from their catalog (Scholastique Mukasonga's Cockroaches, and yes, you should read it if you haven't yet). I am also on their mailing list, and as such frequently receive their self-laudatory calls for donations and support. But we'll get to that shortly. The point is that I'm not writing this post out of a sense of cancelling Archipelago. I have no interest in folks no longer buying their books and penalizing their authors (particularly not their brilliant women writers), I am interested in Archipelago getting their act together and acknowledging and addressing their bias against women writers.

Here's the deal: I tallied up all of Archipelago's publications. Both in translation and not (though the overwhelming majority are in translation). Archipelago and their children's imprint Elsewhere Editions. All the books, of all times per the website. And the conclusion is stark: Archipelago Books apparently does not have any interest in publishing women writers. Among their publicly cataloged books, they have 153 books exclusively written by men, 1 anthology written by both men and women, and only 27 books exclusively written by women. For those who don't want to do the math, that's 15%. Or, in visual terms:

And at Elsewhere Editions, their children's literature imprint? Well, going by authors (which is how I judge the women in translation project), Elsewhere Editions has published a grand total of 15 books by men authors...

...oh, sorry, were you waiting for the number of books by women writers? You'll have to wait until they publish one. (Reminder: Elsewhere Editions was founded after I began the women in translation project/WITMonth and after several attempts to contact Archipelago about their massive gender imbalance in the parent catalog. They knew.) Let me reiterate this point: A children's literature imprint has somehow managed to publish 15 books of which none are by women writers. Children's. Literature. No women.

If I sound exasperated, it's because I am.

Archipelago are a disaster when it comes to publishing women writers, plain and simple. Across the board. No matter how generous I would like to be, it's simply impossible to come away from this data and not recognize that something very rotten lies as its core. Moreover, I have little desire to be particularly generous, given the ways in which Archipelago seem either willfully unaware (or cynically mocking) of their astonishing gender gap. Last year, I was stunned to receive an email regarding Elsewhere Editions, that, in their words, "respond[ed] to the urgent need for diversity in children's literature". This email was a call for donations, and possibly a successful one, based on the subsequent donation requests I have received since. It is difficult to express how unsettled this email left me; how, I wondered, could a publisher of all men writers from a majority Western/Northern European countries (overwhelmingly white, otherwise) cite diversity without feeling at least the tiniest bit of shame and self-awareness?

It's not the first time this sort of cynicism has emerged, at least on my part. Against all odds, Archipelago are sporadically involved in WITMonth, with occasional promotional tweets and discounts. Just this month, I received an email regarding their ongoing WITMonth discount, attached with what looks like a very respectable list of women writers, until you realize they included works with women translators, and also that the list is actually way shorter than the 80 or so which would bring them close to the parity mark. Women, it seems, are perhaps not worth actively seeking out and publicizing, but excellent as a marketing device?

I'm writing this all with the knowledge that my individual post won't make a difference. It's not as though I haven't reached out to Archipelago in the past. In the first few years of the women in translation project, they simply did not respond to my queries. In 2019, they gave me the laundry list of individual case studies, without acknowledging the broader picture and existing imbalances. And it is clear that they did not make any active effort to change matters. As of writing this post, the latest catalogue on Archipelago's website is their Fall 2020/Spring 2021 collection, which has 1 English-language work by a man writer, 8 books by men in translation, and 3 books by women in translation. 25%! Elsewhere Editions remains woman-less, though there is at least one woman illustrator (huzzah...?). At this point, I see little point in personally reaching out again.

As I mentioned at the top, Archipelago have published some of my favorite works of the past few years and have a remarkably interesting catalogue overall. It's important that we as readers acknowledge the good alongside the bad. But we as readers have to seriously address when publishers are simply not up to snuff. And we have to do something. We have to make sure that Archipelago understand that this isn't acceptable. The cherry-picking of individual women writers is not an acceptable response to a catalog of bias and omission.

I ask readers of this blog (and all WITMonth aficionados) to make your voices heard. Tweet at Archipelago. Write to them. Make clear that your support of their publications (whether during their donation drives or otherwise) is contingent on them actually publishing women writers. #PublishWIT, as far as I'm concerned, should go viral. While Archipelago are far from the only publishers out there to stumble in this regard, they are one of the most egregious. It's time for this to change.

In case anyone was wondering a bit more about the placement of the pen and the underlined line in the photo above, those represent the ten titles written by Karl Ove Knausgård. Alone. 

On the value and faults of adaptations

While it may be an odd statement to make on a dedicated book blog and as a person whose personality is often associated with books, I have to admit: I like stories. I like movies, I like television, I like theater (particularly musical theater, let's be real), I like graphic novels, I like campfire tales. I love the human capacity for storytelling and imaginative interpretations of different stories. After all, how many times have we reworked and played with the Hero's Journey? How many times have we played out romances and tragedies and sports victories and so on? It's a wondrous thing.

All of which is to say that I've long been a fan of the concept of adaptations. I find great value in the way that stories can be reworked in new contexts or using new mediums. Contrary to popular belief, I don't think that film inherently elevates a text, but I think that any adaptation has the potential to add to the original, by casting it in a new light. And so a novelization of a movie might elevate that by having the space to fill in details or background that would have felt clunky in film. A film version of a comic book might manage to change the stakes and scope of the text by physically expanding them. And of course adaptations can also happen within the same medium - modernizations of classics are a particular favorite of mine, where the adaptation plays around with the actual story details to set them in a wholly different setting. Similarly, it can be argued that Shakespearean theater (and any theater that takes some liberties in direction and styling) is another form of endless reinterpretation and adaptation. Shakespeare is still Shakespeare, whether in 16th century garb or in modern clothing and style (which is, perhaps, why Shakespeare remains so continually enjoyable to modern viewers!).

Yet for all my love of adaptations as a concept, I often struggle with the execution. I don't think these are unrelated, though, and in fact it was through my disappointment in various adaptations in recent months* that I've realized so much of what it is that makes a good adaptation good. 

It began with Wolf Hall, which I read (and loved) several years back. When a BBC adaptation of that work was announced, I was excited. How could I not be, with an adaptation in the works of some of my favorite books? So when the time came, I watched the first episode with excitement... and stopped. While meticulously crafted and staged, the show felt... dim. Lifeless. I forgot about it for several years, only coming back to it when I read The Mirror and the Light earlier this year. And so I watched the next two episodes (all that time later), and was again struck by a sort of blankness to the adaptation. Coming off of Mantel's writing, it felt even more apparent. Where were the film equivalents of Mantel's writerly quirks ("he, Cromwell")? Where was the depth and weight of Mantel's raw focus? "Wolf Hall" the miniseries was praised for being a faithful adaptation, but it seems to primarily adapt the story, not the work itself. Henry VIII's story is not unfamiliar, nor is Cromwell's by association. The value that Wolf Hall brought in "adapting" Cromwell's life was in how Mantel carried out her work, how she delved into Cromwell's character, and how she built the historical record into and around it. It's the life she introduced into an established historical story. In failing to capture some of Mantel's literary quirks and snarky eye, the "Wolf Hall" miniseries ends up feeling like a neat set-piece historical drama, not a particularly good adaptation.

A similar feeling has continued with the recent BBC/HBO adaptation of His Dark Materials, another of my all-time favorite series. While generally more enjoyable and admirable in its attempts to flesh out the politics of Lyra's world (which are largely left vague in The Golden Compass, somewhat expanded upon in later books) and some bold (and welcome!) storytelling decisions in the overall series pacing, there is still something somewhat missing from the adaptation. Fantasy and sci-fi works are often difficult to translate to the screen, lest something of the actual imagination gets lost. "His Dark Materials" tries to play to its strengths (excellent acting), but it can't quite capture the magic of Pullman's world, mostly failing to really convey the otherness-yet-normalcy of daemons. Season 2 is improving on this a bit, but there's still the feeling that "His Dark Materials" just doesn't quite manage to build on the original. Its an adaptation that is enjoyable (and, again, improving in its expanded world-building, which is great), but not yet all there.

It's partly disappointing because I do think there are plenty of book-to-TV examples that manage to do a good job as adaptations and as stories in their own right, which I'm realizing is part of what I find so important (and engaging) with adaptations. The Babysitter's Club was never really high-quality literature, but its transition to the small screen is not only delightful as a tween-friendly series, it also manages to capture exactly what made the original Babysitter's Club books so successful - its leads and the sense of familiarity in the stories. Modernizing these 90s classics gives space to updating the tropes that each character represents, whether in portraying a character with a chronic illness in a wholly human way, integrating history into characters' backstories with a heavy dose of modern morality, or simply giving voice to underrepresented characters or character types. And it's obviously not alone. From Lord of the Rings to The Princess Bride to Clueless, I think that there are many cases of films exceeding the source material across many different metrics, ultimately carving out their own space as stories (not merely as adaptations) and also remaining true to the spirit of the original in at least some form.

Stories have value, and I am increasingly convinced that adaptations have value of their own and in their own right. An adaptation that merely follows the letter of the text can often come off as stilted and bland, as can those that fail to understand textual innovations (like with Wolf Hall). Sometimes this is only felt by those who have engaged with the original, but sometimes it bleeds into a general sense of a story that has nothing new to say. But it can also be about how you relate to a work, wrapped in how you value that medium. I, for instance, like sparseness in film much more than I do in books. This is how I ended up loving the film adaptation of Brooklyn (a book I otherwise did not particularly enjoy), finding myself enamored with its pacing and visual storytelling. (This is also part of why I loved the 2019 adaptation of Little Women, despite any other flaws it might have. I seriously loved the use of coloring as a frame device.) Meanwhile, I'm probably not going to be very interested in a horror-themed adaptation of a beloved story (sorry Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!). Like with all art, that doesn't mean that there isn't value in the work of art itself, nor does it mean that different people won't find value in different aspects. After all, "Wolf Hall" earned high praise as a miniseries, despite my own disappointment so far; I suppose I will always be contrary.

In short, I remain a fan of adaptations as a concept, and frequently also in execution. Adaptations don't need to supplant an original story, rather to add to it. And as a fan of stories and over-analyzing stories, it's hard not to love the extra depth the mere act of adaptation introduces.

"Classics versus YA" is a false debate

Over the past two days, numerous Twitter accounts, authors, academics, and educators have joined a fairly wide-reaching debate as to the merits of the so-called literary canon (which I will simplify as "classics"). To call this a "debate" is already a bit of a stretch - having read many different perspectives from all sorts of sides, it often feels as though there are two completely different conversations happening, with extraordinary animosity from different directions (even when some of the anger is fairly understandable). Troubling, however, is the prevalence of an especially vicious dismissiveness of young adult (YA) authors, particularly YA authors of color. Twitter being Twitter, it's increasingly difficult to track all of the different conversations happening in parallel, but one thing is sufficiently clear: There are pervasive, frankly snobbish views entrenched in the literary world, and there are pervasive problems with how these translate into pedagogy and there are pervasive problems with how people then turn these into opportunities to yell. I won't get into the individual arguments because a) I don't think I'm necessarily the best person to talk about it (being pretty far removed...), and b) I've mostly found myself thinking about that core misunderstanding and false debate over classics versus YA.

I started blogging in December of 2008, at the shy age of 17. I had been writing reviews for a few years by that point, and blogging was meant to be an opportunity to stretch my (likely falsely perceived) intellectual wings a little. I was just settling into a new reading era for myself, after having blitzed through a classics period at ages 13-15, followed by a YA renaissance at 15-16. Though I didn't know it at the time, at 17 I would begin to shift my focus to international literature on a far greater scale, and this would eventually lead me to the women in translation project. Classics were my first foray into reading like a "grown-up", and there was a time when I thought this meant that I needed to cut back my reading of YA. Once I started blogging, I also discovered that a lot of bloggers I interpreted as more "mature" (that is - not YA- or kidlit-specific) held deeply dismissive views of young adult literature as a concept, and that often spilled over into a dismissal of young adult readers. Suffice to say, I felt out of place from all directions, as a young reader who wanted to also have space to grow into the world of "adult" literature, but also still loved being able to read and engage with stories that seemed to be much more at "eye-level" for me. 

Why am I writing this? Because as this latest round of "classics versus YA" sprung up again, I felt as though I was rewatching something I've seen dozens of times over the past few years. There's not much new in the conversation (except, perhaps, the miscommunication, rage, and hurt that come with a social media platform like Twitter), which really all loops back to the fact that it's a problematic argument in the first place. Just as I didn't need to have to choose between my own reading, neither do young readers today.

To begin with: The "debate" was sparked by a few different threads that criticized different aspects of teaching classics in schools. This is a wholly legitimate concern. One YA author decided to thread classics she felt were bad or harmful in a K-12 school environment (often using somewhat dramatized modern tongue-in-cheek stylings), leading to a swift backlash. Except... it's legitimate to come and say "I don't think we should be forcing kids to read books that are boring or racist or sexist". And that does cover a lot of the classics taught in schools, at least in the US. Classics are often cultural touchstones, but their influence is also pretty context-dependent; books gain classics status by our elevation of them. So why elevate certain books simply because that's what's always been done?

Then there's the question of educational value. Is there educational value in controversial classics? In this, I find myself agreeing with all sides: Yes, but not on a universal scale, and not necessarily in every classroom. Literature serves different purposes at different ages and for different kids. There is certainly the question of teaching critical thinking, textual analysis, and literary interpretation, but those don't actually require "difficult" or controversial books. When most kids aren't reading in the first place, there is value in promoting works that are written with modern children in mind, and these works still leave space for exploring larger questions. Not to mention that modern YA is also infinitely more relevant to important cultural shifts happening now, whether in terms of conversations about race, whether in representing a wider range of sexual and gender identities, or whether just in terms of navigating a world that is constantly changing. To dismiss these works wholesale is to miss out on the extraordinary work being done within the field.

But I also find myself agreeing that there is still value in some of the traditional "classic"/canon-y titles, just not necessarily for the reasons that some have argued. I personally love many different older titles, some of which are firmly in the canon and others which are not necessarily, some of which are clearly problematic products of their times and others which transition reasonably well to a modern setting. I think young readers could learn a lot from Sei Shōnagon, for example, as an opportunity to contrast early diary writing with modern texting lingo, or Frederick Douglass, another "classic" author with immense value in the classroom that reaches beyond a single subject. Middlemarch, in my mind, is also a book that absolutely deserves a place in a classroom. And I even contemplate some of the more controversial, established titles: John Steinbeck absolutely has his issues and as an adult I'm able to parse through a lot more than I was as a child, but I still learned a lot from Of Mice and Men that's stayed with me for years. It's just that I don't think that these titles necessarily deserve space in place of titles that younger readers can relate with. We need to be able to separate two different goals of encouraging reading/a love of books versus challenging readers. Personally, I struggle with the idea that children - even teenagers - must be challenged with "difficult" books. I think that some will want it and seek that out, but it's much more important that kids learn critical thinking in a way that will make sense to them. 

For me, the problem with the whole debate hinges in part on this misunderstanding. On the one hand, you have educators focusing on getting kids to love reading. On the other hand, you have authors focusing on the challenging aspects of literature. But these aren't actually contradictory, nor must they be mutually exclusive. To take an example of a book that came out when I was a kid and is already reaching classics status, Monster by Walter Dean Myers is a modern(ish) YA classic and one of the more innovative, powerful, and memorable books I've ever read. It's a book that forces the reader to contemplate numerous coexisting realities and an unreliable narrator, challenges expectations, and addresses pretty heavy topics, all through a brilliant script format that turns the story into a meta-commentary on narratives. And there are dozens (if not hundreds) of other kidlit/YA books that achieve those two goals as well, many of which actually are recent and geared toward the kids of today. Why not elevate these books?

The canon is not actually real or objective. It's eternally in flux, eternally changing, and endlessly relevant and irrelevant simultaneously. There is nothing set in stone that says one book deserves to belong to the canon while another is forgotten to history, there's just our choice to elevate one book over another. And it's okay to recognize that these things change. Writing changes and our culture changes and our perception of the canon changes with it. Clinging to the books of your past isn't actually about ensuring that modern kids have access to the classics - they do and they will. Nobody told me to read Tolstoy or Zola or the Brontës at 14, I chose to because I was already a passionate, devoted reader and I wanted to explore a new-to-me world. I was able to read through these outdated texts and try to see them in their own, shifted light. I'd like to believe that I learned from those beloved-by-me classics, just like I did from those classics I loathed (hello, Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby!). I read these all for "pleasure", not in any classroom setting. There was a time when I was certain that I had lost something important for it, that I had fundamentally misunderstood the texts and that must be why I hated so many of them. But today I realize that... no. I simply didn't like them, and that's okay. And I simply loved others, and that's okay too. And there are some books that today I realize had additional layers and meta-contexts that I didn't understand as a child (Gone With the Wind is perhaps the starkest example...), and I'm okay with that as well.

I know that this argument will come back in a few years, or a few months. It inevitably always does. Its return is always heralded by the same dividing lines, where there are those speaking for modern texts (usually also reflecting the growing diversity of YA literature, which is very much not disconnected from the backlash the field faces, nor the dismissive attitudes and violent rage that these authors inspire.......) and there are those defending "the classics". I myself used to defend older texts as uniquely elevated, but no more; I just don't see any intrinsic value in classics as classics, nor in defending the canon as a fixed construct. Readers - and young readers in particular - deserve better than to be eternally fed this false dichotomy of enjoyable versus valuable, of "lower" works versus elevated classics. It simply isn't true and it does us all a disservice.

WITMonth Day 31 | The end is, as always, just the beginning

For all my love for August 1st, I have to admit that some years I find myself looking forward to August 31st just a bit more. The beginning of WITMonth symbolizes so much hope for how the month will unfold, but the end demonstrates just how far we've come. The end of August is a full, beautiful display of all of the books and reviews and short stories and poems and photos and recommendations and engagement that WITMonth has borne. 

This year especially - a year that has been remarkably difficult in many ways - I find myself full of love as I contemplate the different ways in which readers took part in WITMonth. There are always new readers discovering the project, with responses ranging from righteous anger over the imbalances and biases to excitement over new books to committed fervor in continuing to read works by women writers in translation. There are countless book recommendations shared, literally too many to count. Readers span six continents (to the best of my knowledge, nobody on Antarctica has yet participated in WITMonth, but maybe someday!) and dozens of different native languages, reading works from backgrounds just as varied. Some works are as-of-yet unpublished (whether in translation to English or in another language!), while others are established, canonic classics. There are books and works and poems that cross genres and reader designations. 

WITMonth is, ultimately, one of the easiest reading or "challenge" months, since there's only one real requirement: Engage with the topic of women writers in translation. No matter your reading tastes, you are likely to find at least one book by a woman writer from around the world that will suit you (though finding two or more may be a bit trickier for some genres...).  Women in Translation Month - for all the misnomers - is meant to be there for everyone. And it shows, with passionate and diverse and fascinating engagement across the internet. Importantly, not all of this engagement is necessarily full of praise - readers also include their critiques of certain works or certain WIT-adjacent topics (though the latter is a genre that I think is mostly comprised of my own writing...). There are meaningful conversations about what WITMonth means to different readers, to translators, to publishers. There are conversations about what WITMonth should mean (beyond my own definitions), and these are all good and healthy things. There is just so much and it is wonderful.

So another year has passed, and as always I find myself wanting to remind readers that this is only the beginning. WITMonth may end with August, but the women in translation movement lives year-round. I always have specific goals that roll over from August to the rest of the year (even if it occasionally takes another full year before I manage to publish them...) and I don't think that the efforts we make should be limited to one month. On the contrary! Every reader who has laughed that their TBR has grown too much as a result of WITMonth? Excellent! You now have reading material for the whole year. Enjoy it! 

There is more work, as well. As I posted yesterday, there is so much room to expand the women in translation movement worldwide, where it was always meant to be. For this, we non-English speakers will need to ask ourselves how things look within our own native languages and try to figure out how to address unique imbalances we may find. We must continue fighting against cultural/linguistic biases in translation, as well as falling into limited patterns in the stories we choose to center. The women in translation movement must also become a normalized conversation within the larger feminist movement, rather than something on its outskirts. There remain publishers and gatekeepers who do not see value in setting aside space for women writers in translation, but we readers can do so much ourselves. We can stand up and make clear just how important women's voices are, whether as reflections of our own experiences, windows into new ones, or doorways that bring the two together. We can make a point to center writers - famous and untranslated - who represent different parts of the world. We can seek to rework the canon to reflect the broader world and find the joy in literature that exists worldwide. We can do all of this while addressing structural accessibility problems, as well as subsequent genre imbalances.

WITMonth, as I mentioned a couple weeks ago, is an opportunity, not an obligation - an opportunity to discover new books, new writers, and new perspectives. It's also our opportunity to do a lot of this work, but it's not an exclusive setup. We can (and must!) continue this effort throughout the year, and I am certain there are so many more topics and issues that we have yet to fully explore. August ends as it always does, but the movement lives on.

WITMonth Day 16 | Languages and power | Thoughts

One of the frequent critiques WITMonth faces is in its centering of Anglo-American/English-language cultural expectations. Why, some international readers argue, do I center Anglo culture in demanding that translations not include books originally written in English? I've addressed these points in the past (and will address them more fully in the near future), but today I want to focus on something that spins off from this question: How do we address the power imbalances between different languages? How do we address the power imbalances in translation that follow the status of different languages? And what does it ultimately mean for readers?

Languages reflect culture in more ways than one. As a native bilingual myself who grew up in a multilingual household (among my grandparents and parents, there are six native languages alone; including the different languages learned by family members or spoken by friends or my surroundings, the number crosses 10), I have long been aware of the ways that different languages reflect the cultures of those speaking those languages, not to mention the ways in which multilingualism itself shapes subcultures. I have subsequently had the great pleasure of being exposed to many different languages throughout my lifetime, though I unfortunately have not had the opportunity to really learn most. 

When we talk about literature in translation - or literature more broadly - not all languages are created equal, nor is their origin. French - a language with ~80 million native speakers - is the language with the most translations into English, yet these are overwhelmingly from France itself (despite ~274 million fluent French speakers estimated worldwide). Meanwhile, Hindi - a language with ~322 million native speakers - barely rates in terms of translations into English that are publicized in the English-only speaking world (i.e. the US, UK, etc.). These sorts of power imbalances are evident in translation to other languages as well, where English-language literature is often a dominating force.

What often ends up happening is that languages with less power - typically those spoken by fewer people, or with a "lesser" cultural impact (in English, at least) - don't get translated. Or, rather, they often don't get written in the first place. In countless regions across the world, colonial languages (and not just European, though obviously these dominate in some regions more than others) are favored over native/local languages because they are likely to garner greater readership and indeed exposure. So you're likely to have read several Nigerian writers in English, but have probably never read a work translated from Yoruba (~40 million native speakers). In this same way, most English-language readers have read works by Indian writers, yet no works translated from Indian languages. As always, the problem is only exacerbated for women writers, who face even greater hurdles in getting published, publicized, and translated than men. 

And it's not just English, of course. French, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, and Portuguese have lessened the power of countless local languages in different places around the world in some degree or other, not necessarily in the same ways. The process also predates the modern era, with languages frequently dying out over time (though nothing is quite on the scale of our current linguistic mass extinction). When we (I) talk about reading more works by African women writers in translation, that mostly means reading works written in French. For the Caribbean or Latin America, it often means works written in French, Spanish, or Portuguese (occasionally also Dutch). Sometimes, this is the result of generations of colonial rule (Latin America); sometimes, it's the effect of relatively modern, swift homogenization efforts (China). 

Writers are, of course, at perfect liberty to choose the language in which they want to write. I will not look down on any author who chooses to write in a more popular language because it means their work is more likely to be read widely. I will, however, note that gendered power imbalances often mean that women are the ones who choose to write in languages other than their own. To take the example of Yoruba that I mentioned earlier, literally every single author listed on Wikipedia as "Yoruba-language writers" is a man. It's a pattern I've found across many different languages and cultures. It doesn't mean that there aren't women writing in different native languages (again: see this year's 50 Day Countdown), but fewer than I would expect or hope for.

As readers - particularly as readers who obviously do not have access to every single language on Earth - we have limited control over the books that we can read, by virtue of availability. As I've said before many times in reference to the lack of women writers in translation (in English and elsewhere): Readers cannot be expected to love books that they haven't read, and they cannot be expected to read books that they cannot access. As a reader who does have the option of reading in English, for example, I'm exposed to a lot more literature than I would be if I only read books translated into Hebrew. English - even as a secondary language, even as an overly dominant colonial language - has immense power. 

But if we're going to talk about the lack of women in translation, we have to understand the sources of the problem, and this is absolutely one of them. We also have to be able to address the ways in which different languages are treated in translation, acknowledging the at-times racist power structures that elevate certain languages far above others (e.g. Norwegian is more translated into English than Marathi) and how these affect women writers in particular. 

We have to be able to talk about what it means to read works that were written in an author's second language, whether it's English or not, to address the way this often shapes an author's popularity or cultural impact. And this is especially important because the language that we write in shapes the work itself. A story that is written from within a certain culture or community and is assumed to be for that culture or community is not going to be the same as a story that is written for an external audience. Moreover, writing changes across different languages and comfort levels per language. I'm a native bilingual and my writing does not sound the same in English and Hebrew, by virtue of the books I've read and the respective literary styles that guide each language. And I'm not even a writer!

Ultimately, we need to remember this one point: Languages have power and unfortunately that power has enormous influence on the books that we read. Whether viewing this matter through an English-language lens (this is a blog in English, after all...) or through the lens of any other native language, we need to be able to pause and ask ourselves why we're exposed to certain books and not others, why we're familiar with certain languages and not others, and why we ultimately have a literary landscape that favors some types of writers over others. And we need to do this both in the context of recognizing where women in translation reside as a group, as well as the imbalances among women writers in translation.

WITMonth Day 12 | Regional and cultural disparities in a complicated world

There's been an interesting recurring question that's come up since I published my personal WITMonth plans, in which I announced my intention to read and discuss books from specific regions of the world during August. In comments and elsewhere, some readers have asked me why I prepared banners for certain author groups and not others. Where were Latin American women? Where were non-South Asian writers? It's a legitimate question and I think it's time to address it.

Last week, I posted the full list of this year's 50 Day Countdown. Like last year's list, every choice this year was deliberate and pointed. Last year, I sought to have a list that was thoroughly comprised of women of color, without a single white European woman writer. While it's true that not all European writers are made "equal" in terms of industry attention and care, the status of most women writers from outside of Europe is significantly worse off. This year, I wanted to focus on women of African descent specifically (partly inspired by Margaret Busby's New Daughters of Africa, a book I'll be discussing more in depth in the future), but soon realized that it's not just African or African-descent women writers in translation who are often underserved. Indigenous women writers - particularly those writing in indigenous languages - are also a rare sight in translation, even when coming from the closest possible literary traditions (see: Canadian First Nations French-language writers). South and Southeast Asian writers are similarly starkly undertranslated as compared with East Asian writers. And Middle Eastern and Caribbean writers are also often left in the wayside.

And so this year's WITMonth countdown and plan were born. 

It's hard for me to give a clear name for my focus. "Underrepresented in English" is incomplete, after all - many of the writers in the 50 Day Countdown and those I'm reading this month are currently living and working out of Europe. A decent proportion are mixed race writers who specifically write about racial and cultural identity. As I've already mentioned this month, French is the most-translated-into-English language and is a dominant language among African writers (thanks, colonialism?), yet African women writers are extraordinarily rare in translation. 

Similarly, my focus on writers from the Americas is blatantly skewed. To put it bluntly: I'm not particularly interested in white Latin American women writers this year. While recognizing that within a US-specific context some Latin American writers share a certain status and while continuing to recognize that like all women in translation, all Latin American WIT are underrepresented on a big-picture scale, there's no denying that Latin America has its own vast diversity which is rarely reflected in translation. Frankly, the most obvious example of this is the fact that Argentina is the Latin American country with the most translations into English, and Argentina is overwhelmingly a country of white European immigrants. Even among the most popular Mexican writers, a not-small proportion are writers of wholly white European background. The Americas have so many voices from so many different backgrounds, yet like with so many other examples, we're not truly given access to most.

It's a recurring pattern. Take Indian women writers, for example. Setting aside the fact that most of the highly-publicized-in-English Indian writers write in English, I've long known that I've read works by far too few Indian women writers. Except I soon realized that I didn't even know of Indian women writers from the vast majority of different Indian languages. India is a massive and massively diverse country (subcontinent!), with literally a dozen different languages with over 30 million native speakers! The fact that the only Indian language I had read full-length works from was Bengali was something that I was deeply unhappy about; I'm glad that I've had the chance to correct this somewhat of late (having read a work translated from Tamil and a collection from Odia), but this is nowhere near where I want to be. There actually are many works translated into English and published across India, but they're just often unavailable to different international audiences. (This is true of a surprising amount of countries where English is a common bridge language, and if anyone in the industry wants to do something about it... please?) 

Meanwhile, like with the imbalances within Latin America, can we really say that this is comparable to the amount of books by women writers translated from Korean and Japanese? Not to diminish from these works - again, there are huge cultural barriers that already place these works at a far greater disadvantage relative to works by white European writers! - but the skew feels large enough that I personally decided to wait a few more weeks with some of the Japanese and Korean women writers currently on my reading list. (And there are plenty.) 

So what have I been reading? Black women writers, mostly, and I've been trying to boost up my reading list even further. Indian women writers as well, trying to get my hands on different writers from different languages and backgrounds. (Instagram has been amazing for this, there are a bunch of wonderful Bookstagrammers promoting incredible-looking books by Indian women writers!) I've tried to spread out into regions I'm really unfamiliar with, like Tahiti (Chantal T. Spitz's Island of Shattered Dreams, which I hope to review soon) and Micronesia at large (albeit not exactly a work filled with women in translation, but still very much within the spirit of: Indigenous Literatures from Micronesia). I'm hoping to read more works from women writers from across the Arab world (taking much inspiration from ArabLit, as usual). And yes, I'd like to make sure that my reading remains varied among these groups, whether in terms of promoting queer women writers from around the world or just voices from all sorts of different backgrounds (religious, socio-economic, cultural, physical, etc.).

My goal isn’t to define or judge anyone else's reading choices. For a lot of readers Latin American and East Asian writers aren’t dominant voices in any meaningful way. White European women writers in translation are still absolutely underrepresented relative to the broader literary landscape. Every time we recognize that and recognize the biases within this conversation, we're taking steps in the right direction! But there's still more. This is just my little bit.

WITMonth Day 10 | What the 100 Best WIT can teach us about shaping a future canon

Last year's big WITMonth project was the 100 Best WIT. Together, readers from around the world sent in their favorite books by women writers in translation and we built what I had hoped would be a new canon of sorts. The ultimate product is one I am both enormously proud of and somewhat disappointed by, as I've previously detailed. As wonderful a list as it is (and it really is wonderful!), the 100 Best WIT remains dominantly European in a way that emphasizes how limited the scope of literature by women writers in translation remains.

Yet despite this disappointment, I find myself wondering if there aren't lessons to be learned about forming a new canon even from this imperfect list. In a video that I posted a few days before the end of the submission period last year, I mentioned how very contemporary the list was; I mentioned this again when revealing the final list itself as well. A contemporary list may strike most readers as the opposite of canon - these works have yet to prove themselves! - though in my view this is precisely what makes the 100 Best WIT such a fascinating contra to standard lists. The canon is no less a selection of popular titles than any modern list, the only exception being that someone has decreed that these particular books have value, and that status is then perpetuated over time.

There is no question in my mind that the canon needs a full overhaul and reshaping. It's not enough to say that the canon includes outdated, racist, sexist, or even just bad books, we have to acknowledge the mistakes that go into crafting canons. It's not for nothing that the 100 Best WIT was partly born in response to Boyd Tonkin's* starkly imbalanced The 100 Best Novels in Translation. Tonkin made many choices - intentional or not - that took an existing problem in terms of women's representation in translation (to English) and exacerbated it, whether in beginning his canon in the 17th century (rather than the 11th, which marks the actual dawn of the novel era, as set by Murasaki Shikibu herself) or in de-emphasizing works written in the 20th century. I wrote about this in that original post, arguing that exclusion is a choice, particularly when determining a new canon.

A future canon would have to take a lot of different questions into account. Eternal fame, we're now reminded, is hardly the marker of true literary quality and often fails to take into account external factors regarding an author's personal behavior or at-times abhorrent views, which themselves necessitate reevaluation of the texts. Popularity is not fixed and often depends on so many other cultural and social factors. We should ask ourselves why a canon may look thin or limited in some ways - are we overemphasizing certain voices/perspectives at the expense of others? We would need to interrogate our own literary exposure and education - how do we rank a book that is clearly part of the canon in one country but an under-the-radar sales bust in another? 

The 100 Best WIT doesn't answer these questions as much as remind us of them. Even with its European bias, our list still fails to include literary giants like Selma Lagerlöf, George Sand, Christine de Pizan, Madame de La Fayette, Isabelle de Charrière, or Anna Akhmatova. Not to mention Sei Shōnagon or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and if we start to expand our 20th century greats: Rosario Castellanos, Gabriela Mistral, Mahasweta Devi, Qurratulain Hyder, Maryse Condé, Can Xue... This is not to suggest that women writers in translation from the 21st century are not to be valued (quite the contrary!), but it's still an important reminder of how little space we're leaving these writers in our larger literary landscape. We give temporary - contemporary - space to new writers, without filling in the gaps of the past. And those writers absolutely exist and many of them are worthy of so much more attention and respect. The writers I just listed are only among those I've personally read (or am currently reading, in the case of Hyder). There are dozens, hundreds, likely thousands more women writers from around the world who simply need that space reallocated. Isn't that what the canon is supposed to do?

It's not just lessons from the mistakes, there are also lessons from the best parts of the 100 Best WIT. Despite its geographic limitations, the 100 Best WIT does make space for a lot of women writers from different backgrounds than those usually found in "Best of" lists. In addition to more than a tenth of the list coming from Japanese women writers alone, there are also several queer classics/modern classics, books from a wide range of genres, and multiple books that tackle huge political issues (whether as nonfiction or through fictional means). It can't be described as a homogeneous list by any stretch of the imagination, whether stylistically, in terms of genre, or writer background (even with the Eurocentrism - Europe is not homogeneous either!).

These are things we need to remember for the future. These are things we need to remember for any future canon we may build, WIT-specific or not. We may argue that the canon is dead, but that doesn't mean much for the concept of the canon or canonization as a literary process - those will exist no matter how many old, outdated, sexist, and racist lists we throw away. So one year after the 100 Best WIT, let's take a moment to appreciate the revolutionary nature of creating a new canon (including the flaws and failures in the system that highlight existing biases!) and what it means for the future.

And yes, let's remember some of these books for that future canon as well, shall we?

* It should be noted that Tonkin himself is someone who does support the women in translation movement through serving as a judge for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, even if I do not personally accept his arguments as to why 14/100 WIT is reasonable representation

WITMonth Day 8 | Accessibility and women in translation

A topic I've found myself thinking about a lot over the past year is accessibility. Accessibility can mean a lot of different things, from a disability context to an international one to simply a financial question. These all intersect pretty seriously with the question of women in translation becoming "mainstream" (as I often describe it) and honestly needed to have been properly addressed until now.

It's no secret that a large chunk of books by women writers that are translated into English are published by small independent presses. These presses - wonderful, gorgeous, labor-of-love indie presses - are often non-profits, cash-strapped, or of limited operations on the whole; there are all sorts of stories about indie presses getting caught off guard by the success of a certain book (WITty or otherwise) and having to rush reprints, or else somewhat sadder stories of indie presses "losing" an author they built up to fame and award-recognition getting snatched for a lot more money at a larger press. Another major force in publishing literature in translation (albeit far, far fewer women writers) is academic publishing, which is similarly somewhat more limited in the reach of their books.

Two things are important to remember about these presses: The first is that their books are, on average, slightly more expensive than those of larger publishing houses. Even the slimmest novellas can cost almost as much as a mainstream full-length novel from the big names. The second is that their books do not typically have the same reach as those by mainstream publications.

Together, these two issues combine to mean something fairly disappointing about indie/academic presses - their books are rarely available to the wide public and are almost always unavailable to readers with disabilities or impairments who mostly read audio- or eBooks. Though eBooks have become a lot more prevalent among indie presses in the past few years, the lack of audiobooks means that a lot of readers who would otherwise be happy to read works by women writers from around the world simply don't have the option. While thankfully some of the biggest name authors have been released in audiobook format, a shocking amount have not. And the usual biases we find in translated literature overall are reflected in audiobook recordings as well. Not everyone can be Elena Ferrante... Literally as I was writing this post, my sister forwarded to me two separate audiobook requests by different friends. When I went to look for some of my favorite women in translation from the past few years, I found that they were nowhere to be found. Too many readers are losing out.

The issue extends further. Not having audiobooks or eBooks also affects readers who primarily use digital libraries in order to read. I know many young people in particular who rely on digital libraries such as Overdrive/Libby for their reading, and many more who have leaned on those services even more since coronavirus closed their local libraries. Many international readers also utilize these digital libraries, coordinating access with local readers who don't mind sharing their details. (Yes, this is a thing.)

And it's not just a matter of audio- or eBooks. Smaller print runs mean that indie and academic publications are virtually nonexistent in smaller libraries or even in many bookstores. Almost every time I mention the women in translation project to someone new in the English-language context - even to avid readers! - there's the moment when they realize that they've at most read one or two books by women writers from non-English languages, usually something like Diary of Anne Frank or Pippi Longstocking and that's it. The process of finding the right books is often a challenge, with readers frequently telling me that they struggle to read WIT because they can't access it. It's not at their library, it's not at their local big-name bookstore (at least in the US), and it's rarely if ever promoted or easily found on Amazon through browsing. (Bookshop.org so far actually does promote a decent amount of WIT on their front page, so that's exciting!) Those who still wish to purchase the books are then met with the uncomfortable roadblock that is the higher price tag (particularly when purchasing from independent bookstores as well) - what should the reader do now?

Finally, accessibility and availability is also a problem that crosses borders. I don't talk about this on the blog very often, but I've occasionally tweeted about how very difficult it is for me to acquire books. I don't live in an English-speaking country. I rely on bookstores/websites with international shipping in order to read books published in English. If a book isn't available through one of 2-3 major sites that are available to me, the book simply isn't available to me. And for the record - for all sorts of reasons, I don't get many review copies (just the rare book, and usually shipped to a US address that I collect months after the fact). Like many other readers from around the world, I am at the mercy of international rights and availability, which are often... not helpful.

Each one of these issues can feel disconnected from women in translation specifically because they just as easily apply to men writers in translation, but there is an important intersection here: If we want people to read more of a thing, they need to be able to access it. That might mean that the books need to be reasonably priced, that might mean that the books need to be conveniently sold, that might mean that the books need to be in the appropriate formats, etc etc. The major problem that the women in translation movement faces (in English) is a lack of global awareness and acknowledgement. But how can readers address a problem that they don't see? How can they read books that aren't available to them? It's the exact same problem that lies at the core of the translation imbalance itself - readers rely on books to be available to them in order to read them!

I don't know what can be done, honestly. These questions all seem to me like something that needs to be handled within the industry. But the questions do feel like they need to be addressed, and soon - readers deserve better.

WITMonth Day 4 | From translation to feminist spaces

When I first started hosting WITMonth back in 2014 - before the @read_WIT Twitter account, before the @readWIT Instagram account, before publisher deals and library involvement and bookstore displays - I had a fairly clear image in mind of my target audience. WITMonth was meant to convince readers of literature in translation that women in translation were worthy of their time. In those days, it seemed like the obvious and necessary approach, since the debates (often well-meaning!) I was having and the trolling I faced were all within the "translated literature community", so to speak. My impression was that I needed to convince folks who already read translations that they needed to broaden their horizons to include more women writers in the mix. My entire approach that first year was rooted in targeting those readers, and not really anybody else.

I've written before about the way that my attention has shifted pretty seriously over the past few years. I no longer find myself particularly nervous about general readers of literature in translation accepting women writers in translation; even as the translation rates only barely creep up and even as many leading publishers continue to ignore the matter and even as most readers default to men writers in translation, "women in translation" as a topic and WITMonth as a specific event have become fairly deeply rooted within the community. I no longer feel I have to be the single driving force for WITMonth to take place, which is pretty awesome.

The problem, as I've previously laid out many times, is my increasing awareness of how literary feminism itself seems determined to shut out women writers in translation. My 2014-justifications for WITMonth were borne of feminist rants and manifestos, but these seem superfluous in the face of the "actual" feminist movement. I shouldn't have to explain why reading internationally is an inherent part of intesectionality, right? I shouldn't have to explain the value in reading words that women write in their native languages (or sometimes different, non-English colonialist languages), to a homegrown audience, right? I shouldn't have to explain the importance in learning about the world through the eyes of other women, right? Right?

If it sounds like I'm repeating myself, it's because I am! I wrote this all last year, and there too I noted how I've written this all before. Repeating myself is frustrating, but it's also, apparently, necessary, because this keeps getting ignored. It's not even that feminist spaces reject women in translation in some clear and concentrated effort, no, it's much worse than that. Women in translation simply aren't on the radar for the vast majority of English-language feminists. You may see a book or two creep into the conversation, sometimes a book go mainstream like My Brilliant Friend or The Vegetarian or Convenience Store Woman, but the conversation itself remains firmly rooted in highly specific cultural contexts. Note too how women who shift from writing in their native languages to writing in English or being marketed as writing in English suddenly get a massive boost in profile and attention (Valeria Luiselli for the former, Elif Shafak for the latter). Framing the conversation around English and around an English-speaking audience is one part of the story, absolutely, but it is only one part.

Feminist spaces have spent years acknowledging their struggles in integrating different perspectives. There's a reason these have spent the past few months talking about antiracism and focusing on women of color. There's a reason there's a constant conversation about space for queer, disabled, or otherwise marginalized voices in feminist spaces. These are all important. Yet they largely fail to take into account the complexities of different cultures or contexts. It's important to remember that an immigrant voice writing a "foreign" story for an unfamiliar audience will be wildly different than a book written within a certain culture's borders. The story that someone tells as a diaspora writer isn't the same as the story someone shares within their culture and community. It's not that the former is bad - on the contrary, it's pivotal that we center these experiences as well! - but it shouldn't come at the expense of the latter. Giving space to Black, Latinx, South Asian, Middle Eastern, or Indigenous writers within English shouldn't replace listening to those same voices writing in their own contexts.

This is where I feel that feminist spaces really need to step up, and this is the point I've been making for years now. To take the most pressing recent example, the US and UK book-sale lists the past few weeks have seen a notable jump in sales of books by Black writers. These are often books that tackle race and racism explicitly in the US/UK cultural context, since it is ostensibly this culture that is being challenged, whether in the form of slavery's legacy or through modern oppressive tactics. But it's worth remembering that these problems exist well outside of English as well. French writers - many belonging to the African diaspora - have been writing about police violence, social inequality, and structural racism for years, as have others throughout Europe. Caribbean writers - whether French-language, Spanish, or Creole - have been writing about the legacies of slavery and colonialism for generations. Indigenous Latin American writers have been tackling stories about racist minority oppression since the 19th century (at least), and many modern writers even make a point of writing in Indigenous languages. Brazilian writers have been having parallel social (and indeed feminist!) conversations about every one of these issues for decades, yet these works are overwhelmingly unavailable to outside audiences (even as English-language books about racial bias and oppression are readily translated into Brazilian Portuguese). And frankly? The only reason I know any of this is because I've made it a point to learn and seek out the authors of these works (which are overwhelmingly unavailable in translation, to English or other languages).

This is just one example. Almost any important topic you can think about exists and is discussed in literature across the world, and deserves that space in translation (and again, not just into English!) as well. Feminist spaces have to open their doors to international writing; you can't claim intersectionality without space for existing international voices. Women in translation must be a part of this mainstream effort.

I don't expect this particular post to move any needles, not more than the previous. I can only hope that as WITMonth grows from year to year, more and more readers who have long embraced English-dominant feminist reading lists will also recognize just how much those lists would benefit from international voices. We all benefit from the normalization of women in translation. We must do more.

The rewards of men (on the backs of women)?

The fallout from the most recent batch of Pulitzer Prize winners has been slow and painful to watch. No, I'm not talking about politics, rather the award given to editor, writer, and translator Benjamin Moser, for his biography of Susan Sontag.

As many of you probably already know, I don't belong to the world of publishing or translating or literature at all. This blog (and associated social media accounts) are all I have when it comes to "associating" with the literary world. I've never met Benjamin Moser and until I started writing this post, I had no idea what he looked like or his age (I assumed, incorrectly, that he was much older and more established than he is, which reveals quite a bit more about my assumptions than anything about Moser himself) or really much about him. My closest interaction with him, you might say, is that I read (and deeply did not enjoy) his translation of Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star. I have also spent the past several years working my way through Lispector's Complete Stories (tr. Katrina Dodson), a book that Moser edited and for which he wrote the introduction.

Allow me to linger on this latter work for a moment, both because I like it so much more than The Hour of the Star and because it leads to the point of this post. One of the first things I noticed when I perused Complete Stories was that quote by Gregory Rabassa in the author description: "that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf". I remember the quote viscerally, because it thoroughly disturbed me. What sort of quote is that? And why was it included alongside other praise of Lispector as the greatest Brazilian writer of all times or a splendid writer or whatever? Setting aside the sexism of Rabassa's individual statement (though it is hard not to pause and reflect on how the statement is offensive from multiple perspectives), there is an important question to be asked in terms of perpetuating this sexism. Did this otherwise slick New Directions hardcover really need that quote? The answer is a clear no. There was absolutely no need to include a sexist quote in this edition. Shouldn't a series editor catch that sort of thing...? Later, it even began to bother me that the cover image simply focuses on Lispector's face. On the front, we have piercing eyes, on the spine, her mouth, on the back cover her hand resting under her neck. It's all extraordinarily striking, but I can hardly imagine Julio Cortázar, for example, having a cover like that. Sexist? Questionable. Unsettling? Definitely.

The truth is, I thought little of the editorial decisions for Complete Stories or the Lispector literary universe (LLU, naturally) until reading Magdalena Edwards' essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books last year. The essay spent quite a bit of time making the rounds in the translated literature community, with many translators taking Edwards' side and others raising (both privately and publicly) their own issues with Moser. In the essay, Edwards lays out her troubled experience translating Lispector's The Chandelier under Moser's editorial pen. Beyond what seems to be numerous cases of miscommunication between editor and translator, Edwards was eventually downgraded to co-translator (with her name appearing after Moser's) and left bemused by Moser's involvement in the project overall. As she writes: "The truth is that Moser tried to get me fired, arguing that my completed manuscript was not up to snuff, that my level of Portuguese was insufficient, and that he would have to rewrite every line of my translation. What happened?" The remainder of the essay tries to argue that there was a lot more than simply a quality argument between Moser and Edwards (and it is worth noting that Edwards doesn't mention anything about how the final translation looked compared to her original work), rather that Moser has a persistent - indeed, pervasive - aloof and possessive attitude towards women writers, scholars, and translators.

I cannot - and will not - make any claims to knowing the truth in Edwards and Moser's interactions, though it does leave me with many questions. But Edwards raises several points in her essay that made me revisit my initial discomfort in Complete Stories. More than the inclusion of Rabassa's sexist quote, I found myself flipping through the introduction of Complete Stories yet again and marveling at quiet, almost invisible sexist threads. For instance, Moser writes: "Traditionally "female" subjects - marriage and motherhood, kids and clothes - had, of course, been treated before. They are all here. But alongside them the little dramas of women's lives gain expression, sometimes for the first time[...]" Moser then goes on to list some of these "little dramas", including the shock value of reading stories about older women (and particularly, older women's sexuality).

While I don't disagree with the latter point, I struggle to swallow the condescension in the first. Moser is writing about women's lives as a uniform, minor experience, with any exceptions counting as "women's lives gain[ing] expression". Even use of the term "little dramas" sets my teeth on edge. Motherhood and marriage are little dramas? Only certain women can rescue these subjects? It's a literary trope that I simply loathe, the idea that women's writing only gains value through certain works and styles. (This is also the second half of what bothers me about Rabassa's quote, for the record, because I don't think it's a coincidence that he compares Lispector to Woolf, another rare woman writer who has graciously been allowed to belong to the men's club as a non-traditional woman writer and therefore one worth reading. A topic for a separate post...)

This sort of reframing of Lispector's writing and repositioning of her work as a woman writer isn't just frustrating as a feminist reader and champion of women in translation. It's also reflective of a pattern. Part of it is the trope I just mentioned, but the other has to do with Moser himself. Edwards' essay is precisely about this pattern of behavior, ranging from accusations of conceptually leaning heavily on Lispector's Portuguese-language biographer Nádia Gotlib's book (leading, as a commenter on the LARB blog notes, to her work effectively being "redundant" in translation due to Moser's heavy and barely-credited reliance on her work, and thus unmarketable) to his public negative review of Kate Brigg's book This Little Art which includes oddly gendered barbs against Briggs to his recently published biography of Susan Sontag.

(Finally, 1000 words in, she gets to the point!)

I haven't read Moser's work on Sontag. To be perfectly honest, I've never even read Sontag herself; she has always struck me as another of those writers (like Lispector, like Woolf) who are othered in the way they are spoken of in literary circles, particularly by the men who adore them. It is undoubtedly unfair of me to doubt these women writers on the basis of their fans (and indeed, see my new appreciation for Lispector on the basis of her short stories!), but there it is. And so I am forced - again - to rely on other people's perspectives of Moser's biography. Edwards' mentions Moser's approach to Sontag several times in her piece, noting that there is a pattern to Moser's rewriting of Sontag's history and interpretation of her work that seems to leap beyond the expected (referring to his additions to Lispector's biography). But hers is not the only essay to take a less-than-glowing approach to Moser's perspective.

Alongside many positive reviews, a few took issue with some of Moser's editorial interjections. In The Atlantic, Merve Emre writes "Moser packs in an extraordinary amount of detail. Yet the book feels strangely vacuous, or at least no more psychologically revealing than either Sontag’s diaries or the earlier unauthorized biography by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock. Aptly enough, the problem is one of interpretation." Johanna Hedva writes in The White Review: "None of the sentences in SONTAG sing, which makes for a wobbly read. From time to time we get some creative vocabulary – ‘it can only be called memoir in the baggiest sense of the word’ – and Moser is at his best when throwing shade. [...] I started to make notes in the margins whenever Moser’s authorial voice gracelessly intruded on the subject, but again, without an accounting of his own position. I noted, ‘BM being a touch nationalistic,’ ‘BM trying to explain racism lol.’ There are also sweeping generalisations that feel thin and unsatisfying." These two reviews left me wondering how much the praise of a certain biography is really about the biography itself, or the subject. Moser was selected to write Sontag's authorized biography... could another writer have done similar work? There is no doubt that Moser dedicated a lot of time and effort into writing this biography, nor do I doubt that it is meticulously and richly researched. By many accounts, it makes for a remarkably interesting reading experience. But I wonder...

This all became relevant the other day, when Moser's Sontag biography won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for a biographical work. Edwards' essay began to make the rounds again and many translators shared those critical reviews, often expressing their disgust and disappointment in Moser's win. Some - overwhelmingly women - went on to emphasize their own interactions with Moser. Susan Bernofsky tweeted angrily, noting Moser's history of "Bullying Women (for example, me)", with author and translator Idra Novey (another Lispector translator under Moser's editorial influence) tweeting "Can a misogynist who cultivates influential female friends and only undermines women who have no clout go on to win the Pulitzer in the 21st century? Yes, he can."

And so I find myself in a similar position as in October, when I wrote about the Nobel mess in awarding the literary world's biggest and highest-profile prize to Peter Handke, a man who has written in support of ethnic cleansers and troubling nationalism. At the time, I noted that: "there's a huge difference between separating art from artist in the sense of "okay let's publish a controversial artist for his art while acknowledging and interrogating his problems" and the question of "should we give the dude lots and lots of money, attention, fame, and a platform from which to promote hateful ideas"?" While Moser is accused of very different types of damage, the larger question remains: Does good writing by a damaging person deserve to be rewarded? What does it say about both our literary culture and our willingness to support the victims of this damage?

Moser's win is mostly troubling not for literary merit, but for personal. The literary community has spent years grappling with cases of lit-world "misconduct", to the point where many complain that authors (or critics or whatever) are "cancelled" for unjust reasons. Certainly I have felt that some cases of widespread dismissals and anger have stemmed from stiff reading of complex situations. And as with many other similar movements, sometimes it's hard to pinpoint where the line is drawn. Other times it's very easy. Moser's case strikes me as having been pushed into the murkier realm. Edwards' essay is being shared as a definitive piece, but what strikes me is less her single account as the combination of so many similar experiences. What strikes me is that several of Moser's collaborators on the Lispector project have come out against him (in some form or other). What strikes me - as ever - is the pattern.

Now let's look at the other pattern. By the other pattern, a man is rewarded time and again, in a situation where it is unclear why it must be him. Sontag's biographer would likely always have written an interesting book, because people are interested in Sontag herself. Moser was apparently approached to write the biography (that is, he was offered this reward on a platter), perhaps on the basis of the buzz surrounded his Lispector biography (which we now know is somewhat suspect). Moser is now rewarded again for the outcome of this work, but to suggest that it something unique to him when presumably any writer with access to Sontag's private writing cache could have done the same is... angering? Bewildering? Ultimately, it is reflective of another pattern that exists all too much in the literary world - insularity. That too is a topic for another post, but here we have such a clear example of someone being rewarded for something that... he was explicitly given. Of course his will be the definitive Sontag biography, if he's the only allowed access. It was never actually about his writing!

I'm left feeling frustrated and disappointed. I don't know Moser; it feels odd to write a whole post basically angry at the reward he has been given, but I am also witnessing many translators and writers I do know (at least through the internet...) practically bursting with rage. The publicly available information seems to paint its own portrait. It is entirely possible that Moser never intended to hijack women's words and works as his own, and this was all rooted in a sad misunderstanding, but there still remains the matter of Moser's existing words: the casual sexism in his Lispector introduction, the casual sexism in his review of This Little Art. As several people have already pointed out, rewarding a writer who has been known to bully those around him (particularly those in positions that rely on his power, and usually women) means giving him an even more established platform from which to work. Moser is now in an even greater position of power and influence; who else is likely to suffer from it?

I want to end on this one final observation. Edwards' LARB piece was published in August 2019. It was widely shared within the translated literature community in particular, yet I expect reasonably widely read elsewhere. It was thoroughly discussed. It also, seemingly, left no impact. It is now May 2020 and Moser's Wikipedia page shows no hint of controversy (nor, it seems, did anyone ever try to edit it accordingly), somewhat reminiscent of the erasure of Handke's literary controversy in the immediate aftermath of his Nobel win (I should note that a controversy section has returned to his Wikipedia page). Well-known women - who I will leave unnamed - have not been so lucky, instead having a controversy section emphasizing their faults (justified or not). Despite everything, Moser's public image remains untarnished, his reputation seemingly unblemished. Where do we go from here?