Women in Translation

Publication Date: 2018

Summary:

The winner of Sweden's most prestigious literary award makes her American debut with an epic, multigenerational poem about a Sámi family's quest to stay together across a century of migration, violence, and colonial schooling.

Publication Date: 1986

Summary:

This wild and entertaining novel expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Condé brings Tituba out of historical silence and creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age. She turns her into what she calls "a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like the legendary 'Nanny of the maroons, ' who, schooled in the sorcery and magical ritual of obeah, is arrested for healing members of the family that owns her.

Publication Date: 2003

Summary:

Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn't one to complain. He's got a job--transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe--and though he doesn't enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least he's not a serf or a half-human four-legged Degenerator harnessed to a troika. He has a house, too, with enough mice to cook up a tasty meal, and he's happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And he's managed--at least so far--to steer clear of the ever-vigilant Saniturions, who track down anyone who manifests the slightest sign of Freethinking, and the legendary screeching Slynx that waits in the wilderness beyond.

Publication Date: 2005

Summary:

Consisting of sixty short stories by forty women writers from across the Arab world, this collection opens numerous windows onto Arab culture and society and offers keen insights into what Arab women feel and think. The stories deal not only with feminist issues but also with topics of a social, cultural, and political nature. Different styles and modes of writing are represented, along with a diversity of techniques and creative approaches, and the authors present many points of view and various ways of solving problems and confronting situations in everyday life. Lively, outspoken, and provocative, these stories are essential reading for anyone interested in the Arab world.

Publication Date: 2012

Summary:

Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be moulded into respectable citizens, and to protect them from the dangers of the outside world. The young ladies are expected to learn, eat, and live together, presided over by the colonial white nuns. It is fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide and a quota permits only two Tutsi students for every twenty pupils. As Gloriosa, the school's Hutu queen bee, tries on her parents' preconceptions and prejudices, Veronica and Virginia, both Tutsis, are determined to find a place for themselves and their history. In the struggle for power and acceptance, the lycée is transformed into a microcosm of the country's mounting racial tensions and violence. During the interminable rainy season, everything slowly unfolds behind the school's closed doors: friendship, curiosity, fear, deceit, and persecution. Our Lady of the Nile is a landmark novel about a country divided and a society hurtling towards horror. In gorgeous and devastating prose, Mukasonga captures the dreams, ambitions and prejudices of young women growing up as their country falls apart.

Publication Date: 2015

Summary:

Thus Were Their Faces offers a comprehensive selection of the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo, undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's great masters of the story and the novella. Here are tales of doubles and impostors, angels and demons, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman, a suicidal romance, and much else that is incredible, mad, sublime, and delicious.

Publication Date: 2024

Summary:

Longings brings together stories by both well-established and emerging Vietnamese writers, those who come from various regions in Vietnam and represent the diversity and richness in Vietnamese short fiction. This anthology expands the audience for deserving authors and broadens perspective on the heterogeneous voices, narrative styles, and thematic interests of women who contribute to the growing corpus of contemporary Vietnamese short fiction.

Publication Date: 2018

Summary:

Here, gathered in one volume, are the stories that made Clarice a Brazilian legend. Originally a cloth edition of eighty-six stories, now we have eighty- nine in all, covering her whole amazing career, from her teenage years to her deathbed. In these pages, we meet teenagers becoming aware of their sexual and artistic powers, humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies, old people who don't know what to do with themselves-- and in their stories, Clarice takes us through their lives--and hers--and ours.

Publication Date: 2025

Summary:

Dawn is breaking over the Guilleries, a rugged mountain range in Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, brigands, deserters, race-car drivers, ghosts, and demons. In a remote farmhouse called Mas Clavell, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed. Family and caretakers drift in and out. Meanwhile, all the women who have lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party. As day turns to night, four hundred years' worth of stories unspool, and the house reverberates with raucous laughter, pungent feasts, and piercing cries of pleasure and pain. It all begins with Joana, Mas Clavell's matriarch, who once longed for a husband-a full man, perhaps even an heir with a patch of land and a roof over his head. She summoned the devil to fulfill her wish and struck a deal: a man in exchange for her soul. But when, on her wedding day, Joana discovered that her husband was missing a toe (eaten by wolves), she exploited a loophole in her agreement, heedless of what consequences might follow. I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is an audacious and entrancing novel in which the lines between the dead and the living, past and present, story and history are blurred. In it, Irene Solà draws on oral tradition as well as art, literature, and fairy tales to tell a completely new kind of story.--

Publication Date: 1936

Summary:

"As a work of literature, Market Street rivals many of the most compelling creations of this and other periods of Chinese history in terms of its evocative power, universal accessibility, and rhetorical skill. As autobiography, it reveals the life and the general world view of a representative Chinese intellectual, a woman living in a male-oriented and male-dominated society in the chaotic period just prior to World War II. It describes a young woman's attempt to come to grips with the realities of her own life, thereby legitimizing her past to understand her present. Market Street is, in sum, literary autobiography at its finest."--Description from p. xix

Publication Date: 1994

Summary:

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses--until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.

Publication Date: 2022

Summary:

In the years since her tragic death in a car accident at age thirty-two in 1967, Forough Farrokhzad has become a poet as iconic and influential as Lorca or Akhmatova, celebrated as a pioneer of modernist Iranian literature and as a leading figure of contemporary world literature. Farrokhzad, as Elizabeth Gray writes in the preface, "remains a beacon to artists, especially women and marginalized artists, who seek freedom in all its forms." This thoughtfully curated, deftly translated selection of Farrokhzad's poems includes work from her whole writing life, early to late. Readers will thoroughly treasure this expansive poet of the quotidian; of longing, loss, and desire; of classical reinvention; of lexical variation and sonic beauty; of terrifying wisdom, hope, and grief.

Publication Date: 2016

Summary:

Early in her literary career Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, born in St. Petersburg in 1872, adopted the pen name of Teffi, and it is as Teffi that she is remembered. In pre-Revolutionary Russia she was a literary star, known for her humorous satirical pieces; in the 1920s and '30s, she wrote some of her finest stories while in exile in Paris, recalling her unforgettable encounters with Rasputin and her hopeful visit at age thirteen to Tolstoy after reading War and peace. In this selection of her best autobiographical stories, she covers a wide range of subjects, from family life to revolution and emigration, writers and writing....

Publication Date: 2021

Summary:

This profound and disturbing novel by acclaimed Lebanese author Hoda Barakat tells the story of characters living on the periphery, battling with poverty, and fighting their own demons. Set in an unnamed, war-torn country, the novel consists of six letters-all intercepted by unintended recipients, all of whom are compelled to write their own letters of confession. An undocumented immigrant writes his former lover. A woman in a hotel writes a man from her past. An escaped torturer recounts his crimes to his mother. A former prostitute writes to her brother. A young queer man recounts to his estranged father his partner's battle with AIDS. Finally, the mailman leaves his own note. Incisive, troubling and deeply human, this is an urgent story of lives intimately woven together in a society that is tearing itself apart.

Publication Date: 1968

Summary:

While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. With a cat, a dog, and a cow as her sole companions, she learns how to survive and cope with her loneliness. Allegorical yet deeply personal and absorbing, The Wall is at once a critique of modern civilization, a nuanced and loving portrait of a relationship between a woman and her animals, a thrilling survival story, a Cold War-era dystopian adventure, and a truly singular feminist classic.

Publication Date: 2023

Publication Date: 1948

Summary:

Elsa Morante is one of the titans of twentieth-century literature—Natalia Ginzburg said she was the writer of her own generation that she most admired—and yet her work remains little known in the United States. Written during World War II, Morante’s celebrated first novel, Lies and Sorcery, is in the grand tradition of Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Proust, spanning the lives of three generations of wildly eccentric women. The story is set in Sicily and told by Elisa, orphaned young and raised by a “fallen woman.” For years Elisa has lived in an imaginary world of her own; now, however, her guardian has died, and the young woman feels that she must abandon her fantasy life to confront the truth of her family’s tortured and dramatic history. Elisa is a seductive, if less than reliable, spinner of stories, and the reader is drawn into a tale of secrets, intrigue, and treachery, which, as it proceeds, is increasingly revealed to be an exploration of a legacy of political and social injustice. Throughout, Morante’s elegant writing—and her drive to get at the heart of her characters’ complex relationships and all-too self-destructive behavior—holds us spellbound.

Publication Date: 2009

Summary:

Available for the first time in English, the ten short stories by modern Korean women collected here touch in one way or another on issues related to gender and kinship politics. All of the protagonists are women who face personal crises or defining moments in their lives as gender-marked beings in a Confucian, patriarchal Korean society. Their personal dreams and values have been compromised by gender expectations or their own illusions about female existence. They are compelled to ask themselves "Who am I?" "Where am I going?" "What are my choices?" Each story bears colorful and compelling testimony to the life of the heroine.

Publication Date: 1002

Summary:

Written by the court gentlewoman Sei Shonagon, ostensibly for her own amusement, The Pillow Book offers a fascinating exploration of life among the nobility at the height of the Heian period, describing the exquisite pleasures of a confined world in which poetry, love, fashion, and whim dominated, while harsh reality was kept firmly at a distance. Moving elegantly across a wide range of themes including nature, society, and her own flirtations, Sei Shonagon provides a witty and intimate window on a woman's life at court in classical Japan.

Publication Date: 2012

Summary:

"I believe there is a miracle in Wanda," wrote Marguerite Duras of the only film American actress Barbara Loden ever wrote and directed. "Usually, there is a distance between representation and text, subject and action. Here that distance is completely eradicated." It is perhaps this "miracle"--the seeming collapse of fiction and fact--that has made Wanda (1970) a cult classic, and a fascination of artists from Isabelle Huppert to Rachel Kushner to Kate Zambreno. For acclaimed French writer Nathalie Léger, the mysteries of Wanda launched an obsessive quest across continents, into archives, and through mining towns of Pennsylvania, all to get closer to the film and its maker. Suite for Barbara Loden is the magnificent result.

Publication Date: 2008

Summary:

From the shtetl to the New World, from failed revolutions in tsarist Russia to the Holocaust, these Yiddish tales illuminate a lost world from a woman's distinctive perspective. For decades, stories by Yiddish women writers were available only to those who spoke the mother tongue of Eastern European Jews. This translation brings some of the lost women writers of the golden age of Yiddish to English-speaking readers. Their stories range from the wryly humorous--a girl seeking a wet nurse for her cousin brings him to a shiksa, with dire consequences--to the bittersweet, as a once-idealistic revolutionary now sees her hopes for humanity as fantasy. The title is from a poem that describes a widow arguing with a storm that threatens her harvest. It is a metaphor for the Holocaust, whose dark cloud was rising. Arguing with the Storm is a joy to read and a tribute to all those women, who, in arguing with the storm, fought to protect their families and way of life.

Publication Date: 2007

Summary:

"Haltarin Bolor- Erdene (b. 1975) was born in Ulaanbaatar and worked as a journalist on the city’s free newspapers until 2007, since when she has lived in Paris, France, with her family. She writes short stories and novellas and published her first novel, The Running Woman, in 2019. 'Room for Rent' is an example of how Mongolian literature is responding to the horror and supernatural genres. More than the unnamed student, it is perhaps the claustrophobia of the eponymous room that is the central character of this story."--Description from p. 261

Publication Date: 2024

Summary:

May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She's been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear. Soon a Taiwanese woman -- who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name -- is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko's travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It's only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the something is. Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan's highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships--

Publication Date: 2024

Summary:

Ever since she was a child, Louise has been not quite hearing and not quite deaf. After an audiology test shows that almost all her hearing is gone, her doctor suggests a cochlear implant. This irreversible operation would give Louise a new sense of hearing, but it would come at the expense of her natural hearing, which has shaped her relationship with the world, full of whispers and shadows. --

Publication Date: 1987

Summary:

The Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship with Hungary's Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else may enter, not even her closest relatives. She is Magda's housekeeper and she has taken control over Magda's household, becoming indispensable to her. And Emerence, in her way, has come to depend on Magda. They share a kind of love--at least until Magda's long-sought success as a writer leads to a devastating revelation. Len Rix's prizewinning translation of The Door at last makes it possible for American readers to appreciate the masterwork of a major modern European writer.

Publication Date: 1947

Summary:

Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement, 'I shot him between the eyes.' Everything in between is a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness, and as the tale proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. In this powerful novella, Natalia Ginzburg's writing is white-hot, fueled by rage, stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality; she transforms an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that might pose the question: Why don't more wives kill their husbands?

Publication Date: 2018

Summary:

This volume re-edits and expands a previous bilingual collection published in 1997. The first edition included stories by twelve writers: Pilar Cibreiro, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Adelaida García Morales, Lourdes Ortiz, Laura Freixas, Marina Mayoral, Mercedes Abad, Rosa Montero, Maruja Torres, Soledad Puértolas and María Eugenia Salaverri. The present edition adds another four: Nuria Amat, Juana Salabert, Luisa Castro and Berta Marsé. The stories gathered in this second edition were written between 1980 and 2010, and testify to the richness and vitality of women's writing in contemporary Spain.

Publication Date: 2022

Summary:

Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids. Olga Ravn's prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity--

Publication Date: 2021

Summary:

The daughter of Haitian journalist and pro-democracy activist Jean Léopold Dominique, who was assassinated in 2000, Jan J. Dominique offers a memoir that provides a uniquely personal perspective on the tumultuous end of the twentieth century in Haiti. Wandering Memory is her elegy for a father and an ode to a beloved, suffering homeland. The book charts the biographical, emotional, and literary journey of a woman moving from one place to another, attempting to return to her craft and put together the pieces of her life in the aftermath of family tragedy. Dominique writes eloquently about love, loss, and traumas both horrifically specific and tragically universal.

Publication Date: 2015

Summary:

Natalia Toledo's The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems, with an award-winning translation by Clare Sullivan, describes contemporary Isthmus Zapotec life in lush, sensual detail. In Toledo's poems of love and loss the world's population turns into fish, death is a cricket, and naked women are made of wet magma. The Black Flower won the Nezhualcóyotl Prize, Mexico's highest honor for indigenous-language literature, in 2004.--Cover.

Publication Date: 1999

Summary:

The Water Horse includes a selection of poems from Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's prize-winning collections, Feis (1991) and Cead Aighnis (1998), with facing translations into English by the award-winning poets, Medbh McGuckian and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. In this work - characteristically rich in folklore and myth and courageous in its treatment of psychological states - versions of the natural and supernatural worlds coalesce.

Publication Date: 2019

Summary:

Drawing from her own experiences growing up in a Syrian refugee camp, as well as her current life in Gaza, these stories stitch together a patchwork of different perspectives into what it means to be a woman in Palestine today. Whether following the daily struggles of orphaned children fighting to survive in the rubble of recent bombardments, or mapping the complex, cultural tensions between different generations of refugees in wider Gazan society, these stories offer rare insights into one of the most talked about, but least understood cities in the Middle East. Taken together, the collection affords us a local perspective on a global story, and it does so thanks to a cast of (predominantly female) characters whose vantage point is rooted, firmly, in that most cherished of things, the home.

Publication Date: 2021

Summary:

In this witty how-to guide, Wisława Szymborska has nothing but sympathy for the labors of would-be writers generally: I myself started out with rotten poetry and stories, she confesses in this collection of pieces culled from the advice she gave-anonymously-for many years in the well-known Polish journal Literary Life. She returns time and again to the mundane business of writing poetry properly, that is to say, painstakingly and sparingly. I sigh to be a poet, Miss A. P. from Bialogard exclaims. I groan to be an editor, Szymborska responds. Szymborska stubbornly insists on poetry's prosaic side: Let's take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we? This delightful compilation, translated by the peerless Clare Cavanagh, will delight readers and writers alike--