For the past six years, August has been dedicated to women in translation. There are many great blogs dedicated to this cause this month as well as quite a few virtual events planned by publishers. To plug just one such series, Fitzcarralo Editions and Charco Press are putting together a weekly lunch sereis of talks with the first one beginning tomorrow (08/07/2020) and focusing on translating violence.

I recently looked through my personal list of books I’ve read so far this year and saw that only 13 of the 55 to this point have been written by women (in translation). Although a couple of my favorite authors - Samanta Schweblin and Valeria Luiselli - are women, and two of my favorite books so far this year have been written by women - Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold and On Lighthouses by Jazmina Barrera - these totals are still below the share of translated fiction held by women.

I always have a ton of books on my stack(s) of “to-read soon” (so many so that I often get anxiety choosing the next book). These stacks are also full of super interesting books by women. So I decided to pull a selection that I want to try to get to this month (or at least soon). I’ve chosen a mix of authors I’ve enjoyed in the past as well as a number of new voices I’m very eager to hear. The list includes a variety of some of my favorite publishers and a large number of countries as well.

Although it’s an ambitious stack to tackle this month, I want to give it a go; and if anyone wants to try any of these books with me, please just reach out and we can read together! I plan to periodically come back and update this post with my thoughts on each work as well as possibly post other interesting events or articles focusing on Women in Translation.

[2020-08-14 Update] I’ve now finished three of the books on the list (All My Goodbyes, Blood of the Dawn and Die, My Love) and started a couple others. These three novels worked very well together as a set; all are marked by fractured narratives from women undergoing identity crises. All My Goodbyes and Die, My Love offer a very intriguing dichotomy. Both are told from the first person persepective of our (singular) female Latin American narrator who is unhappy with herself as we discover more about each woman’s life through a series of disjointed, hop-scotching short snapshots. In Goodbyes, the narrator seeks to escape her problems by always staying on the move, while the character in Die is grounded to a husband, a son and her established life. Both however exhibit similar feelings of depression, anxiety and sadly experiences with horrifying violence. Pairing these two stories shows that it’s really impossible to outrun or ignore deep-rooted issues of depression and identity crisis: no matter how far and quickly we try to move on to new places or how hard we try to supress our issues with platitudes and facades of normalcy, eventually we will have to face our demons.

I actually finished The Blood of the Dawn between the two books just described above. This work, unlike the other two, focuses on the stories of three very different women. In particular, we are shown the atrocities and many facets of the ongoing conflict in Peru between the established government and the Communist Party (known as the Shining Path), which began in 1980. The novel masterfully makes the reader experience the conflict from many angles simultaneously. We are thrown into the stories of three very different women (a woman who abandaned her family to join the high ranks of the Communist regime and must grapple with violence to achieve the goals of the party; a woman of the mountainous villages who experiences the full force of violence upon herself and her family as a bystander in the conflict; and finally a wealthy urbanite journalist who chooses to try to document some of the scenes) whose narratives unfold interstitially and entangle only tangentially as we are thrown into the violence of the conflict.

Blood of the Dawn is one of the most interesting books I’ve read recently in terms of the use of language. Jiménez beautifally uses repetition throughout the work, both at the word level and at the entire paragraph/scene level, to give a staccato, dizzying effect on the reader. Additionally, there is always a focus on the eyes, ears and senses of scene and characters. These choices help convey a visceral quality to the horrendous violence described within the pages. Additionally, Bryer offers a very informative Translator’s Note to help provide some useful historical context to the novel as well as some very interesting insight into the challenges in the translation process for this book in particular.

While reading this book, I also happened to watch Monos(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monos_(film)), a film focusing on a group of children commandos in Columbia in charge of protecting and transporting an American prisoner of war. Like Blood of the Dawn, we are thrown into the atrocities of conflicts still ravaging parts of South America and it’s effects on all parts of society. The film takes place on a very remote mountaintop where these kids are alone with the clouds, and the scenery oscillates between idyllic and neon-tinted, hallucinatory shocks of violent rituals, as we begin to see the setting as some sort of tainted Eden and these children represent the sins of all humanity. As a viewer we sympathize with all characters, the pow as well as her child-captives, simultaneously. I think this movie paired particularly well with Blood of the Dawn and is currently available in Hulu.

Originally I had intended to write a short review of each of these books as I read them, but these three together worked so well as a trilogy of sorts that I think the comprehensive dump of thoughts I just wrote above works as a comprehensive overview of the each. I highly recommend all three books and I will add some of my favorite quotes from each below with the info for each book instead of a review. To be continued…

All My Goodbyes, Mariana Dimopulos (Argentina, tr. Alice Whitmore, Transit Books)

Die, My Love, Ariana Harwicz (Argentina, tr. Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff, Charco Press)

Slum Virgin, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (Argentina, tr. Frances Riddle, Charco Press)

Seeing Red, Lina Meruane (Chile, tr. Megan McDowell, Deep Vellum Books)

Blood of the Dawn, Claudia Salazar Jiménez (Peru, tr. Elizabeth Bryer, Deep Vellum Books)

Belladonna, Daša Drndić (Croatia, tr. Celia Hawkesworth, New Directions)

Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann (Germany, tr. Philip Boehm, New Directions)

Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor (Mexico, tr. Sophie Hughes, New Directions)

Bluebeard’s First Wife, Ha Seong-nan (Korea, tr. Janet Hong, Open Letter Books)

Cars on Fire, Mónica Ramón Ríos (Chile, tr. Robin Myers, Open Letter Books)

Four by Four, Sara Mesa (Spain, tr. Katie Whittemore, Open Letter Books)

The Body Where I Was Born, Guadalupe Nettle (Mexico, tr. J.T. Lichtenstein, Penguin Random House)

Things We Lost in the Fire, Mariana Enriquez (Argentina, English language debut, Penguin Random House)