When participants registered for the inaugural Translating Women Conference (October 31–November 1, 2019) at the Institute for Modern Languages Research in London, UK, they probably did not yet know that October 31 would become “Brexit Day.” Fortunately, Brexit was postponed, and when some of the delegates arrived in London, they saw a sign in front of a restaurant: “The year is 2192. The British Prime Minister visits Brussels to ask for an extension on Brexit. No one remembers where this tradition came from, but it attracts many tourists every year.” Over two days, a potentially isolationist “historical day” gave way to a fruitful international dialogue focused on translation and women writers from many parts of the world, forging connections and understanding in a time of division and uncertainty.
In the following conversation, Monica Manolachi, Helen Vassallo, and Olga Castro—co-organisers of the Translating Women Conference—speak about the meaning of the hashtag #BeMoreOlga, the many conference highlights, reading books in translation, and explain why feminism and translation are connected movements that have the potential to fully open up the Anglosphere to world literature.
Monica Manolachi (MM): Helen Vassallo and Olga Castro, you co-hosted the first Translating Women Conference at London’s Institute of Modern Languages Research on October 31 and November 1, 2019. On this occasion, participants received pins with the hashtag #BeMoreOlga. What issues does this hashtag address?
Helen Vassallo (HV): This stemmed from an opinion piece I wrote after the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded the delayed 2018 prize to Olga Tokarczuk and the 2019 prize to Peter Handke. Apart from the controversy in awarding the prize to Handke (a decision I found ill-judged, to say the least), I was incensed by the way in which the chair of the prize committee casually and erroneously justified the paucity of women laureates in the prize’s history by saying that “now” there are many great women writers. This only compounds the problem of women’s invisibility: suggesting that women hadn’t featured significantly because they weren’t there or weren’t “great” assumes that awards are based only on merit and not on visibility. I took issue with both the androcentric and the Eurocentric approach to choosing winners: I agree that Tokarczuk was a great choice, but the committee had previously stated that they were looking further afield than Europe, and then both prizes went to Europeans. It’s almost like saying: “well we looked, but there wasn’t anything good enough,” which is exactly what I mean about the myth of meritocracy. There wasn’t any real, demonstrable evidence that the prize committee had scrutinised its own policies, just empty rhetoric. And it was ironic that they commended Tokarczuk’s work for “crossing boundaries as a form of life”; I thought that they could take heed of that for calling into question their own criteria and approach—hence my suggestion that they “Be More Olga.” That was the specific context, but generally, “Be More Olga” stands as a call to action for all of us to be more open, to challenge borders and boundaries—whether literal or figurative—and to claim our place in a connected world. And to cap it all, Olga Tokarczuk herself was wearing one of our #BeMoreOlga badges at the Nobel Prize ceremony in December; I never dreamed that would happen! Tokarczuk’s Nobel lecture offers profound reflections on crossing borders, remaking our broken world, and challenging isolationism; it’s translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Jennifer Croft, and expresses far more articulately than I could exactly what “Be More Olga” means.
MM: Why do you think translating women writers has become a relevant cultural issue nowadays?
HV: I think it’s always been a relevant cultural issue. In her manifesto, We Should All Be Feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie states that: “Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.” What’s important to note is that if women writers were not translated in the past, it’s not because they weren’t there or weren’t worth being translated—it’s because they were ignored, silenced, or dismissed. People made culture, men made culture, and women weren’t an equal part of it. Those issues are still present today—as indicated with the Nobel Prize in Literature awards—and so I think it’s more important to frame this question in terms of why it’s important that we keep talking about women in translation. And that’s because it’s an urgent concern! Translation itself is important in these times, when nationalist rhetoric is amplifying and borders are being reinforced instead of broken down, and such regressions go hand-in-hand with an erasure of women’s experience. As Ngozi Adichie says, we can and must make the full humanity of women our culture, and that implies an openness that is the opposite of what we’re seeing globally. In the recent UK parliamentary elections, a number of female candidates stood down because they feel under threat. Women’s voices should be growing, not shrinking, and if we are not represented nationally, how can we be represented internationally, globally? I truly believe that there is, more than ever, a need for feminism, for solidarity, for challenging the status quo—not just what has always been, but also what it has become. For me, the importance of translating women is inseparable from the importance of translation more generally. We need it for a greater understanding between cultures, and if women are left out of culture, then the very notion of culture is itself impoverished.
OC: The relationship between women writers and translation has always been problematic. Traditionally, many women who were not allowed to become writers found in translation a safety valve to gain access to the literary world; after all, translation was seen as something reproductive, rather than productive. However, those women who did succeed in becoming writers found—in translation—an insurmountable barrier preventing them from travelling across languages and cultures to gain a wider readership. And this is starting to be challenged now. After centuries of feminist activism, some of the cultural issues perceived as most relevant in some societies today are clearly linked to making visible those who had traditionally been made invisible: women in sciences, women in the arts, women in sports, women in politics, women in literature. I think it was just a matter of time that women in translation became a more central issue, at least in the Anglosphere. But we must be aware of our cultural relativity and situated knowledge; in Donna Haraway’s terms, this means: first, that there are many cultures and literary spaces where women in translation have not yet acquired such relevant status; and second, we must also emphasise the importance of translating more diverse women writers. In the era of intersectionality and transnational feminism, we must enquire which women writers are the ones overcoming the barriers and ultimately being translated, that is, which other identity markers beyond gender (i.e. sexuality, class, age, race, nation, religion, etc.) are represented. To my mind, these two aspects are not always central in current discussions about the translation of women writers.
MM: What were some of the highlights of the conference?
OC: We had two full days of highlights, one after the other. Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of online activism about translating women, and this conference gave us the opportunity to finally meet in person and see each other in real life—that’s the most important highlight for me. On a more personal level, I was honoured to be chairing a keynote panel on initiatives about women writers in translation with activists and academics whose work I admire so much, such as Meytal Radzinski (founder of the #WITMonth in 2014), Margaret Carson (co-founder of Women in Translation Tumblr with Alta L. Price in 2015), Chantal Wright (founder of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation in 2017), Helen Vassallo (founder of the Translating Women blog in 2017), Salwa Benaissa (founder of Project Plume in 2019), and Godela Weiss-Sussex and Heike Bartel (organisers of the “Encounters authors-translators” seminar series). Many other highlights have to do with the content of the papers and discussions that followed the presentations. To mention just a few, the emphasis put on intersectional feminism as a way of raising awareness about the lack of diversity in women being currently translated into English, an argument convincingly defended by Corine Tachtiris, was of paramount importance. It also was particularly rewarding to have a mix of scholars and practitioners talking about the same issues from different perspectives and thus contributing to bridging the gap between academia and the English-language book industry. That was also one of the aims of the evening events, in which acclaimed writers recently translated into English discussed their views on translation with their own translators: Négar Djavadi with Tina Kover, and Ariana Harwicz with Carolina Orloff and Annie McDermott.
HV: Absolutely, it was an exciting, energising, and memorable event. Margaret Carson’s keynote on “snapping the gap” will stay with me for a long time—the “snap” being the tipping point as Sara Ahmed defines it, the realisation of a need for feminist action, and the “gap” of course is the gender gap. Margaret set out all the key issues that delegates were discussing over the two days. Another highlight for me was Aviya Kushner’s inspiring talk on women who don’t follow the rules, particularly her coining of the term “expectation bias,” or the presumption that “I want you to write about what I want you to say.” I think this brought together a lot of the discussions across the papers; it’s a concept that underpins women’s absence in translated literature, the expectations of what women should write about and how they should represent their country and experience, and a general lack of understanding of source cultures and contexts. And one of the greatest highlights was, quite simply, the atmosphere, and the coming together of so many brilliant and dedicated people across academia and the translation industry to talk about urgent matters that have global resonance, but all in a positive and collective way.
MM: On a more personal level, what memories do you have about some of the first books in translation you read? I remember reading an abridged version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, a big book with funny pictures. Town Musicians of Bremen by Brothers Grimm and Thumbelina by Hans Christian Andersen were some of the first books I read in English. That was in the 1980s—classical books by male writers. Nowadays, children and teens have many more options. What about you? When did you realise the book you were reading was a translation?
OC: Being born and raised in Galicia, Spain, translations from other languages entered my life at an early age. My first memory dates back when I received O principiño, the Galician translation of Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, as a birthday present—something to be noted is that this translation was first published in 1972 when fascist dictator Franco was ruling the country and languages such as Galician, Basque, or Catalan were officially illegal in Spain. I had read the book in Spanish already, possibly thinking that it was the original, so that birthday present was revealing enough to make me realise that the “same” story could be told and retold in different languages. That was a turning point, and since then I started actively seeking for hints to determine whether a book was a translation.
HV: My first realisation about translation was when I was studying The Iliad for a Latin exam at the age of sixteen. We studied sections in Latin but read the whole text in English. I honestly hadn’t grasped that this was not something that had always already existed in English. Translation was just never talked about as anything other than a linguistic exercise. I remember buying Anna Karenina around that time, and assuming it was an English book. Then later when I was studying a drama course in Spain, and we read Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller in Spanish, I realised they were translations because I had previously read them in English—though I didn’t notice who translated them or whether the quality was good; I just had this vague understanding that somehow these were important writers that everyone in the world should read. I’m embarrassed about what that says regarding the cultural attitudes I must have held unquestioningly at the time. But when we read Ibsen and Chekhov, I didn’t even register that they weren’t originally written in Spanish. The fact that we were reading in translation just wasn’t mentioned. And look, every single example I’ve mentioned is a book by a man, because that was my curriculum in the 1990s. And in many language departments there is this kind of acceptance that it’s “bad” to read books in translation, which cultivates a sense of the translation being inferior. One thing I particularly like about contemporary translations is the translator’s visibility—not in the text, in a translation studies sense, but as an agent, a promoter of the text, a co-author of the translation, and an activist for literature from the country or cultures they’re translating from. They open doors to other worlds, and they don’t hide the fact that the text is a translation. That’s much healthier, in my opinion, than presenting books from other languages and cultures as just magically existing in English.
MM: Olga, in 2017, you co-edited Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives and Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in Multilingual European Contexts. What did working on these collections mean for you, and what feedback have you received so far?
OC: As an academic, the central theme driving my research is the operation of power in translation across transnational borders, particularly as it manifests in relation to (a) gender and feminism and (b) minorised and stateless cultures within multilingual settings. In a way, my research is informed by my political activism in defense of women’s rights, and in the defense of self-determination for stateless nations like Galicia, where I come from. Working with other colleagues on these two topics, which I feel very close to, meant a lot to me for a number of reasons. First, because these two co-edited volumes challenged common assumptions (at least in British universities) that editing books can never be “excellent” research, even if they are published by highly reputable academic presses, as was the case here. I still remember that one line manager at my previous university dismissed my work, even telling me that editing books is not proper research, but something one should do in the evenings or the weekend, outside the normal working hours covered in our contracts. I am glad that I trusted my instinct and carried on with these projects. In both cases, we took our editing role very seriously and it absolutely paid off. We had amazing feedback about both books; at least seven reviews about them were published in high impact journals, and they led to other forms of public engagement like an authors’ interview for the London School of Economics Review of Books or the forthcoming Korean translation of Feminist Translation Studies. Second, it also meant a lot to me because the whole process of close-reading work by other scholars complemented and challenged some of my previous understandings of feminist translation and self-translation, especially in relation to the asymmetrical power relations operating between Western hegemonic cultures and the global South, and also in in-between cultures in which literary self-translation into the hegemonic language often becomes a necessary and painful step taken by writers in the minorised language to reach wider audiences. I learnt a lot and feel privileged that I could have very enriching discussions with the different authors contributing chapters to both volumes. Something particularly productive was the interaction with Patricia Hill Collins and Edwin Gentzler when they wrote the prefaces to the two collections, as well as the interviews we conducted with scholars such as Richa Nagar, Kathy Davis, Judith Butler, AnaLouise Keating, Claudia de Lima Costa, Sonia E. Alvarez, and Ayşe Gül Altınay for the cross-disciplinary roundtable chapter on the feminist politics of translation included in the book. Last but not least, I found the whole process of discussing everything with my co-editors (Emek Ergun in the case of Feminist Translation Studies, and Sergi Mainer and Svetlana Page in the case of Self-Translation and Power) a very rewarding experience, and one that often made me get out of my comfort zone.
MM: Helen, in a previous interview you argued that “there is often still an idea that feminism has happened and we have achieved equality, but this is one of the most dangerous attitudes of all because theoretical equality is not the same as real equality.” In your opinion, what is missing from the picture, and how can we realise an increased sense of equality?
HV: Yes, what I mean is that equality in the eyes of the law, or theoretical equality, is not the same as actual equality. And I think that the first step is for that to be universally acknowledged. A good starting point would be if Caroline Criado Perez’s award-winning study Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Made for Men were mandatory reading! Our power structures replicate themselves, and they are not gender-equal. But younger generations are being brought up with the understanding that feminism has happened and achieved all it needed to, so we need to change the attitude that the need for feminism is in the past. What about the gender gap in terms of pay, healthcare, public office, managerial roles, in every sphere, including the issues we’re talking about regarding publishing and translation, plus all manner of less “visible” biases? So, we need to keep talking about this, and keep challenging injustice wherever we see it. It’s not always easy, because—as Margaret Carson said in her Translating Women Conference keynote—when you point out the problem, you become the problem. Just look at the backlash Criado Perez faced when she campaigned for the Bank of England to keep a woman on at least one banknote after it was announced that Winston Churchill would replace Elizabeth Fry on the £5 note, resulting in an all-male line-up on Bank of England notes. And no, for anyone who thinks I’ve forgotten the Queen, that doesn’t count as there’s no active choice involved, whereas the others are meant to “celebrate people who have shaped UK society through their thought innovation, leadership, or values.” Criado Perez received multiple and graphic death and rape threats just for daring to suggest that women shouldn’t disappear, for having the temerity to point out that society wasn’t—and shouldn’t be—only shaped by men. I admire her courage in speaking out and not being broken by the vitriol directed at her for pointing out the problem. But don’t tell me this can happen in a society in which men and women have real, as opposed to theoretical, equality. On a similar note, I also appreciated Megan Rapinoe’s recent acceptance speech at the Best FIFA Football Awards: Rapinoe said that everyone should be outraged about homophobia and the gender pay and prestige gap in football. She called on her colleagues to “lend their platform,” and I think that’s a really powerful message: whenever we have any privileged aspect of our identity, we have a responsibility to join our voices to those who may be oppressed or discriminated against. We can’t only fight for the things that affect us.
Helen Vassallo is the founder of the Translating Women project, which launched in 2018 and investigates the gender gap in translated literature into English. She is the author of two books on French women’s writing and the forthcoming book Translators, Publishers and Activism: Translation as Hospitality and the Year of Publishing Women (Routledge, 2021), as well as numerous articles on women’s writing. She writes reviews and opinion posts for the popular Translating Women blog, and can be found on Twitter as @translatewomen.
Olga Castro lectures in Translation Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Prior to joining Warwick in 2019, she held different academic positions at Aston University in Birmingham and the University of Exeter, UK. She has co-authored the monograph Feminismos (Xerais, 2013), co-edited the books Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives (Routledge, 2017) and Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in Multilingual Europe (Palgrave, 2017), and most recently two special issues on “Towards Transnational Feminist Translation Studies” for the journal Mutatis Mutandis and on “Transnational Encounters: Crossing Borders in Galician Translation Studies” for the journal Galicia 21 (2020). Her research focuses on the social and political role of translation in the construction of gender and cultural/national identities in a transnational world, with a particular interest in stateless nations and non-hegemonic contexts. Her academic work has been translated into Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Latvian, and Korean. She is Vice-President of the Association of Programmes in Translation and Interpreting Studies of the UK and Ireland (APTIS) and Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Galician Academy (RAG).
Monica Manolachi is a writer, literary translator, and lecturer at the University of Bucharest, Romania. She is the author of Performative Identities in Contemporary Caribbean British Poetry (2017), and, as a regular speaker at international conferences, she has published many academic articles and delivered papers on contemporary American, British, and Caribbean literature. Her article “Multiethnic Resonances in Derek Walcott’s Poetry” was published in Ethnic Resonances in Performance, Literature, and Identity (2019), edited by Yiorgos Kalogeras and Cathy C. Waegner. In 2016, she was awarded the Dumitru Crăciun Prize for translating Caribbean poetry into Romanian. She has also done several retranslations of classical authors such as Mark Twain, Jack London, Charles Dickens, and Lewis Carroll. She has published three volumes of poetry and, together with poet Neil Leadbeater, co-authored Brasília (2019), a poetry collection inspired by the works of architect Oscar Niemeyer.
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