Posts filed under 'sexual abuse'

Translating the Demons on the Page: Maureen Shaughnessy on Belén López Peiró’s Why Did You Come Back Every Summer

May 27, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Rebecca Wilson

I feel like it's a gift that she opened herself up and shared such a raw part of herself with us.

After nine years and a criminal complaint. Affidavits, expert witness reports, trips back and forth to police stations, district attorneys, national courts. A five-hundred page case record. Two lawyers. One prosecutor. A justice commission. Fifteen years of therapy. Half my life! My entire family split in two. A whole town covering up the abuser. Seven years of writing workshops. Two books published. Finally. Finally. . . Now I can say out loud all the names I once could not.

Argentine writer Belén López Peiró eventually wrote these words last year, following nearly a decade of denouncing her abuser.

Belén’s first novel, Por qué volvías cada verano (Why Did You Come Back Every Summer), published five years prior to the sentencing, is an account of the abuse Belén suffered as a child and the breakdown of her family after she spoke out. It covers a number of years between the apartments and lawyers’ offices of Buenos Aires and the small town in this province where Belén spent summers with her cousins, her aunt, and her abuser—her aunt’s husband. Using mixed media, the book gossips and growls in a cacophony of voices, legal and colloquial, who question, opine, pity, doubt, support, and blame her. 

This April, Charco Press published the English translation of Belén’s novel by Maureen Shaughnessy. I caught up with the translator, who’s based in Southern Argentina, over Zoom to discuss the book. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Wilson (RW): What were your first impressions of the book and how did you feel when Charco Press asked you to translate it?

Maureen Shaughnessy (MS): In Argentina it had its moment of hype, which is how I came across it in the first place, even though it was published with a small press. It came out here during a time when the #NiUnaMenos movement was really taking off, in that context of purple and green marches with women filling the streets.

When I started reading it, it was too intense for me. Right away, in the second or third entry, she tells this really intense story, the most abusive moment in the book, the most raw. Plus there’s all these dense legal documents—there are these two extremes together.

I had read it and found it too intense to think about pitching it to editors. It was too much for me to even consider, so it was a hard place to go to, to work for so long on the book.

RW: Any translation is a huge responsibility. But given this novel is so personal, and a true account, what did you feel was your relationship to the text?

MS: During the last few drafts, I got to a point where it was already typeset and we were supposed to go to print and I read it again. I had to say, ‘No, wait, not yet. Sorry, we have to keep editing it’, because I did feel responsible for trying to translate all those voices that were swimming around in her head, all those demons she brought out onto the page. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2022

February 14, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan and Andrea Blatz

New work this week from Tunisia and Russia!

In this week’s selection of translated literature, we present Hassouna Mosbahi’s expansive, dreaming portrait of Tunisia through the recollections of one man’s life, as well as Nataliya Meshchaninova’s precise, cinematic cult classic of a young girl carving her own way through abuse and neglect in post-Soviet Russia. Read on for our editors’ takes on these extraordinary titles.

mobsani

Solitaire by Hassouna Mosbahi, translated from the Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins, Syracuse University Press, 2022

Review by Alex Tan, Assistant Editor

The essential core. The innermost heart. The pupil of the eye. The central pearl of the necklace.

These are epithets lifted from a tenth-century anthology of poetry and artistic prose by the literary connoisseur Abu Mansur al-Tha’alibi—a privileged arbiter of what counted as the era’s innermost heart. Determined to immortalise the remarkable cultural efflorescence of his contemporary Arab-Islamic world, al-Tha’alibi took upon himself the task of gleaning the anecdotes, biographies, epigrams, and panegyrics he deemed exemplary of his epoch: “sift[ing] our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls”, as Virginia Woolf once wrote.

Not for nothing did al-Tha’alibi name his compilation Yatimat al-Dahr fi Mahasin Ahl al’-Asr: “The Unique Pearl Concerning the Elegant Achievements of Contemporary People.” From the inheritance of this opulent work, the Tunisian writer Hassouna Mosbahi drew inspiration for his own dazzling, shape-shifting novel Yatim al-Dahr—cleverly rendered in English by William Maynard Hutchins as Solitaire. Hutchins contextualises the title in his helpful preface, explaining that “yatimat” refers to both a “unique, precious pearl” and “fate’s orphan.” “Solitaire” reflects these prismatic valences.

Solitaire, also, is a game one plays with oneself; Mosbahi’s book, in many ways, is a puzzle with no straightforward answers. It is encyclopaedic and uneven and oblique. Stories proliferate, nestled within other stories, structurally echoing the classic Thousand and One Nights.

On a first reading, it is easy to sink into the sediment of the novel’s non-linear chronology, before being pulled abruptly out of the seductive illusion and back onto the newly destabilised present. Mosbahi’s work dissolves temporal barriers, saturating the present with echoes of the past. It feels vertiginous to remember that all the action spans a single day, kaleidoscoped through the mind of the eponymous orphan-protagonist Yunus and taking place mostly along the coast, at the threshold of sea and sand. Language arrives on the page like slips of paper curled up in glass bottles: Sufi prayers, journal entries, newspaper articles, quotations of verse, orally transmitted tales, autobiographical monologues—shored up in their rawness. Digressions expand, often without warning, to constitute entire chapters. Hutchins’ translation captures these tonal shifts impeccably. READ MORE…