Posts featuring Aoko Matsuda

Celebrate International Women’s Day with Women’s Writing!

March 8, 2023  |  in News  |  by The Blog Team

Join us as we highlight the vital contributions of women to literature and translation.

March 8th is International Women’s Day, and we wanted to take the opportunity to lift up the work of women in world literature. Below, find a selection of pieces published on the blog in the past year, across essays, reviews, translations, and interviews, curated to represent the breadth and brilliance of women working in writing.

Interviews

A Conversation on Kurdish Translation with Farangis Ghaderi
by Holly Mason Badra

But when you look deeper, when you look at archives, and look at early Kurdish periodicals, you find women. You discover these forgotten voices. An interesting example of that is Zeyneb Xan, who published under the pseudonym of Kiche Kurd (“Kurdish girl”). In 2018, when a publisher was reprinting Galawej (the first Kurdish literary journal published in 1939–1949), they decided to have sections on contributing writers. They came across this name, and one of the researchers working on the project uncovered that the identity of the writer was Zeyneb Xan (1900–1963), the eldest sister of Dildar—a very well-known figure of Kurdish literature who wrote the Kurdish anthem. Although her family was a literary family and at the center of literary attention, her manuscript remained unpublished until 2018. Her truly fascinating poetry collection covers a wide range of themes from patriotism to women’s education and liberation.

Wild Women: An Interview with Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton
by Sophia Stewart

For me, films and television programs, as well as books and comics, have always been the places where I can meet outsider women, weirdo women, rebel women, sometimes scary women. When I was a child, I didn’t care if these women were human beings or ghosts or monsters, and I didn’t care if they were from Japan or other countries. I was just drawn to them, encouraged by their existence.

To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda
by Rose Bialer

Maybe if I was born in some other place, I would be writing about something else, but I do believe that Latin America is a very violent continent, especially for women, and in all of our traditions of women’s literature, there have always been women writing horror stories in Latin America. . .  I do believe that it’s because you can’t write about anything else. That’s how you live life. You are afraid for your life. You are scared of the violence in your family, the violence between your friends, the violence in the street. You can’t think about anything else except how to protect yourself from violence.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 25, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar, Mary Hillis, and Nestor Gomez

Translation competitions, new publications, and poetry readings from Japan, Guatemala, and El Salvador!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on a translation competition and an event to support Ukraine in Japan, the publication of a harrowing new memoir from Guatemala, and a celebration of women poets in El Salvador. Read on to find out more!

Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant, reporting from Japan

Give Artists a Voice was held on March 15 at the Goethe-Institut in Tokyo and live-streamed on social media. Organized by EUNIC Japan and E.U. member cultural institutions and cultural departments in Japan, artists expressed their support of Ukraine through music, film, poetry, dance, and talks. Joining from Kharkiv, contemporary artist Olia Fedorova read text in Ukrainian documenting life during the war. Poet Marie Iljašenko read “Five poems from collection St. Outdoor” in Czech and Yoko Tawada read “Auszeit von Menschheit” (“Timeout from Humanity”) in German. Michal Hvorecký, author of the novel Troll (published in Slovak in 2017), delivered a message on disinformation and literary translation as a vehicle for deeper understanding.

Earlier in the month, at Bungaku Days Spring 2022, the award winners of the JLPP (Japanese Literature Publishing Project) sixth International Translation Competition were recognized: English grand prize winner Grant Lloyd and Spanish grand prize winner Eduardo López Herrero. Contestants translated two texts, “Namiuchigiwa made” by Maki Kashimada in the fiction category and “Ojigi” by Kuniko Mukōda in the criticism and essay category. The original texts and winning translations can be read on the JLPP website.

Designed to both recognize and provide support for emerging translators of contemporary Japanese literature, the event began with a prerecorded video showcasing comments from the judges and messages from the top three awardees in English and Spanish respectively. Former contest winners Polly Barton and Sam Bett joined this year’s winner, Grant Lloyd, for a symposium on the topic of becoming a translator, moderated by Yoshio Hitomi of Waseda University. They discussed Lloyd’s prize-winning translations and also analyzed the challenges of working with stories, novels, and essays from Japanese, while revisiting steps on their journeys to becoming literary translators. The publishing panel was moderated by Allison Markin Powell and included Anne Meadows (Granta Books), Yuka Igarashi (Graywolf Press), and Tynan Kogane (New Directions), who discussed their points of view on pitching, the acquisition process, and barriers to publishing literature in English translation. The seventh edition of the competition is now in progress and entries are being accepted in English and French.

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“Precise Tactility”: Polly Barton Interviewed by Xiao Yue Shan

December 1, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Language is a source of great fear, but it's also a source of great joy and connection.

At page 124 of Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds, I found myself smiling impossibly wide, reading out loud to the empty room: “Kyuki-kyuki . . . The sound of a pen writing on a whiteboard.” Part of the joy that pervades and grows in reading this “memoir-dictionary” is in its subtle invitation to speak: to feel, as the author says, the “sensory bombardment” of encountering each new word, and the world that arrives with it. Written in fifty essays that each orbits off—sometimes tangentially, sometimes straightforwardly—from one of Japanese language’s vast selection of onomatopoeic words, the book generates a curious, sensual portrait of Barton’s life in Japan as a young woman, informed by the Wittgensteinian notion of language being defined by its utility, and in similar spirit to Lyn Hejinian: “Language . . . nearly is our psychological condition.” Through explorations of how the myriad self comes to match and distinguish itself from the world in words, Fifty Sounds creates an ecstatic realm of what happens in, between, and across languages—and the people who speak them.

Barton is a prolific translator from the Japanese; her repertoire includes Akutagawa winners like Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden and bestsellers like Misumi Kubo’s So We Look to the Sky, as well as English PEN Awards for Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are and Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job. Though we’ve spoken to her in the past about her translation work, I wanted to hear more about the linguistic and textual discoveries that catalysed this desire to work with language, in the quiet and admiring affinity between all people who love words and their secret conspirations. I spoke with Polly on-screen in our opposing time zones; she answered my questions in thoughtful bursts of speech that carried with them a vivid, various nature, her hands occasionally gesturing at the immeasurable distance between us, that which only language can attempt to breach.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Did Fifty Sounds begin in its current structure?

Polly Barton (PB): Not at all. I started working on it when I’d just got back to the UK after years of living in Japan, and at first, it was just notes for essays about the Japanese language. The inclusion of the onomatopoeia happened quite naturally, but the “fifty sounds” structure came about when I started writing the proposal for the [2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions] Essay Prize; I wanted to do it as a way of consolidating my thoughts, because I felt like there was meat in there and I was really enjoying writing about it, but it was kind of all over the place.

But the more I was writing, the more this concept started coming to me, and it seemed so out there that even while I was writing, I was thinking, can I do this? Can I write a memoir in fifty essays about Japanese onomatopoeia? Still, the callout for the contest said, “rewards ambitious writing,” so I was like, they want ambitious, I’ll give them ambitious. It’s funny because I am so grateful for that structure. It was just a crazy idea I hit upon, but I think it was very good for me to have that as a constraint, to start over fifty times—so I could do some sections like prose-poems, and a couple bits that are more academic.

XYS: Freedom dressed up as a constraint. There are definitely pieces that feel as though they could be portioned into separate texts, but because all the sections are encompassed in the umbrella of one experience, it feels cohesive.

PB: I don’t know if I intended this, but the experience of being in Japan, and learning Japanese, was so chaotic to me. I think a lot of people who learn a different language when they grew up and live in another culture—particularly one where they’re visibly different from most people around them—do have this real panoply of conflicting experiences, and the book is about embracing chaos in a way.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 15, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Carol Khoury, and David Boyd

The latest news from Argentina, Japan, and Palestine!

This week our writers bring you exciting news from Argentina, Japan, and Palestine! In Argentina, the legalization of abortion has been celebrated and supported by many, including renowned feminist writer Nora Domínguez; in Japan, leading women writers and their translators will be in conversation for the Japan Foundation New York, whilst translator Yukiko Konosu shared her recommended new reads from Japan, including Rin Usami; and in Palestine, four great new works of Palestine literature are soon to be published in English. Read on to find out more! 

Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina 

Two days before 2020 slid into history and memory, an anxious crowd gathered outside Argentina’s Congress in Buenos Aires. They watched the Senate debate on big screens and the summer heat dissipated as day turned into night, Tuesday turned into Wednesday. Many—though not all—of those who stood outside wore green scarves, the symbol of a yearlong movement to legalize abortion in the historically conservative country. In the small hours of Wednesday morning, after a long and suspenseful Senate session, they found out that their work had paid off: Congress legalized voluntary abortion through the fourteenth week of pregnancy.

Several of the pro-choice activists who advocated for this major legislation were writers. The day before the senators took up the bill, a collection of Argentina’s most notable writers, including Claudia Piñeiro, Florencia Abbate, Agustina Bazterrica, and Gabriela Saidon, released a statement and video expressing their support. “The green wave puts an end to hypocrisies, inequalities, injustices and replaces a long dark violence with dignity,” they wrote. “Like the deep and living heartbeat of the sea, it instills in us a pulse to continue fighting.”

Nora Domínguez was among the writers who endorsed the statement. She’s one of three directors of an ambitious project to publish the history of Argentina’s literature through a feminist lens. The first of six volumes, En la intemperie: poéticas de la fragilidad y la revuelta (In the Open: Poetics of Fragility and Revolt) was published by Eduvim late last year, but it’s chronologically the last in the series, focusing on the period between 1990 and 2019. The work features a collection of analysis and criticism from Argentina’s leading feminist thinkers—part of the project’s larger effort to give form to “certain absences, not to build a counter-canon but rather to provoke detours, scandalous stops, fissures, divisions, and contradictions” in the existing canon. In a December interview, Domínguez confirmed that Argentina has experienced a boom in recent years of new voices in the country’s literature, not just women but trans writers and young people as well. This century’s feminism is a culmination of both feminist and literary genealogies. The work to interrogate and revise a patriarchal canon and the work to advocate for laws that respect women’s autonomy go hand in hand. READ MORE…

Wild Women: An Interview with Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton

November 23, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

Metamorphosis is about possibility. I wanted to show the possibility of change in ourselves and society through . . . stories of transformation.

One of my favorite pieces of writing by Aoko Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton, is a story called “The Woman Dies,” which appeared in a 2018 issue of Granta. “The woman dies,” it begins. “She dies to provide a plot twist. She dies to develop the narrative. She dies for cathartic effect. She dies because no one could think of what else to do with her.” The first half of the story is divided up into corresponding sections: “The woman gets married”; “The woman gets pregnant”; “The woman miscarries”; “The woman is raped.” Matsuda’s argument echoes that of many American feminist critics, like Laura Mulvey and Alice Bolin, but the story’s formal inventiveness and fierce narration distinguishes “The Woman Dies.” With piercing precision, she takes to task that most insidious and ubiquitous narrative crutch, where women are nothing more than receptacles for pain and trauma.

Matsuda’s short story collection, Where the Wild Ladies Are, recently published by Soft Skull Press and translated again by Barton, offers a sort of corrective for the female suffering that has always pervaded storytelling. Through a series of interlinked stories, Matsuda blends existing legends with new stories to give women the agency and power that they often lack in our traditional narratives. In revisiting and reimagining centuries-old tales, she draws connections between the past and present, emphasizing the ways in which history is never really over.

The stories of Where the Wild Ladies Are have an explicitly feminist bent; against the backdrop of Japanese ghost stories, Matsuda tackles issues like glass ceilings and workplace discrimination, as well as patriarchal expectations for women: that they be hairless, that they don’t outshine their male counterparts, that they contain their rage (even when it’s merited). She is just as outspoken a feminist in conversation as she is on the page. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Matsuda, who is both a writer and literary translator (she’s translated work by Carmen Maria Machado and Karen Russell). Polly Barton also joined us and shed light on her work as Matsuda’s frequent collaborator. The three of us talked about Starbucks lattes, translating “Britishisms,” and the wonderful friendship that has blossomed between Matsuda and Barton.

 —Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): The stories in Where the Wild Ladies Are draw inspiration from traditional Japanese ghost and yōkai tales, and the book includes a complete list of references and outlines of these original works in a section called “inspiration for the stories.” Aoko, how did you choose these specific tales as inspiration, and why did you want to bring these traditional narratives and contemporary stories into conversation with each other? 

Aoko Matsuda (AM): Most of them are stories I’ve known since childhood. My favorite at that time was the ghost story of Okiku, because I also am from Himeji, where Okiku’s Well actually exists on the grounds of Himeji Castle. Summer is the season for kaidan—Japanese horror stories—and I used to watch the story of Okiku, along with other kaidan stories, on TV over and over. While watching her story, I found myself shouting to Okiku inside of my head: “Die Okiku, die quick, so that you can become a ghost with superpowers and have your revenge!” In my eyes, female ghosts in the kaidan stories looked so much livelier than living people, and were so much more fun to watch.

As I became an adult, I also realized how these old stories reflected and encouraged people to internalize misogynic views towards women, since most of the time those stories were written and told by men. So although I loved them very much, I’ve always had mixed feelings about them, and in writing Where the Wild Ladies Are, I wanted to create a space where all the female ghosts can enjoy themselves and find new lives. After I started to write the book, I did some research to find new stories I didn’t know of. One of the stories I was fascinated by was “Neko no Tadanobu,” which I rewrote as “The Jealous Type,” in which a jealous woman appears. The woman doesn’t have a big part to play in the story, and nobody feels sorry for her even though her husband is cheating on her. So in my story, I made her a main character and let her be as jealous as she wants.  READ MORE…