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Clockwise from top left: publicity shot for BookSHElf podcast; Fish Soup in Caravans\u00e9rail; in conversation with Margarita Garc\u00eda Robayo<\/p><\/div>\n
I was thrilled when Carolina Orloff, director and editor at Charco Press, invited me to host an evening in conversation with Margarita Garc\u00eda Robayo at the Caravans\u00e9rail<\/a> bookshop in London on 31 October. It was part of Margarita\u2019s European book tour to promote Fish Soup<\/em><\/a>, and it was a great honour to meet her in person; re-reading Fish Soup <\/em>on the train to London, I was struck once again by the profundity of its caustic reflections (as well as finding it mildly surreal to be reading one of my favourite books while en route to meet its author). After spectacularly losing track of time in the excitement of meeting Margarita and Carolina at a tea salon in Brick Lane, we trooped to Caravans\u00e9rail just in time for the event. It was my first time there, and I fell entirely under its spell: it\u2019s a small premises, with the back area packed floor to ceiling with French books on one side and works in English and translation on the other. In the front area there is an intimate interview and audience space, where we gathered for our conversation.<\/p>\n Interviewing Margarita was a dream. She was so open and generous in her responses, both to me and to the audience. We covered topics ranging from the autobiographical nature of her writing and the need to leave Colombia in order to write about it fully, to Charlotte Coombe\u2019s magnificent translation and the cover art of Fish Soup <\/em>(beautifully described by one of my Twitter friends, author R\u00f3n\u00e1n Hession, as \u201clike Jaws but with fuzzy felt\u201d). The thing I most want to focus on here came about when discussing the novella \u2018Sexual Education\u2019, which was published for the first time as part of Fish Soup<\/em>, and is based on Margarita\u2019s own experience of Opus Dei sex education classes in 1990s Colombia (the \u201cTeen Aid\u201d course was one she was forced to attend at school). There was in her class, as in the novella, a girl who claimed to be in communication with the Blessed Virgin, and we discovered in conversation with Margarita that the teachers lapped this up, pressing the girl to find out what Mary had communicated to her, so that they could use this to further convince the female students of the merits of abstention. Margarita talked about the deep effect that such indoctrination can have (in particular, the notion that \u201cvirginity\u201d means \u201cpreserving the hymen\u201d which, as her narrator observes wryly, results in a generation of girls with \u201chymen intact […] ass in tatters\u201d), and described life thereafter as a process of \u201cunlearning\u201d, a sentiment which seemed to resonate with everyone present.<\/p>\n So can we \u201cunlearn\u201d how we think about borders? I\u2019m currently reading Go Went Gone <\/em>by the wonderful Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky and published by Portobello Books. Erpenbeck seems to me to be a truly important writer of our times: in Go Went Gone <\/em>she tackles the subject of migration, and I was struck by the wisdom of this reflection: \u201cHave people forgotten in Berlin of all places that a border isn\u2019t just measured by an opponent\u2019s stature but in fact creates him?\u201d How terrifying that a book reflecting on one of the great socio-political scissions of the last century is so resonant with how I feel in my country today. Borders close us off, keep people out, and create enemies: by opening a book we open ourselves, allow others in, and create connections.\u00a0Charco Press are certainly creating such connections: Margarita described their endeavours as \u201crevolutionary\u201d, since in Latin America literary success is often limited to each individual country, with books not crossing borders in their original language, and so translation into English is an important part of literary success and wider distribution of work. At a time when \u201cthe inhabitants of this territory [\u2026] are defending their borders with articles of law\u201d (Erpenbeck, Go Went Gone<\/em>), it seems to me that promoting and celebrating work that breaks through these borders and barriers is a revolutionary act in itself. In his essay \u201cReflections on Exile\u201d, Edward Said wrote that \u201cBorders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity.\u201d Familiar territory is exactly what we leave behind when we read literature in translation, as we refuse to remain imprisoned in how our particular political or cultural \u201ctime\u201d is telling us to define ourselves. Said goes on to claim that \u201cExiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience\u201d, and perhaps here we could substitute \u201cexiles\u201d with \u201cwriters in translation\u201d: their books not only cross borders but help to break them down, reminding us that we are more connected than we can sometimes realise.<\/p>\n If you read Spanish, you can read Margarita\u2019s full account of her book tour here<\/a>.<\/p>\n The morning after interviewing Margarita I went to Oxford Circus to meet Sophie Baggott, who earlier this year made a pledge to read a book by a woman writer from every country in the world by 2020<\/a>. Sophie also hosts BookSHElf<\/em><\/a>, a monthly podcast for Wales Arts Review, in which each month she interviews a guest about a topic related to women in translation: as the November guest, I followed in the illustrious footsteps of Theodora Danek, writers in translation programme manager at English PEN, Jennifer Croft, translator of the Man Booker International prize-winning Flights <\/em>by Olga Tokarczuk, and the author-translator duo Michelle Steinbeck and Jen Calleja. It was an honour to find myself the guest on a podcast I look forward to each month, and half an hour has rarely passed so quickly: it was a joy to talk about women in translation with someone who shares my passion for it. Aside from talking about the Translating Women project, we talked about books we\u2019ve loved (I shared my four women in translation Books of the Year for 2018 \u2013 tune in<\/a> to see which I chose and why!) and issues such as the difficulties facing women in translation, the importance of the Year of Publishing Women and its legacy, and what we might look forward to in terms of women in translation (as December approaches, my excitement for the soon-to-be-released Translating Feminisms chapbooks<\/a> from Tilted Axis Press grows).<\/p>\n Sophie and I also discussed the \u201clabels\u201d we use to talk about literature: I don\u2019t want to try to define what books from a given geographical region might be “like”, and I wonder whether, if we want to transcend borders, it’s helpful to categorise books by country or literary tradition (particularly if a writer might break with this, challenge it, defy it, or simply reject the notion of a national \u201cliterary tradition\u201d). Or, like Margarita, they might be from one country, live in another, and be published in another \u2013 and it is precisely this porosity, this mobility (dare I utter the words \u201cthis freedom of movement\u201d?) which make literature in translation so important to the English-speaking world. What do a gathering in a multicultural bookshop and a podcast that can be listened to on the world wide web represent, if not a breaking down of borders? Sophie asked me to identify the best opportunities to have come out of the Translating Women project, and it was easy to answer: the connections. What a privilege it is to form relationships (real or virtual) with authors, translators, publishers, and fellow readers.<\/p>\n English PEN uses the strapline \u201cLiterature knows no frontiers\u201d, and if there is anything that the books I\u2019m reading have in common, it is their ability to reach out beyond national stereotypes and physical borders, and create connections. I hope that a day will come when we don\u2019t have to talk about \u201cwomen’s writing\u201d, because we shall simply be talking about \u201cliterature\u201d \u2013 but the days of such equality are, I think, still some way off. Until then, I shall be celebrating the inspiring, enriching, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes quiet, sometimes exuberant, always fascinating body of work that women in translation represents.<\/p>\n And on that note, I\u2019m bringing together two things I love at the end of 2018: I always find the end of the year to be a time of reflection and resolution, and I also like to share some of my favourite quotations from the books I\u2019m reading. So each weekday from 1 December until Christmas, I shall post on Twitter a meditative or inspiring quotation from a book by a woman writer in translation, using the hashtag #WiTWisdom. Please feel free to share and follow the hashtag, and to join in if you feel moved to do so!<\/p>\n The books I couldn’t resist purchasing at Caravans\u00e9rail<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Borders are on my mind right now. I live on an island, and so the borders of my homeland are physical; more importantly, they are also in the hearts and, recently, on the ballot papers of many of my compatriots. Everything about my identity, my work, and my beliefs rejects borders, crosses them, perhaps even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[157,175,179,347,587,859,1039,1055],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/601\/2018\/11\/IMG_20181102_083935.jpg\")
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