Someone messaged me on LinkedIn today, asking about my PhD and wanting to know whether I was daunted at the prospect, which reminded me I’ve left that last post hanging a bit. So here goes…

In short, my PhD project is a feminist translation of Camila Valenzuela León’s YA novel, De bosque y cenizas, which I will produce through workshops with secondary school students, where we will revise and adapt my draft translations to produce a finished text that will cause its readers to critically engage with the issues it raises.

As I said before, my motivation to do this came from my master’s, and the work I had begun on establishing feminist translation strategies for children’s literature while translating another YA book by Camila. I have continued to work with Camila since finishing that project, and become more and more interested in what she and others in Chile are doing to change the way that children’s literature is perceived, taking it from something that is seen as having either pure entertainment or educational value, somehow lesser than books written for adults, to something that is recognised as literature in its own right.

There are a lot of brilliant books for children coming out of countries like Chile and Argentina at the moment, written in the aftermath of lengthy and brutal dictatorships. The books might not be about that per se, but there is a common theme of writers telling stories that encourage children towards civic engagement, that promote a “nunca más” (never again) ideal…

And there are a lot of fantastic books for adults from these countries that are being translated into English – many of them published by the brilliant Charco Press – but a lot of UK children’s publishers seem unwilling to take a chance on translating a book that is more than just a good story; there’s a reluctance to believe that children are capable of reading and appreciating literature that holds a subtext.

So my hope for this project is that I can not only establish some effective feminist translation strategies for children’s literature, which can be used by other translators in future, but also that I can help to further the work that Camila and her colleagues are doing, to get Chilean children’s literature recognised and read by children around the world.

Oh, and to answer Hilal’s question: yes, I’m terrified! But I really believe in this project, and I have a fantastic supervisory team behind me at UCC, who are giving me the support and encouragement I need to make this happen.

I know I said my next post would explain a bit more about my actual PhD project, but as the kids have been home over the summer I’ve been finding it harder to focus on the academic reading so have compromised by reading other people’s musings on translation, and I wanted to share some (horribly self indulgent, sorry) thoughts on what I’ve read.

The books I’ve been poring over for the past couple of weeks are Daniel Hahn’s Catching Fire, and Jen Calleja’s Fair: The Life-Art of Translation, two titles that are only really comparable in that they are written by esteemed translators, and have translation as their subject matter. Catching Fire is Daniel Hahn’s translation diary, written while he was translating Chilean author Diamela Eltit’s novel Nunca el fuego jamás (Never did the Fire). The diary was live posted on the Charco Press website at the time and has since been published as a book.

Fair, on the other hand, is… well, I’m not sure how to describe it really. It’s essentially a guided tour through an imaginary book/art/fun fair, in which every stand/attraction represents some facet of the life of a translator. It’s sort of part memoir, part manifesto campaigning for translator visibility and fair pay (ooh, I wonder if there’s a double meaning in the title? Probably – she is a translator, after all, so no word will have gone unconsidered).

Whenever I read books about translation (or attend seminars, workshops, events…) I experience a strange rollercoaster of emotions. In many ways, both these books offer plenty of reassurance – Daniel Hahn’s first drafts look a lot like mine! Jen Calleja worries her German isn’t always up to scratch! – and there’s lots in both of them that any translator could relate to. But then the self doubt begins to creep in. These are both really well established, award-winning literary translators, how could I even think about comparing myself to them? They started young, pushed themselves, found a way to be in the right place at the right time, and had bucket loads of talent to smooth their path… I’m  always impressed at the way imposter syndrome can take hold of me, even when I’m sitting in my own home.

If you want a less egocentric review of these books, here goes: Catching Fire is a great little glimpse into the mind and working life of a translator. We see the text turn from a sketchy first draft to a polished translation, ready to be submitted for editing, and we get some fascinating insights into the challenges and decisions that went into that process. I’ve yet to read the resulting novel – although I bought it at the same time as the diary and spent a good week dithering over which to read first – but I’m confident it will be worth the wait.

Fair is almost a love letter to translation, explaining why she’s stuck with it despite all obstacles – low pay, poor recognition, unpredictable workloads – and I think is possibly more accessible to a non translator, although it’s hard to say really, given my personal situation. Perhaps I’ll lend them both to friends and feed back.

Anyway, with all three kids now back at school I’d probably better get on with some real work. More on my project next week!

When I finished my masters, I told myself and everyone around me that there was absolutely no way I was going to do a PhD. No chance. Not in a month of Sundays. I had absolutely had enough of academia, never wanted to attempt to decipher another convoluted journal article, never mind compile a bibliography. And the idea of presenting at conferences filled me with dread. That was my academic career over. And yet here I am, just embarking on a doctoral project at University College Cork, with three years of textbooks, bibliographies, papers and presentations ahead of me. So how did I get here, and for the love of God why?

When I was working on an assignment as part of the MA, I was looking for potential texts to translate and I came across a Chilean author of books for young adults, Camila Valenzuela León. I got in touch with Camila, who was delighted I’d taken an interest in her work and more than happy for me to translate an extract from one of her books for the assignment. That particular essay was on the application of translation theory, and I had chosen feminist translation: as Camila’s work is heavily influenced by her own feminist stance, this seemed an appropriate choice. However, although there is plenty of scholarship about feminist translation and its strategies, I struggled to find much work that told me how those strategies could be adapted for children’s and YA literature. Strange, I thought, given that children are very much the future, but whatever, so I had a little think about my own strategies, wrote the essay, got a decent mark and left it at that.

By the time I came to start my final extended translation project (ETP), I had got to know Camila and her work a bit better, so was keen to translate another of her texts. She introduced me to a series of fairy tale retellings she had written, and I chose one of those, Las Durmientes (The Sleepers), which is based on Sleeping Beauty, but set in Chile and entrenched in Chilean history and mythology. With a bit more time on my hands (we were given several months to work on the ETP), I decided to delve further into the theory on feminist translation for children, but still found very little. So I thought a bit further about what my own strategies might be, found some scholarship from other disciplines (education, children’s literature) to back them up, and cracked on with the project. Once again, I was awarded a high mark, but I couldn’t help feeling slightly dissatisfied – obviously I was delighted to do well, but I wasn’t fully convinced that I, a 40-year-old woman, and my examiners, both also fully-grown adults, were the best people to judge how effective those strategies were.

Fast forward a year from my graduation – during which time I had been slogging away trying to get a foot in the door of the literary translation world, with varying degrees of success – and I was attending an event at the Birmingham Literature Festival, run by the Feminist Translation Network. The talk was really interesting, with a number of translators talking about how they apply feminist theory in their practice, but what struck me was that still no one was talking about feminist translation for children’s literature. This really played on my mind over the next few days and weeks, and I began to think about why this was so important to me. What I came up with was this:

• I really believe in the importance of children reading books translated from other languages and cultures, as a way of fostering empathy and inclusivity in the next generation
• Translated children’s books that also carry a political message, whether that’s feminism or lessons learned from conflict situations have a sort of double value
• While adults tend to have fully formed political opinions that are unlikely to be changed, children – and particularly adolescents – are more open to new ideas. So YA books containing feminist themes have the potential to influence their readers and change the way they see the world. And, because those readers are the voters and politicians of the future, maybe even change the way the world is run.
• Camila and other authors are working hard to change the face of young adult literature in Chile, arguing that children are more than capable of deciphering subtext and engaging with political themes, and I feel it is only fair to give the translation of their books the same careful consideration that they have given to the writing of them
• While it makes sense for adults to come up with and assess the efficacy of feminist translation strategies for literature aimed at adults, surely the best judges of whether strategies aimed at children are effective are the children themselves?

Once I’d established these points, it became painfully obvious that the only person who was going to be able to solve the problem was me (particularly since I seemed to be the only one convinced that it actually was a problem). So, armed with all these ideas and ideals, I set about finding an appropriate supervisory team and devising a plan for my project. More on which next time!