Check for web archive captures
Translating International Literature as Human Rights
Activism
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2019-09-02 17:24:13
[caption id="attachment_ 13013" align="alignleft" width="300"] The Women
in Translation panel at McNally-Jackson Books in New York, from left, Inea Bushnaq, Sevine Turkkan, Alex Zucker, Jenny
Wang Medina, Anne Goldstein, and Jenny McPhee.[/caption] With the end of August and the start of September Women in
Translation Month has given way to a month devoted to all international literature in translation. Women in Translation
Month was began in August 2014, established by critic Meytal Radzinski to highlight the gender disparities of which authors
are translated into English from their original languages. In the United States, under 3% of traditionally published books
each year are translations from other languages, and only 30% of these are books by women authors. As I found out when I
attended a Women in Translation reading at McNally-Jackson Bookstore last week, whether or not an author is translated
isn’t just a matter of money and prestige. For some writers, it can have life and death consequences. In the panel moderated
by Jenny Wang Medina and Alex Zucker, translators Seving Tiirkkan, Anne Goldstein and Jenny McPhee, and Inea Bushnaq
read, respectively, from works by Asli Erdogan, Anna Maria Ortese, and Najla Jraissaty Khoury. The name Asli Erdogan
sounded familiar. Three years ago, she and translator Necmiye Alpay were imprisoned following the failed coup against
Turkey’s strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan (no relation to the author) in July 2016. Accused of terrorism for their support
for a pro-Kurdish newspaper, the two women were incarcerated for four months until an international letter-writing
campaign helped to secure their conditional release. As | wrote at the time:
Turkish authorities arrested and held 70-year-old Alpay along with her 49-year-old friend and colleague Asli
Erdogan, who has diabetes and suffered damage to her health as a result of the conditions in prison. In her
statement to English PEN, the first of the PEN affiliates to take her case, Alpay sought to draw attention to her
friend’s plight above her own, highlighting Erdogan’s literary accomplishments and delicate health. It was a
moving example of solidarity among writers...
Upon their release, the two women writers had their passports seized, trapping them inside a Turkey that could imprison or
execute them at any time. Since then, charges were dropped and Asli Erdogan received political asylum. She now lives in
exile in Germany. [caption id="attachment_ 13014" align="alignright" width="249"] :
Translator Sevinc Turkkan holds the English edition of Asli Erdogan's short stories.[/caption] Born in n Bulgaria to Turkish
parents and immigrated to the United States as a teenager, Seving Tiirkkan has long appreciated Erdogan’s writing. After it
was first published in a somewhat freer Turkey in 2009, Tirkkan began translating the short story collection The Stone
Building and Other Places for herself, as many translators do for practice and out of appreciation for their favorite
international authors. As she began teaching in upstate New York at the University of Rochester and translating other books,
Tirkkan put the project aside but came back to it when she heard that Erdogan had been arrested. She approached publishers
in the hope that they would understand the importance of translating an author whose life was now in danger. They weren’t
— except for City Lights, a venerable independent press that has long devoted itself to books that address topics of social
justice and human rights. Last year, City Lights published The Stone Building and Other Stories, a collection of three stories
and a novella written ten years ago that have proven prescient. All of the stories occur in the sight, or memory, of a stone
building — a prison that the readers finally enter in the novella. The first two stories take place in exile. In the first, a former
political prisoner is visited by the ghost of her former self. In the second, a Turkish woman whose health was ruined during
her incarceration escapes from a sanitarium with five others, two other former prisoners in exile and three German women,
to seize a bit of life in the face of sickness and death. The third story follows a pregnant woman to the stone building and
what she witnesses outside. In the novella, we go inside, outside, and above, hearing a chorus of stories: lives interrupted,
2Stone
destroyed, ended, and the line woven throughout, “He left his eyes with me...” e left his
eyes with me.The reader is the witness, bearing the story that the prisoner is no longer alive to tell. In translating The Stone
Building and Other Places, Tirkkan served as the author’s “eyes,” accepting an award for her when she was freed from
prison but still trapped inside her country. Now that she’s in exile, the book’s translation and sales help support her, never an
easy task for one trying to recover from the physical and psychological impacts of imprisonment while starting over in a
new land. Before I became a professional writer and translator, I was a small-time music promoter with a special interest in
folk musicians from Latin America. That background played a major role in my writing of Gringolandia, but at the time, a
principal reason for doing it was to bring these musicians — some of whom had been imprisoned under the dictatorships of
the 1970s and 1980s and others who were working underground to bring democracy to their countries — to the attention of
audiences and, through the audiences, to political leaders in the United States. We knew that unknown people rotted and died
in prison for standing up for their rights, and we knew that once those people became known, they had more protection.
Those in power knew people outside the country were watching. If the artists ended up in prison, we would flood the
authorities with letters. We would embarrass the regimes and call on our representatives to impose sanctions. Sometimes
these tactics didn’t work, but for those writers and musicians who were visible, more often than not they did.
