August is Women in Translation month. The initiative was started four years ago by translator Meytal Radzinski to challenge the gender imbalance in the anglophone publishing industry. This sees works by women making up only around 30 per cent of books originally written in other languages that make it onto English-language bookshop shelves.
And as WITmonth for the Twitterate among you is all about championing underrepresented voices, it seemed to make sense to seek out a title from a country that is relatively poorly served for translation overall.
Slovakia is such a nation. Although a relatively wide selection of Czech literature is available in English, there is surprisingly little to sample from the country that made up the other half of Czechoslovakia until its dissolution in Here, surely, was an exciting title to get my teeth into. At a mere pages, Seeing People Off might seem to be a sliver of a book. Its contents, however, are far from lightweight. There are oddball comparisons too. Much of this quirkiness is funny, but it can be alarming too.
Discussions surrounding a reality TV show set in a concentration camp and cold — almost clinical — accounts of violence and suicide inspire unease as the narrative lurches between what is acceptable and what is not, inviting readers to acknowledge and test this boundary within themselves. The result is a book that seems to operate partly on the subconscious level, dredging up, inverting and reconfiguring ideas, themes and images. As such, it requires careful reading for, suspended on the finest of threads, the narrative is always only an attention lapse or two away from tumbling into nonsense.
For those who persevere, however, the rewards are great. In so doing, she reveals that sometimes the point of reading might be to lose the thread. Mona responded to my Halfway Appeal for countries I have yet to find books from with several interesting ideas. There was a good interview with him , in which he talked about the reasons not many Slovak writers have been translated into English, on Three Percent, she said.
