Featuring work by Loraliu , Dostena Anguelova, Lê Pham Lê, Diti Ronen, Hadassa Tal, Dareen Tatour, Blanca Wiethüchter
Edited by Katherine E. Young
Loraliu
Copyright © Loraliu | Dreamstime.com
Dostena Anguelova translated by Holly Karapetkova
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About the Author
Dostena Anguelova is a poet, anthropologist, and journalist. She is the author of three volumes of poetry and has been published and translated widely throughout Europe. She holds a PhD in International Relations and is the author of the influential political nonfiction text,Experts of Transition.
About the Translator
Holly Karapetkova’s poetry, prose, and translations have appeared recently in The Nashville Review, The Southern Review, and many other places. Her second book, Towline, won the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize and was published by Cloudbank Books.
Lê Pham Lê - translated by Nancy Arbuthnot
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About the Author
Born in Vietnam, poet Lê Phạm Lê is the author of two bilingual collections of poems (translated into English with Nancy Arbuthnot): From Where the Wind Blows, Waves Beyond Waves, and three childrena’s books written in English: Magical Voice in the Forest, Guava Hill, and Baby Sparrow Song. Her poems have been published in several poetry anthologies and periodicals including World Literature Today, Nimrod International Literary Journal, and Source, among others. After working at Los Medanos Community College for 22 years, Lê is retired and currently working on a play, Bequest of Wings, in collaboration with Nancy Arbuthnot.
About the Translator
Nancy Arbuthnot is professor emerita of English at the United States Naval Academy (USNA), author of Spirit Hovering: Poems, and co-translator with Lê Pham Lê of two books of her Vietnamese poems, From Where the Wind Blows and Waves Beyond Waves. She is currently seeking a publisher for her poems about growing up Navy and teaching at USNA.
Diti Ronen translated by Joanna Chen
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About the Author
Diti Ronen is a leading Israeli poet. She has published six full-length collections of poetry, most recently The Return of the House, as well as numerous essays and articles. Her poetry has received international and national awards and has been published in World Literature Today, among others. Ronen is deeply involved in advocating the arts and culture, its policy, and its management.
About the Translator
Joanna Chen is a literary translator and essayist. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Mantis, Asymptote, and Poetry International, among others. She is the translator of Less Like a Dove (Shearsman Books, 2017), Frayed Light (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), and My Wild Garden (Penguin/Random House, 2019). She writes a column for The Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches at the Helicon School of Poetry.
Hadassa Tal translated by Joanna Chen
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About the Author
Hadassa Tal, winner of the coveted Leah Goldberg Poetry Award, has published six poetry collections in Hebrew with Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House. Her work has been translated into several languages and she is the subject of a forthcoming US documentary produced by Truestories. “It is poetry refined as crystal” wrote Bruno Doucey, who published Tal’s work in France and where it has now been declared part of the Ministry of Education’s syllabus. Her poems have inspired leading artists in various fields and has been set to music and dance worldwide. Selected poems translated into English by Joanna Chen have appeared in Mantis, Waxwing, and Ezra.
About the Translator
Joanna Chen is a literary translator and essayist. Her work has appeared in , and Poetry International, among others. She is the translator of Less Like a Dove (Shearsman Books, 2017), Frayed Light (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), and My Wild Garden (Penguin/Random House, 2019). She writes a column for The Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches at the Helicon School of Poetry.
Dareen Tatour translated by Joanna Chen
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About the Author
Dareen Tatour is a Palestinian poet, photographer, and social media activist from Reineh, Israel. In 2018, she was tried and convicted in an Israeli court for inciting violence and supporting a terrorist organization following the publication of a poem on social media. She was released in 2018 after serving a prison term.
“the poet’s case has become a cause célèbre for free speech advocates and has drawn attention to a recent rise in Israeli arrests—of Israeli Arabs and Palestinians in the occupied West Bank—accused of incitement or planning attacks online.” PEN AMERICA has continuously supported Tatour’s case, stating that her conviction “relies on a wanton mischaracterization of her work and is an unacceptable attack on freedom of expression in Israel.” Jewish Voice for Peace and Adalah NY have also openly supported her.
Tatour is the recipient of the OXFAM Novib/PEN award 2019 for freedom of expression. A Hebrew online magazine, , awarded Tatour the 2016 prize for creativity in struggle, and she was also awarded the Danish Carl Scharenberg Prize in 2017 for standing against injustice through her poetry.
Running through all Tatour”s work is a double narrative of oppression against the Palestinian people and also oppression of women under a patriarchal society.
Since her release from prison, Tatour has appeared at events around the world, including in Holland, Sweden and Germany. She was a guest speaker at the CREA conference on violence against marginalized women. I, Dareen Tatour, a solo documentary work by Israeli actress, director, and activist Einat Weizman based on Tatour’s experiences, has been shown both in Israel and abroad.
About the Translator
Joanna Chen is a literary translator and essayist. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Mantis, Asymptote, and Poetry International, among others. She is the translator of Less Like a Dove (Shearsman Books, 2017), Frayed Light (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), and My Wild Garden (Penguin/Random House, 2019). She writes a column for The Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches at the Helicon School of Poetry.
Blanca Wiethüchter translated by Christina Daub
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About the Author
Blanca Wiethüchter (1947-2004), from Bolivia, authored fifteen collections of poetry. Her writing spanned three decades and in addition to being an award-winning poet, she was a historian and essayist and published a novel and three collections of short stories. She taught at the Catholic University of Bolivia, where she ran the creative writing program, and at the Higher University of San Andrés. She is considered an iconic female voice of late 20th century Bolivian poetry and one of the most recognized authors of contemporary Bolivian literature.
About the Translator
Christina Daub co-founded The Plum Review, a national award-winning poetry journal, and started The Plum Writers Retreats and The Plum Reading Series, which featured Joseph Brodsky, Carolyn Forché, Mark Strand and many others. Recent poems appear in The Southampton Review, as well as the anthologies Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, edited by Kim Roberts, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and The Paradelle, both edited by Billy Collins. She is a recipient of a Young American Poet’s Award and her work has been translated into Russian, Italian, and German. She has taught Poetry and Creative Writing in the English Department at George Washington University and in both the Maryland and Virginia Poets-in-the-Schools programs, as well as to adults for many years at The Writer's Center. Her poem At the One Step received a 2017 Pushcart Prize nomination from .
Katherine E. Young
Katherine E. Young is our special editor for this Women in Translation issue.
About this issue
Women in Translation Month, an international event held every August since 2014, is the brainchild of Meytal Radzinski, a scientist and book lover who noticed how few women she was reading in translation. When Radzinski and others began crunching the numbers, it became clear just how few women were being published in English translation. Here in the U.S., only around 3% of the literature published in any given year is in translation—that’s fewer than 800 titles, spanning all literary genres. Of that number, less than one third is work originally written by women. Clearly, we are not hearing enough women—s voices from around the world, not even from those languages where their work is originally published as often as the work of men.
This edition of ArLiJo includes work by women writing in Arabic (Dareen Tatour), Bulgarian (Dostena Anguelova), Hebrew (Diti Ronen and Hadassa Tal), Spanish (the late Blanca Wiethüchter), and Vietnamese (Lê Phạm Lê). The life experiences of these poets are as diverse and multifaceted as their poetry. Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, whose internment by the Israeli government sparked international protest, writes about her imprisonment, as well as her earlier experience of sexual assault. Dostena Anguelova examines the complexities of interpersonal relationships, including loneliness. Diti Ronen explores the many ways a person can define “self.” Hadassa Tal and Blanca Wiethüchter mine questions of death, the passage of time, and each person’s juxtaposition between the two. Lê Phạm Lê, a Vietnamese immigrant to America, travels to Japan.
Meytal Radzinski had two goals in mind when she founded Women in Translation Month: to increase dialogue and discussion about women writers in translation and to encourage people to read more books by women in translation. With this selection of contemporary women poets, including many translations appearing for the first time in English, I hope you’ll want to pursue both of Radzinski’s goals. If the spirit moves you, I urge you to support women authors, their translators, their publishers, and the booksellers who carry their work: go buy a book (or two!) by a woman in translation!
Katherine E. Young
Poet Laureate Emerita, Arlington, Virginia
August 1, 2019
About the Editor
Katherine E. Young is the author of Day of the Border Guards, two chapbooks, and a 2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, Subtropics, and many others. She is the translator of Farewell, Aylis by Azerbaijani political prisoner Akram Aylisli and Blue Birds and Red Horses and Two Poems, both by Inna Kabysh. Young’s translations have appeared in Asymptote, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, and 100 Poems about Moscow, winner of the 2017 Books of Russia award (Poetry). Young was named a 2020 Arlington County Individual Artist Grant recipient and a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow. From 2016-2018, she served as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, Virginia.