Last month, we celebrated Women in Translation Month and this month we’re celebrating translation more broadly with Translation Month! Over the years, we’ve published books translated from Punjabi, Odia, Polish, Slovenian, and French. In her translator’s note for the forthcoming Little Wet-Paint Girl by Ouanessa Younsi, Rebecca Thompson writes: “The translation of poetry is a long walk. You seek some sort of origin, try to discover some text that fixes your feet firmly in one direction. You look ahead at the landscape, try to get a look at the text’s face, evaluate your expectations and aspirations, and then you make start making decisions. Then you take a step. Then another. If all goes well, if the origin was steady and the steps line up as required, you will end up at a destination. That’s the process, defined as concretely and as specifically as I’m able: discover, decide, then step and repeat.”
Collected here are tiny excerpts from some of our favourite translations.
![[book cover] Grieving for Pigeons](https://www.aupress.ca/app/uploads/120294_Grieving-for-Pigeons-revised-cover.jpg.jpg)
Grieving for Pigeons: Twelve Stories of Lahore by Zubair Ahmad, translated by Anne Murphy
Our beginning is like a blue sky; time makes it dull and grey. Remembrance turns it into the deep blue of evening, before it becomes a thick night. There is some other place between dream and reality where we live and die.
Sefer by Ewa Lipska, translated by Barbara Bogoczek and Tony Howard
In those days I often talked to my father. “Read yourself,” he used to say, “read yourself carefully, revise yourself, then take the Test.” Increasingly, his life was invading my space. Sometimes I felt he wanted to present me with some black box, the symbol of the disaster he’d survived. “Do you know what I’m going to tell the dead?” he used to ask me: “‘I never forgot you.’”
What We Are When We Are: Kaj smo, ko smo by Cvetka Lipuš, translated by Tom Priestly
Morning throws you a rope
you use to clamber along to the evening.
However far up you get,
your body, a vowel with a foreign accent,
keeps in step.
Breath gives autumnal colours to bone marrow,
and when the sun appears, a mega-star
on the stage of the earth, early and high
you leap into the day
Praha by E.D. Blodgett with Czech translations by Marzia Paton
the light that falls in late
autumn through linden trees
that line the alleys of
the parks is harvest light
a light that bears all
the summer in its warmth
And, finally, because we’re so excited about this stunning collection that’s coming out next month, a little excerpt from Little Wet-Paint Girl by Ouanessa Younsi, translated by Rebecca L. Thompson.
Among tall grass and wasps, I didn’t know the wind was an hourglass. My innocence amused the woman next door. Her delight planted watermelons, pink mouthfuls amidst famine. We rescued different species, different riddles:
Why does September make you thirsty?
Once born, who stays behind?
The neighbor woman was a theater.
We grew older, and I lost her by losing myself.
