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Happy Women in Translation Month!

Kristen Hall-Geisler

• 4 min read
Happy Women in Translation Month!

Apparently, August is Women in Translation Month. I hope you are all celebrating while I am deep into revising my translation the final volume of Mogador’s Memoirs of a French Courtesan.

There are two large cogs in my metaphorically mechanical brain that make translating fun for me: hyperlexia and puzzles. Hyperlexia is an ability to read when very young and without training. It usually comes along with a lifelong ability to comprehend new words more easily than most people, which also leads to a fascination with written materials of all kinds. It is a facet of neurodivergence, so there are downsides that don’t relate to written languages. As for the puzzle part, translating is a bit like doing a cryptic crossword or a decoding puzzle, at least in the first pass. The revision process is where I work to create idiomatic English without flattening the author’s style and intent. It’s like editing someone else’s work, even though I was the translator.

As far as I can tell, I’m the first person to translate the four-volume version of Mogador’s 1858 memoirs. There is another translation from about twenty-five years ago of the two-volume version that Mogador published first. I’ve only skimmed that translation a bit, so I’m not sure where the differences lie. I believe Mogador left out some of the long tales told by her friends, as well as her more philosophical takes on Parisian society of the mid-nineteenth century.

I like to read works in translation to English because, frustratingly, I am not literate in enough languages to read the originals, though sometimes I try and mostly fail.

I’ve plucked a few books translated by women from my shelves as particularly good examples of both the translation itself and the art of the author:

Morgan Giles translated Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri, a short, powerful novel that takes on death and grief, post-nuclear disaster Japan, and the way unhoused people live and are treated. And yet, I promise, it does not leave the reader feeling depressed.

Charlotte Barnslund translated Vigdis Hjorth’s Long Live the Post Horn! Who knew that a novel about a woman dealing with a work crisis through union organization would be so readable? This one is uplifting when personal and occupational pressures are bearing down.

Sasskia Vogel translated Ædnan by Linnea Axelsson. Do not be intimidated by this novel in verse. It is beautiful and moving and epic and deserving of all its accolades. I cannot imagine how challenging it was for Vogel to translate Axelsson’s verse from Swedish, with some Sami, into English, but the result is a moving account of generations of a Sami family navigating change across more than a century.

Ann Goldstein is maybe famously the translator of Elena Ferrante’s novels, including the Neapolitan Quartet. You probably don’t need me to tell you these books are among the greatest works of literature; if you haven’t read them yet, I found that they made great summer reading when devoured one right after another. Goldstein also translated There’s No Turning Back by Alba de Cespedes, which was written in 1938 and published in English in 2025.

Alison Strayer, Tanya Leslie, Anna Moschovakis, and Linda Coverdale have been translating the works of Annie Ernaux into English for Seven Stories Press for something like twenty years. French being the one other language I’m very literate in, I read Ernaux in the original, but I’d easily recommend any of her novels published by Seven Stories to English readers.

Maria Devanna Headley not only translated Beowulf into twenty-first century English, she visited my class at the Harvard Continuing Education School while we were reading this epic poem in the original Old English. If you think you might find Beowulf challenging or stuffy, Headley is the translator for you. She captures the masculinity of the characters and the narrative through her feminist lens.

Links to stuff in this post:

(I receive an affiliate commission from Bookshop.org if you order using these links. Thank you!)

KHG’s latest translations, Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 1: Rebellion, Volume 2: Spectacle, and Volume 3: Luck, are available now.