Before the talk, Joanna Huss talked a little bit about the importance of mentors, particularly for women (translators) in academia. She talked about a bad experience she had had, and how after that, she made it a priority to actively see and support those coming into the field after her. I thought this idea of mentorship—particularly women mentoring other women—resonated beautifully with the way in which she talked about Ginczanka. She did not shy away from saying that Ginczanka was beautiful, curious about sex and humanity and the metaphysical universe all at the same time. I felt that she saw Ginczanka on so many different, important levels without fixating on one singular moment or facet. Huss took into consideration Ginczanka’s youth, her family life, her physical appearance, her early poems, her later poems, photographs of her, the material that remains from her life, the material that was either lost or yet to be found. The way Huss discussed Ginczanka’s work reminded me very much of the concept of “herstory,” a feminist history that includes memory, stories, dreams, poetry, and multiple, sometimes even contradictory narratives rather than a linear, chronological, patriarchal History.
Emma Ramadan’s translation of Anne Garreta’s In Concrete is just a brilliant breaking down. Of course, the title In Concrete, suggests a sort of fixed-ness, stuck foreverness. But then Garreta and Ramadan do just the opposite. The text is, as we have seen throughout the course of this semester, a flexible, always changing, always moving thing. Almost immediately, In Concrete breaks down the very flexible boundaries between written and spoken language—the young narrator’s words constantly shifting between the two and peppered with wordplay. Perhaps more importantly, the novel breaks down fixed notions of storytelling and… novels themselves. Instead of a highly linear narrative, the novel somehow establishes an all-at-once slowed down and sped up understanding of time. The family is constantly in motion, with things moving and breaking and needing repair, and then a narrator who is side-tracked, distracted by this or that digression.
I found Ramadan’s translator’s note at the very end particularly helpful and moving. On page 178, Ramadan calls the book “a feminist inversion of a domestic drama” (178) and I agree—the voice of a young, female narrator who knows a hilarious and jaw-dropping amount of information about machinery, concrete mixers, glands, and electricity is enough to suggest this—but regardless, I’m curious to hear Ramadan speak more about how she sees feminism operating in this text.
-sharon
No comments:
Post a Comment