I was musing a while back as to how Ancillary Justice would work when translated into languages such as Finnish or Hungarian which, like Radchaai, have no gendered pronouns. As it happens, Csilla Kleinheincz got the job of translating the book into Hungarian. She has just commented on my post, and I thought it would be worth elevating that into a post. Here’s what Csilla had to say:

The non-gendered pronouns helped a lot as we are well used to having no default gender and don’t have to make a deliberate choice when using pronouns in our writings — thus our language is a bit closer to Radchaai, although I had to adjust the text more at the places where Breq uses direct references to gender. On the other hand, instead of gender-neutral nouns for ‘child’, ‘cousin’, ‘parent’ etc., I used the feminine versions to make up for what I lost with the gender-neutral translation of ‘she’. It’s possible to find a different solution but I wanted to keep the text flowing and natural while retaining the mentality behind using ‘she’ as the basic pronoun.

I really enjoyed working on it, I wish all books I get for translation would be this good and challenging.

So there you have it. Hungarian has a partial solution. Is the Finnish translator out there?

Fascinating stuff, this translation business. I have so much admiration for the people who do it.

One of the best ways to acquaint yourself with fiction from Latin America remains the fabulous Cosmos Latinos anthology which I reviewed for Emerald City back in 2004. It contains stories by both Latina authors I have mentioned thus far: Angélica Gorodischer & Daína Chaviano. There are also many other fine stories in it.

Also germane to this post is the fact that the editors of the book are both women: Andrea Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán. I suspect that many of the translators are women too. I can’t check because my copy of the book is in California.

Anyway, here is my review, first published in Emerald City #104.

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I owe my discovery of this particular book to reader Mike Kingsley who wrote to me suggesting a translated story as a potential Hugo nominee. The story in question was “Gray Noise”, by Pepe Rojo, and it appears in Cosmos Latinos, an anthology of science fiction from Latin America and Spain, edited by Andrea Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán. Given Mike’s enthusiastic recommendation of one of the stories in the book, it seemed that I really should cover it in this column.

If Cosmos Latinos has a flaw, then it is that it is trying to be two different things. Rather than simply pick the best of current Latino SF, the editors have gone all the way back to the 19th Century and have produced a history of Latino SF from then to the present day. (By the way, I’m using the US term Latino here, in part because of the title of the book, but whenever I use that term it should be taken to encompass Spain as well, and not to include other “Latin” European countries except possibly Portugal. There are works translated from Portuguese in the book, but they are all Brazilian.) So on the one hand we are looking at an historical document, and on the other a cross-cultural comparison. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, except that the development of Latino SF seems to have closely paralleled English SF. There is obviously less influence from the American pulps, and more influence from the likes of Borges, but in terms of history it is very recognizable.

We start out in the 19th Century with absurdly optimistic faith in science and an earnest support of a “feminism” that would have most modern-day women gagging in horror. From there we move forward to a more rigorous view of science, on into a period where most of the stories sound like scripts from Classic Trek, and finally into a grimy cyberpunk era. It is all very familiar.

Culturally, however, there are differences. There is perhaps more of an emphasis on religion than in English SF. But by far the most characteristic feature of the stories is their fascination with living under dictatorships. There is, of course, a very good reason for this, namely that many of the stories were written by people who actually have lived under dictatorships, as opposed to us lucky Anglos who have largely avoided that fate. Needless to say, the whole thing sounds much more real when written about by someone with practical experience of the subject.

The most important question, however, is whether these stories are worth reading. Are Spanish and Latin American SF writers any good? And the answer to that is an unequivocal yes. Some are obviously better than others, and I’d like a highlight a few of the stories.

The funniest piece in the book dates all the way back to 1952. “Baby H.P.” by Mexican writer, Juan José Arreloa, is a mock advertising brochure for a special harness that you can put on your toddler and have the little darling generate electricity as it rushes about the place. The power generated is stored in a battery, which can later be used to power household appliances. It is probably even funnier now than when it was written because to us the style of 1950’s advertising is hilarious all by itself.

You can foster individual ambition in the wee ones by rewarding them with little prizes when they surpass their usual production records. For this purpose we recommend sugar treats, which repay your investment with interest. The more calories added to a child’s diet, the more kilowatts saved on the electricity bill.

“Baby H.P.”, Juan José Arreloa

Argentina’s Angélica Gorodischer is one of the acknowledged stars of Latino SF. Her novel, Kalpa Imperial, recently translated into English by Ursula Le Guin, will find its way into this column before too long. Cosmos Latinos features her story, “The Violet’s Embryos” from 1973, a disturbing tale about the crew of a spaceship marooned on a planet that will grant almost any wish they desire, except escape and women. Back in 1973 writing feminist SF was tough enough for the likes of Russ and Le Guin in the USA. Goodness only knows what it was like in Argentina, but Gorodischer does a great job.

I was pleased to find that the book contained a story by Cuba’s Daína Chaviano, probably the only work of hers to appear in English thus far. “The Annunciation”, from 1983, is about a young woman called Mary who received a visit from an angel and discovers the delights of heaven. Goodness only knows what the Catholic Church made of this one.

The star of the show, however, is Mexico’s Pepe Rojo. “Gray Noise” is a fabulous piece of cyberpunk about a reporter with an implanted camera. The story dates from 1996, long before the explosion in reality TV. Rojo has his finger firmly on the sick tastes of the TV audience, and boy can he write. If he were working in English he’d be a big name by now. “Gray Noise” won the Kalpa, Mexico’s top SF award, and it deserves to be much wider known.

The whole world is on TV. Anyone can be a star. Everyone acts, and every day they prepare themselves because today could be the day that a camera finds them and the whole world discovers how nice, good looking, friendly, attractive, desirable, interesting, sensitive, and natural they are. How human they are.

“Gray Noise”, Pepe Rojo

Cubans come in two types: those who still live in Cuba, and those who have left to live elsewhere in the world (often the USA). Daína Chaviano falls into the latter group, but she still counts as one of Latin America’s finest writers of fantastic fiction. In 2004 she was a guest of honor at ICFA, which is a highly unusual thing to happen to a non-English-speaking writer. I didn’t get to talk to her much, at least in part because many of the male writers were following her around with their tongues hanging out. It was quite spectacular.

Chaviano’s best known work is the novel, The Island of Eternal Love, which is unfortunately titled because it makes it sound like a romance. Actually, when I wrote about it, I said:

As well as being a ghost story, it is also an examination of the roles played by different races in the history of Cuba, and a heart-felt expression of the conflicted attitudes of Cuban emigres living in Miami.

I didn’t do a full review, at least in part because I wasn’t sure about the translation. My brief remarks can be found here.

This week’s prompt for Women in Translation Month is the Americas, so naturally I am starting with Argentina’s Angélica Gorodischer. Small Beer press have her Trafalgar, translated by Amalia Gladhart, and next year they will be publishing Prodigies, translated by Sue Burke. However, they first book of hers that they published was Kalpa Imperial, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin. Here is my review, first published in Emerald City #107 (July 2004).

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One of the problems with translating books from foreign languages is that you often tend to only get the hard jobs. There are doubtless lots of novelists in Argentina, but some of them are exceedingly famous, and they are the ones that people in non-Spanish-speaking countries want to read. One of those famous Argentinean writers is Angélica Gorodischer. She has written 17 novels, has won numerous awards, is compared to Borges, Calvino and Kafka by the Buenos Aires press, and has none of her work available in English, until now. Fortunately for us, the person who has chosen to translate Gorodischer’s work is a brilliant writer in her own right, and a person whose interests in fiction seem to map well with Gorodischer’s own: Ursula Le Guin.

The book in question, Kalpa Imperial, is a strange beast. It is a collection of short stories about a mythical empire. The material was first published in Argentina in 1983 as two separate volumes. It was re-printed in Barcelona in 2000 as a single-volume collection, and it is that format that Small Beer Press has chosen for the first English-language edition. You will see the book referred to as a novel, presumably on the grounds that it is a fix-up of sorts. Certainly all of the stories seem to be set in the same mythical empire. But aside from that there is little to connect them and I think I’d classify it as a collection.

All these works of the imaginative inventions unfortunately got into chronicles, which were made into books which everybody respected and believed, principally because they were thick, hard to hold, tedious, and old. And they got into legends, those tales that everybody says they don’t believe in because they can’t take them seriously, and that everyone believes in precisely because they can’t take them seriously. And they were sung in ballads, which are insidious because they pass to easily about town squares and the ports and the dance halls. And none of it was true, none of it, none of the romantic origins, none of the melodious and fantastical names.

As to the stories, they are all fables. There is little attempt at world building, but equally very little in the way of magic or other traditional fantasy tropes. What we get are legends out of the history of the empire, which seems to stretch back thousands of years. There are good emperors and bad emperors, wise empresses and vacuous ones. Much of the book is to do with meditation on government and how to undertake it wisely.

This is where things get kind of interesting, because the back cover contains blurbs from reviews written in Argentina and Spain. The Argentinean review says, “not once is there an attempt to pass judgment on the real world from fiction,” whereas the Spanish one specifically says that the book is allegorical. That could just be two reviewers reading the book differently. But it occurs to me that the first publication of the book was only a year after a couple of wannbe imperial despots called Galtieri and Thatcher fought a stupid war over a small collection of barren islands in the South Atlantic. Could Gorodischer perhaps be commenting on this? Does the fact that one of the stories has a character called Magareta’Acher have anything to do with this? Is the fact that the Emperors live in the northern hemisphere of their world and the brave and independent rebels live in the south significant?

Maybe, but for the most part the stories have rather less obvious political content. They are much more the sort of thing that Le Guin writes: interesting little fables that deride the power-hungry and promote a small-is-beautiful view of the world. There is a worry with translation that translators will impose their own style and prejudice on the work, and the similarity to Le Guin’s own work could raise suspicions of that here. But having read all of the book I suspect that Le Guin would have had to undertake a major re-write to achieve that because there are just so many places where the style and attitudes some through. I suspect rather that Le Guin and Gorodischer have fairly similar attitudes and preferences, and that therefore Le Guin is an ideal person to translate Gorodischer’s work.

As for recommendations, if you like Le Guin then you will like this book as well. On the other hand, it is certainly not traditional SF or fantasy as we English-speakers understand it. There certainly are some fun stories there. I particularly enjoyed the odd versions of Greek myths retold by the caravan master in “The Old Incense Road”. And I certainly wish that more of Gorodischer’s work were available in English.

I missed the official LGBT focus on Wednesday due to being stupidly busy, but today is the official kids & YA day so I’m taking you on a trip to Engelsfors. This small Swedish town is the setting for a trilogy by Sara B. Elfgren and Mats Strandberg. (They are not a couple.) The name of the town translates as Angel Falls, and the books tell the story of a group of teenagers who discover that they are witches. The books have sold in translation it many languages, and a movie is being made in Sweden. The Circle and Fire are available in English now, and The Key is published in Swedish so is presumably on the way. I’ve read the first book and really enjoyed it. I see the website has an enthusiastic endorsement from Liz Hand. The kids in the book represent a variety of lives, and the sexuality and gender issues seem very well handled as far as I’ve read. Also Sara & Mats are lovely people.

There’s a wealth of speculative fiction writers in The Philippines. Many of them are women. The ones I am familiar with all write in English, though I am sure there will be some who write in Tagalog, and quite possibly some who write in Spanish as well. As with Aliette, though their words may not need translating, they are very much presenting a non-white culture to the Anglophone world. I mention Rochita and Eliza because I’m familiar with their work and like it, but really you should seek out Alternative Alamat and the various other anthologies published by Flipside (the company Charles Tan works for) because there are lots of great people you can read.

I also recommend listening to the Small Blue Planet episode with Charles and Dean Alfar as guests as you’ll learn a lot more from them than you can from me.

Aliette lives in France and writes in English, but she’s well worth listing here because of the use of Vietnamese culture in her short fiction. She may not be translating the language, but she is presenting the culture to the Anglophone world, and that’s a very valuable thing to be doing. See here for a list of her award-winning short fiction.

This is the final day of the Northern & Western Europe focus for Women in Translation Month, so I’ll try to catch up with lots of people whom I have not yet mentioned.

Starting in Sweden, we have Sara B. Elfgren, co-author of the massively-selling and soon-to-be-movies Engelsfors series. I’ll be talking more about her when we get to the LGBT focus day.

Moving on the Finland, Salla Simukka, is the Next Big Thing in YA fiction. The first book in her Snow White Trilogy, Red as Blood, will be published in English on August 26th.

Also from Finland, Emmi Itäranta now lives in the UK and writes in English, but I don’t want to leave her out just because she’s smart enough to be bilingual. Her Memory of Water is a very interesting dystopian novel set in a future Finland that is ruled by the Chinese. I’m not entirely convinced by her future setting, but the story of a young woman trying to respect a family tradition, while discovering that her parents may have done something horribly unethical, is very well told.

Emmi is featured alongside Jenny Kangasvuo and Tiina Raevaara in the Finnish Weird magazine, paper copies of which doubtless be available at Worldcon. (I have a few if you want to reserve one.)

Talking of people who write in English, I haven’t forgotten Aliette de Bodard (France/Vietnam) and Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (Netherlands/Philippines). I’m saving them for the Asia tour.

Finally we drop in on Spain to say hi to Rosa Montero whose Blade Runner influenced novel, Tears in Rain, is available in translation.

Now I get to worry about who I have forgotten. I’m sure there are lots of them.

Our next stop on the European tour for Women in Translation Month is France. For my French episode of Small Blue Planet I spoke to Mélanie Fazi, who has had short fiction published in translation in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science-Fiction, Black Static and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Mélanie also translates English language works into French. As Brandon Sanderson is one of the people whose books she has translated, she may well be quite busy these days.

Mélanie shares the podcast with Lionel Davoust. They talk about their own work, and that of many other French writers. You can listen to the episode here.