The Beauty of Translation: A Personal Review of Books Read for Women's Translation Month and Women of Translation Month Read-a-Thon

I recently had the pleasure of reading three books that I picked up at my local bookstore, and I'm excited to share my thoughts on them with you. First up was "The White Book" by Honoring, translated by Deborah Smith. This book is pitched as a novel, but it's actually more like a poetry collection. The author explores the idea of her mother before she was born, particularly in relation to her older sibling who died at birth and an older sister who raised her. What struck me about this book was its unique format, with short segments of text and plenty of white space. While I appreciated the poetic quality of the writing, I found that it wasn't as engaging for me as some of Honoring's other work.

That being said, I did appreciate the thought-provoking nature of "The White Book". The author's exploration of identity and family dynamics is both personal and universal, and her use of imagery and metaphor to convey these ideas was fascinating. What I enjoyed most about this book was its potential for rereading and reflection - I can easily see myself returning to it in the future, and I'm excited to dive back into Honoring's world. While "The White Book" may not have been my favorite of Honoring's work, I do appreciate her unique voice and perspective, and I'm eager to explore more of her writing.

Next up was "Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World", edited by Zahra Funkier. This anthology is a powerful collection of essays by Arab women journalists and photojournalists from around the region, including those who report for publications in the Middle East and beyond. What struck me most about this book was its refreshing lack of stereotypes - despite our Western tendency to view these women as needing to be "rescued" or "saved", Funkier's introduction makes it clear that these women are doing their own work, on their own terms.

As someone who has been fortunate enough to hear Samaya, a Saudi Arabian journalist and editor, talk about her experiences with this book, I can attest to its impact. Funkier's introduction provides context and insight into the lives of these women, but it's the essays themselves that truly shine. From discussing the complexities of feminism in Saudi Arabia to reflecting on the challenges faced by women working professionals in the region, these essays offer a window into a world that is often misunderstood or overlooked.

I was struck by how much I enjoyed listening to Samaya discuss this book - her insights and reflections added depth and nuance to our conversation, and I appreciated the opportunity to hear from someone who has firsthand experience with the issues and themes presented in "Our Women on the Ground". For me, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in feminism, journalism, or simply wanting to learn more about women's experiences in the Middle East. With its diverse range of voices and perspectives, I think it would be an excellent addition to any feminist reading list.

Finally, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the importance of translation in bringing global literature to readers around the world. "Our Women on the Ground" is just one example of how translating works can make these books accessible to new audiences - by working with translators like Miriam Antar, Funkier has helped to bring this valuable collection to life.

In the end, my experience reading these three books for Women's Translation Month and the Women of Translation Month Read-a-Thon was a rewarding one. While "The White Book" may not have been my favorite Honoring work, I appreciate its unique voice and perspective, while "Our Women on the Ground" is an essential collection that offers a fresh and nuanced understanding of women's experiences in the Middle East. With so many amazing books to explore, I'm excited to see what other readers will discover this year!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello my name is candor Winchester welcome back to my channel the noise that you hear is Dylan playing with his toy behind the door so who knows what's gonna happen there I mean but look at this face I mean can you can you tell keep this face out of library I can't so good luck anyway so today we are gonna be talking about the books that I read for women and translation Month specifically books for the women in translation month read-a-thon and I have about four and a half books tell you about and that will make sense here in a second I guess let's just jump into the first couple books so I started out actually with a winter's promise and the missing of Claire de Lune here we go that's better and the missing a Claire de Lune and this is by crystal de bois and this is translated by Hildegard cyril and stop from Europa and I listen to these and I'll put the narrator on the screen here for all of these books and I have really enjoyed this story so this is about a philia and she lives on an ark now Ark is sort of like it looks like this it's a floating piece of earth in the middle of the sky and the earth at some point was like blown to pieces and then people live on these little pieces of land and each like Ark has a sort of like a God and I'll be kind of like ruling families are descended from that God and so they each God has like a different magical power I use the word God it's not exactly right but we're just going to go with it but they have different powers so Ophelia's powers that she can read objects she touches them I can learn more about the past owners and then she can also walk through mirrors and she is one of the first people to be able to walk through mirrors in a long time now she has rejected all the suitors that her parents have presented her to but the elders of her particular arc take matters out of her own hands and arrange her marriage to a guy named thorne who lives on an arc in the north so she goes to like basically the North Pole to with this guy who doesn't really want to marry her she doesn't want marry him and she's thrown into this arena of a world that is really cutthroat and the different families are basically trying to kill each other continuously it's very interesting story and I really enjoyed learning about Ophelia she's like this plucky super weird kind of protagonist just like I love and it's just a great story this is a great almost like feel-good story and you know I've been recommending this book to so many sensitive readers you know I as a kid was very very sensitive as a reader I've always had really vivid nightmares and things and so I would be very careful what I read and what I watched and so this is a book though that doesn't have a ton of violence there's not a ton of stuff in it that might you know be difficult for sensitive readers so I've been recommending this one and the audio book is on hoopla so if your library subscribes to hoopla you can then go listen to these I really love that and I love how both of them are finally on the audio also translated from French so I feel like you're getting this great fun story it's translated it's fabulous it's just so different than any other story that I've read I I just love it so you should definitely go check out our winters promise by Crystal Dibble also really heavy so those were the first two books that I read and that lasted me for a while but I also read this book by jack aarthi and this is translated by Marilyn booth and this is celestial bodies now this is coming out and print in the United States in October so I guess this month no well time flies but this is out on audio and has been out in audio for a while and so I've listened to this on script and I ordered this particular copy from the UK so I really enjoyed this multi-generational family saga because the different viewpoints are the different women the different generations of women you we jump around from their different perspectives through time back and forth and we see all of their interactions and how their choices affect their children or their choices have an effect on their parents and how all of this goes together there is a perspective from one of the patriarchs and he also just talks basically about the women and what the women's choices have meant to him and I find this entire story very interesting because you can see the dynamics of the different generations and they're making different choices than their parents and how marriages and love work with these different in particular there are these three sisters that we follow and I would say they're like almost like the primary generation that we see and they all make different choices in regards to their marriages and love and what those different choices look like and what they have what the consequences are of those decisions of who they marry and who they don't marry and I find that just fascinating I think she did a great job of getting into the heads the characters and seeing how they would react there was this one particular one that I don't want to tell you about because it's a spoiler but she's basically in this very long relationship with this dude and eventually she just like snaps and ah it was so good I was like honey honey should have kicked it to the curb a long time ago but anyway that's her choice so I really enjoyed reading this book and I definitely will be picking up more by this author in the future hopefully they will now translate more of her work and English because that would be fabulous I assume she has more books I have not actually looked this up but I assume yes she seems pretty established and she won the Man Booker International Prize so congratulations to her it's just so good alright so the next book I picked up actually read print and this is the white book by honking and this is translated by Deborah Smith this is out from Hogarth here in the United States this is basically almost like a poetry collection I think it's pitched as a novel but it's basically this character had an older sibling who died at birth and an older sister and so she's trying to grapple with who her mother is before she's born like a lot of us do but also thinking of the sibling that died and what her life could have been like and she does this pondering through thinking about different white things that's why it's called the white book and it read more like poetry I read that this is like Maggie Nelson's Bluett I believe it's called but I have never read that but that's what I've seen it compared to I did find this the reading experience was definitely more like poetry because there are these little segments of text and it's lots of white space and obviously that was planned but I found this very interesting I really enjoyed though I would say her her novel novels more than I enjoyed this just because this is a more like poetry and at first time I went into it I was confused and I didn't exactly know what was going on I think this would definitely hold up to rereading though so I'll definitely have to check that out but I much enjoyed more her vegetarian and he Max is still my favorite but she's still such a brilliant writer and I'd be really interested to read more of her work I hope they publish more of her work I mean she seems to be doing pretty well for herself so but yeah I feel like I'm like also the last person to read this book on book do I get there eventually the last book I'm gonna tell you about I'm gonna tell you about a little bit and talk about it a little bit more later but this is our women on the ground essays by Arab women reporting from the Arab world and this is edited by Zahra funkier and this is Ana brilliant anthology that's Arab women journalist and photo journalist from around the Arabia that region of the world the Middle East and just talking about doing their job as women journalist I think here in the West we often have these very strict stereotype say for some reason a lot of times even our feminism comes out that these women are being oppressed and that they need to be rescued but these women make it very clear that they do not need some random Western white Savior to come and save them they are just doing the thing on their own in their own culture and it was really great to talk about this book with samaya she is from Saudi Arabia and she and I talked about this on the reading-room podcast so I'm not gonna talk about it down here because we like take different essays and talk about them and she gives her own experience growing up as a woman in Saudi Arabia and being a woman working woman a professional woman who was you know a magazine editor in Saudi Arabia and just all the different things that are in her experience and all the things that she found in this book that just yeah we both had so many feelings about this and it was great to be able to talk to someone who's experienced some of the things that are in this book and to have her take on it so I highly recommend that you go to check out that conversation it will be the first episode went up this week and then the discussion episode about this book will go up in a couple weeks so like the middle of October the third Wednesday in October whenever that is obviously I really love this book there are flags everywhere and I would have to say that this is definitely a book that I just want to shove into people's hands and say go read this book because this is just something that more people especially those of us who advocate for feminism and women's rights that we definitely need to read more of or these women's stories from their own perspectives and I am including this for women's translation Month because several of these essays are translated from arabic not all of them but a lot of them are and thus translator is miriam antar and so she did a great job she translated all of the essays that were originally written in arabic into english and so i think she did a great job I really enjoyed the audio book so definitely go check out our women on the ground just gonna wave the book around until someone finally picks it up and starts reading so anyway those are the books that I read for women translation month and the women of translation month read-a-thon thank you so much for watching and I'll see you the next one can you believe him really bye guys youhello my name is candor Winchester welcome back to my channel the noise that you hear is Dylan playing with his toy behind the door so who knows what's gonna happen there I mean but look at this face I mean can you can you tell keep this face out of library I can't so good luck anyway so today we are gonna be talking about the books that I read for women and translation Month specifically books for the women in translation month read-a-thon and I have about four and a half books tell you about and that will make sense here in a second I guess let's just jump into the first couple books so I started out actually with a winter's promise and the missing of Claire de Lune here we go that's better and the missing a Claire de Lune and this is by crystal de bois and this is translated by Hildegard cyril and stop from Europa and I listen to these and I'll put the narrator on the screen here for all of these books and I have really enjoyed this story so this is about a philia and she lives on an ark now Ark is sort of like it looks like this it's a floating piece of earth in the middle of the sky and the earth at some point was like blown to pieces and then people live on these little pieces of land and each like Ark has a sort of like a God and I'll be kind of like ruling families are descended from that God and so they each God has like a different magical power I use the word God it's not exactly right but we're just going to go with it but they have different powers so Ophelia's powers that she can read objects she touches them I can learn more about the past owners and then she can also walk through mirrors and she is one of the first people to be able to walk through mirrors in a long time now she has rejected all the suitors that her parents have presented her to but the elders of her particular arc take matters out of her own hands and arrange her marriage to a guy named thorne who lives on an arc in the north so she goes to like basically the North Pole to with this guy who doesn't really want to marry her she doesn't want marry him and she's thrown into this arena of a world that is really cutthroat and the different families are basically trying to kill each other continuously it's very interesting story and I really enjoyed learning about Ophelia she's like this plucky super weird kind of protagonist just like I love and it's just a great story this is a great almost like feel-good story and you know I've been recommending this book to so many sensitive readers you know I as a kid was very very sensitive as a reader I've always had really vivid nightmares and things and so I would be very careful what I read and what I watched and so this is a book though that doesn't have a ton of violence there's not a ton of stuff in it that might you know be difficult for sensitive readers so I've been recommending this one and the audio book is on hoopla so if your library subscribes to hoopla you can then go listen to these I really love that and I love how both of them are finally on the audio also translated from French so I feel like you're getting this great fun story it's translated it's fabulous it's just so different than any other story that I've read I I just love it so you should definitely go check out our winters promise by Crystal Dibble also really heavy so those were the first two books that I read and that lasted me for a while but I also read this book by jack aarthi and this is translated by Marilyn booth and this is celestial bodies now this is coming out and print in the United States in October so I guess this month no well time flies but this is out on audio and has been out in audio for a while and so I've listened to this on script and I ordered this particular copy from the UK so I really enjoyed this multi-generational family saga because the different viewpoints are the different women the different generations of women you we jump around from their different perspectives through time back and forth and we see all of their interactions and how their choices affect their children or their choices have an effect on their parents and how all of this goes together there is a perspective from one of the patriarchs and he also just talks basically about the women and what the women's choices have meant to him and I find this entire story very interesting because you can see the dynamics of the different generations and they're making different choices than their parents and how marriages and love work with these different in particular there are these three sisters that we follow and I would say they're like almost like the primary generation that we see and they all make different choices in regards to their marriages and love and what those different choices look like and what they have what the consequences are of those decisions of who they marry and who they don't marry and I find that just fascinating I think she did a great job of getting into the heads the characters and seeing how they would react there was this one particular one that I don't want to tell you about because it's a spoiler but she's basically in this very long relationship with this dude and eventually she just like snaps and ah it was so good I was like honey honey should have kicked it to the curb a long time ago but anyway that's her choice so I really enjoyed reading this book and I definitely will be picking up more by this author in the future hopefully they will now translate more of her work and English because that would be fabulous I assume she has more books I have not actually looked this up but I assume yes she seems pretty established and she won the Man Booker International Prize so congratulations to her it's just so good alright so the next book I picked up actually read print and this is the white book by honking and this is translated by Deborah Smith this is out from Hogarth here in the United States this is basically almost like a poetry collection I think it's pitched as a novel but it's basically this character had an older sibling who died at birth and an older sister and so she's trying to grapple with who her mother is before she's born like a lot of us do but also thinking of the sibling that died and what her life could have been like and she does this pondering through thinking about different white things that's why it's called the white book and it read more like poetry I read that this is like Maggie Nelson's Bluett I believe it's called but I have never read that but that's what I've seen it compared to I did find this the reading experience was definitely more like poetry because there are these little segments of text and it's lots of white space and obviously that was planned but I found this very interesting I really enjoyed though I would say her her novel novels more than I enjoyed this just because this is a more like poetry and at first time I went into it I was confused and I didn't exactly know what was going on I think this would definitely hold up to rereading though so I'll definitely have to check that out but I much enjoyed more her vegetarian and he Max is still my favorite but she's still such a brilliant writer and I'd be really interested to read more of her work I hope they publish more of her work I mean she seems to be doing pretty well for herself so but yeah I feel like I'm like also the last person to read this book on book do I get there eventually the last book I'm gonna tell you about I'm gonna tell you about a little bit and talk about it a little bit more later but this is our women on the ground essays by Arab women reporting from the Arab world and this is edited by Zahra funkier and this is Ana brilliant anthology that's Arab women journalist and photo journalist from around the Arabia that region of the world the Middle East and just talking about doing their job as women journalist I think here in the West we often have these very strict stereotype say for some reason a lot of times even our feminism comes out that these women are being oppressed and that they need to be rescued but these women make it very clear that they do not need some random Western white Savior to come and save them they are just doing the thing on their own in their own culture and it was really great to talk about this book with samaya she is from Saudi Arabia and she and I talked about this on the reading-room podcast so I'm not gonna talk about it down here because we like take different essays and talk about them and she gives her own experience growing up as a woman in Saudi Arabia and being a woman working woman a professional woman who was you know a magazine editor in Saudi Arabia and just all the different things that are in her experience and all the things that she found in this book that just yeah we both had so many feelings about this and it was great to be able to talk to someone who's experienced some of the things that are in this book and to have her take on it so I highly recommend that you go to check out that conversation it will be the first episode went up this week and then the discussion episode about this book will go up in a couple weeks so like the middle of October the third Wednesday in October whenever that is obviously I really love this book there are flags everywhere and I would have to say that this is definitely a book that I just want to shove into people's hands and say go read this book because this is just something that more people especially those of us who advocate for feminism and women's rights that we definitely need to read more of or these women's stories from their own perspectives and I am including this for women's translation Month because several of these essays are translated from arabic not all of them but a lot of them are and thus translator is miriam antar and so she did a great job she translated all of the essays that were originally written in arabic into english and so i think she did a great job I really enjoyed the audio book so definitely go check out our women on the ground just gonna wave the book around until someone finally picks it up and starts reading so anyway those are the books that I read for women translation month and the women of translation month read-a-thon thank you so much for watching and I'll see you the next one can you believe him really bye guys you\n"