Today’s Monday Musings was inspired by the shortlisting for the 2018 Stella Prize of Iranian-born Australian-based writer Shokoofeh Azar’s The enlightenment of the greengage tree. I first came across this book when Lisa (ANZLitLovers) reviewed it last August, commenting in her opening paragraph that the novel “is an exciting development in Australian publishing” because it was written in Persian by Azar and translated into English by Adrien Kijek for publication by Wild Dingo Press. I wonder how many other speakers of non-English languages in Australia would like to write – or do write – but are closed off from the majority of us because of a lack of support and money for translation?

I have written about translation here several times before, but in this post I want to specifically name some current Australian literary translators, many of whom are based in our universities. We do, in fact, have many literary translators, but I’m going to select just a few – somewhat randomly – to give a sense of the breadth of translators we have here.

Stuart Cooke and Juan Garrido Salgado

Sydney-born Cooke has lived in Hobart and Latin America, but is currently a lecturer in creative writing and literary studies at Brisbane’s Griffith University. The various bios I’ve seen for him describe him as a poet, critic and translator. I’ve picked him because one of his translation interests is the Aboriginal song poem. In 2014 he published a translation of George Dyuŋgayan’s Bulu line: a West Kimberley song cycle. His other translation interest is, apparently, Spanish. In 2007 his translation of Juan Garrido Salgado’s Once poemas, Septiembre 1973 was published.

And, just to complicate things a bit, this Juan Garrido Salgado is a Chilean immigrant to Australia (1990). His poems, says Red Room Poetry, have been widely translated, and he himself has translated works by Australian poets – John Kinsella, Mike Ladd, Judith Beveridge, Dorothy Porter and MTC Cronin – into Spanish. He has also translated five Aboriginal poets into Spanish for Espejo de tierra/Earth mirror poetry anthology (2008)!

Linda Jaivin

When I chose this post, one of the two translators to pop into my head – before I went to Google – was Linda Jaivin whose Quarterly Essay, Found in translation, I reviewed a few years ago. American-born, she did Chinese studies at university in Rhode Island before spending time in Taiwan and Hong Kong. She’s perhaps a bit of a ring-in here because she doesn’t seem to have translated novels or other sorts of books, but she is a professional translator whose work has included subtitling (into English) Chinese films like Farewell My Concubine. She has written a memoir, The monkey and the dragon, about her experience as a translator in China. And, she’s an associate of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University.

Meredith McKinney

The other Australian translator I remembered, before Googling, was Meredith McKinney. The daughter of the great Australian poet Judith Wright, she has made a name in her own right as an expert in and translator of Japanese language and literature. She lived in Japan for a couple of decades but is now a visiting fellow in the Japan Centre at the Australian National University where she teaches Japanese-English translation. She has translated both classic and modern Japanese novels and short story collections. You can see a pretty comprehensive list at GoodReads. Her translation of Furui Yoshikichi’s Ravine and other stories won the 2000 Japan-US Friendship Commission Translation Award.  A few years ago I bought her translation of The wild goose by Ōgai Mori (Finlay Lloyd) but it still, unfortunately, languishes on the TBR.

Ton-That Quynh-Du

Vietnamese-born Ton-that Quynh-Du came to Australia in 1972 under a Colombo Plan Scholarship. He has worked as a translator, court interpreter, and as an academic at Deakin University, Monash University and the Australian National University. His translation of Pham Thi Hoai’s novel The crystal messenger – a book that has been on my bedside TBR for some years now – won the 2000 Victorian Premier’s Award for literary translation. (This award is now, unfortunately, defunct. I believe it was called the SBS/Dinny O’Hearn Prize for Literary Translation, and was only awarded three times, in 1997, 2000 and 2003. What a shame.) His translation of this same author’s collection of short stories, Sunday menu, won the 2007 ACT Book of The Year Award. While he mostly translates into English he also does some translation into Vietnamese (as does Pham Thi Hoai, who now lives in Germany)

Kevin Windle

I chose Kevin Windle as my fifth example because I found, via Google, that last year, 2017, he won a rather prestigious award, albeit one not known to most of us Australians. It’s only awarded every three years by the International Federation of Translators (FIT), and is the Aurora Borealis Prize for Outstanding Translation of Non-Fiction Literature. A press release said that “his work, translating into English from nearly a dozen different languages, and across a wide range of subject areas, is described by his supporters as ‘reliably brilliant’.” How I’d love to be descried as “reliably brilliant”! London-born Windle has worked at the University of Queensland but is now emeritus fellow in the School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at the Australian National University, where his expertise is in Translation Studies and Russian. Indeed, the Words Without Borders website states that in 2014 he was awarded the inaugural AALITRA prize for literary translation from Spanish, and in 2015, second prize in the John Dryden competition for a translation from Polish. Although the Aurora Borealis Award was for non-fiction, he has apparently translated fiction, drama, literary biography, and linguistics and ancient history texts.

The above-mentioned press release for Kevin Windle’s Aurora Borealis win notes that the award aims

to promote the translation of fiction literature and non-fiction, improve the quality thereof and draw attention to the role of translators in bringing the peoples of the world closer together in terms of culture.

And that seems a perfect point on which to end, I think.

Do you read translated literature? I’d love to hear your favourites – or anything else you have to say about translation.