Embark on a cultural odyssey with Jamie Richards, a consummate artist of literary translation. Our exchange unveils Jamie's accidental yet fateful plunge into the realm of translation, alongside her storied career, marked by venerated honors and a discerning taste for the literary unexplored. The episode unwraps the nuanced art of translation through Jamie's latest endeavor, Marosia Castaldi's The Hunger of Women, and her anecdotes about meeting Castaldi in the scenic Navigli district of Milan, shining light on the profound relationship between an author and their translator.
Step into a spirited dialogue that traverses the mosaic of literary translation, where the spirit of cities like Naples and Milan breathe life into the narratives they house. The conversation takes a turn towards the burgeoning influence of AI, juxtaposing its potential utility with the irreplaceable touch of human finesse. We address the surge in the allure of translated literature, and how this renaissance is sculpting the global literary stage. Join us in celebrating the transformation in the publishing world, with a salute to diversity, independent bookshops, and small presses—the pillars of this richly transforming milieu. Jamie also offers a peek into the profound works that stir a translator's spirit, rounding off a session that applauds the craft of translation and the boundless beauty of language and story that unites us across borders.
Jamie Richards
The Hunger of Women, Marosia Castaldi
Explosion in a Cathedral, Alejo Carpentier
Embark on a cultural odyssey with Jamie Richards, a consummate artist of literary translation. Our exchange unveils Jamie's accidental yet fateful plunge into the realm of translation, alongside her storied career, marked by venerated honors and a discerning taste for the literary unexplored. The episode unwraps the nuanced art of translation through Jamie's latest endeavor, Marosia Castaldi's The Hunger of Women, and her anecdotes about meeting Castaldi in the scenic Navigli district of Milan, shining light on the profound relationship between an author and their translator.
Step into a spirited dialogue that traverses the mosaic of literary translation, where the spirit of cities like Naples and Milan breathe life into the narratives they house. The conversation takes a turn towards the burgeoning influence of AI, juxtaposing its potential utility with the irreplaceable touch of human finesse. We address the surge in the allure of translated literature, and how this renaissance is sculpting the global literary stage. Join us in celebrating the transformation in the publishing world, with a salute to diversity, independent bookshops, and small presses—the pillars of this richly transforming milieu. Jamie also offers a peek into the profound works that stir a translator's spirit, rounding off a session that applauds the craft of translation and the boundless beauty of language and story that unites us across borders.
Jamie Richards
The Hunger of Women, Marosia Castaldi
Explosion in a Cathedral, Alejo Carpentier
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson Beverly. Welcome to the Bookshop podcast. Each week, I present interviews with independent bookshop owners from around the globe, authors, publishing professionals and specialists in subjects dear to my heart the environment and social justice. To help the show reach more people, please share it with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to episode 233.
Speaker 1:Jamie Richards is a literary translator from Italian, with occasional forays into Spanish, greek and German. Born and raised in suburban Los Angeles, she earned her BA in English from Scripps College, with a semester study at Temple University, rome, and went on to complete an MFA in literary translation at the University of Iowa and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Oregon. She is the recipient of a 2021 NEA translation grant to translate the neglected Italian classic Dolores Prato's Giulia Piazza Necce Nesunio, which is still in the works, alongside a number of other projects. Most recently, she was the spring 2023 translator in residence at the University of Iowa and she is a judge for the 2023 Italian prose in translation award. She is currently based in Southern California after many years in Milan. Hi, jamie, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. Okay, let's begin with learning about you and what led you to become a translator of prose.
Speaker 2:I've been translating for a little over 20 years, gradually, as a professional translator. I was first introduced to translation in a course that I took when I was studying abroad, so I was an English major. Of course I read translations, but I hadn't thought about it as as a possible creative practice or even given much thought to it as a thing, and I took a workshop with Lawrence Vanuity, who is a translator and a quite prominent translation theorist, and that that was my first introduction to translation and after that I sort of never stopped. So I ended up doing an MFA in literary translation and at that time was I was still working on my Italian, still still learning the language, learning the literature and at the same time figuring out how to find books and find projects and getting started.
Speaker 2:And at that time it was a very different landscape for translation and translated literature, so it felt very much. There weren't as many resources or programs or even publishers publishing opportunities. So it was a really different time, very exploratory Anyway. So that's that's how I got started and then I kept translating. I suppose one of my first publications was with Words Without Borders and that has been an instrumental publication for me and a lot of translators. I think of my sort of mid-career generation of translators, which, indirectly, is also what took me to translating comics, which is not what this interview is totally about, but that's one of the other things that I do.
Speaker 1:Oh, I think that's great. It's all to do with getting people to read. You recently translated Marossia Castaldi's the Hunger of Women, which was absolutely beautiful. What a gorgeous book but you translated it from Italian into English. What made you interested in taking on this project, and can you tell us a little about your meetings with her?
Speaker 2:Sure, I had recently moved to Italy, to Milan, and I always like to look for new literature and find sort of neglected gems, you know, and things like this, and her work was featured, actually as part of the World Expo materials. Like the World Expo, the World's Fair was in Milan in 2015. And part of that was they had a whole series of literary programming and because the theme was food, the, the Hunger of Women, la Famine d'Aledone, was featured in this little in one of their recommended books catalogs kind of thing, and I ended up looking it up. You know, after that I found the book and I was immediately struck by it and it was very easy to reach out to the publisher and to her, actually who she lived in Milan, and so that was how I found that book and her work and can you tell us a little about meeting her in person?
Speaker 2:Let's see, she invited me to her home, which is in a very characteristic, distinctive neighborhood of Milan, which is the Naviglia, which is where the canals are.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's not like the canals of Venice, but Milan has these two canals basically, that are also, you know, it's a really vibrant neighborhood where the nightlife is and so on, and a lot of the older homes in the city are there, and so she lived in one of these types of homes which is always a difficult thing to translate because they're called Casi di Dinguiera which are characterized by, you know, they sort of look like motels. Anyways, I'm rambling about that. But she lived in this very distinctive, beautiful old building and she invited me over and I think I brought my husband with me. So we just had a conversation at that time and you know, she made us coffee and we talked about this and that and we looked at her work a little bit. But she was really generous and open and kind, and that's not the relationship I have with all the writers you know I work with. I mean, sometimes it's more or less distant, but she was immediately very so pleased that I was interested in her work and immediately started sharing everything with me.
Speaker 1:And did you get to see many of her sculpture pieces while you were there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm not sure what her older work looked like, to be honest, but at that time she was working on paper sculptures, so they looked kind of like cutouts. And I did go to an exhibit of hers that was called City of Paper and it was based on these things. So some of them were like charcoal drawings on I don't know what kind of paper, not huge, so a lot of these kind of shadowy silhouettes, some human figures that looked a little bit like the screaming figures in Guernica and Picasso, and then images of buildings and stuff. So it was scenes from kind of an urban paper sculptures basically. And I don't know if she Like exactly what other materials she worked with, just like Claire, I actually don't know.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about her writing style. There are no commas, there are no periods, there are capital letters. I enjoy reading experimental writing, so I found it beautiful. I think the capital letters help in her writing because you can clarify when one sentence ends and another begins, but the cadence of her work is beautiful. So let's talk about this and what readers can expect when they open her novel.
Speaker 2:Sure, and also if you have recommendations in that regard, that would be interesting here. Because so I feel like a lot of the time when you see writers who are experimental with punctuation or syntax, a lot of times it's working with very long sentences or just having no endless phrases, a lot of commas and just sentences that might go on for pages. I feel like that's something you see more often, or kind of run on. And I think in some romance languages, and in Italian for sure, a lot of run-on sentences connected by commas or a feature like a very common Marozia's style, is generally more peritactic.
Speaker 2:So these short bursts, so the first editor I showed her to thought of Gertrude Stein immediately, because the language is not necessarily ornate and you have these sentences that are like little bursts and she'll make lists, but they don't have the comma. So you have these phrases that the way that you read it, I feel it speeds up the pace. But when you open the book you will have something that seems like a normal sentence but it just doesn't have a period. So then that might take you a minute and feel disorienting. But then maybe I wonder if, when you're reading that as a reader, if you kind of put that period there, or if it sort of is like an invisible semi-colon or something where you pause and keep going and pause and keep going, and it's a little bit more rhythmic as a silent reading experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and, as I said earlier, the capital letters definitely help with the rhythm and the flow of the book and the flow of the writing. The book is filled with descriptions of food, her relationship with her mother, her relationship with her daughter, but mostly I felt that it was about her relationship with food. Did Moroshi speak about this with you?
Speaker 2:So one of my regrets, which I sort of expressed a little bit in the afterward word, is that I feel like I didn't get enough of a chance to work with her on this book and talk to her a lot about this book in particular. So I got to know her a little bit in general, but I didn't ask her really about what is this about here. But there's a very wonderful interview that she did actually with this great Swiss literary program that's available online still actually, and she talks about how she doesn't really distinguish between types of appetite and so if you think of hunger and desire more broadly, it's sort of part of the same thing. I'm sure that there's interesting work on this that I don't know about, even at the philosophical level, especially when you think of an excess of food and depriving oneself of food and what it means.
Speaker 2:As I say, she was affected by an eating disorder herself and I don't know how much that should color exactly our reading of the book, because you have these long lists of food and these recipes and I think a lot of that is about even older ideas, like Mediterranean ideas of hospitality, and the way that you show love is through this abundance of food or even these kind of orgies of you just supposed to make a beautiful spread, and that's a certain kind of expression.
Speaker 2:And in the book it's also about ancestral knowledge and what is passed on, especially from mother to daughter, and that is a kind of embodied knowledge really in these recipes and how they connect you to culture and family, and that's done in a really beautiful way and I think that personally, I think she thought about it and I think that this is a kind of literary expression of that and maybe some of the personal struggles that she had with it as well. I think sometimes it can be also depriving oneself of food can be a kind of self punishment, for whatever reason. Throughout her work is very intense and she has another huge book that is called my Hands in Yours, Dentro Lemia Mani Le Tue, and it's sort of about her mother's death, but I mean it's a very long and so a lot of her work is sort of reliving a little bit in these metaphorical ways but some of these basic traumas of her brother dying and her mother dying and those kinds of things.
Speaker 1:So that's not so much about food but just the way all those things integrate the other topic that came up over and over again in the book is the sea, the ocean, and I couldn't help but consider this as a deep dive into her psyche. I think it was Jung that used to relate the sea and the ocean, the deep ocean, to the deepest parts of our psyche. What are your thoughts on this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's a really good reference to the sea as an idea. I think it's also a very literal thing, for her Part of this book and her work is a little bit placing this distinction between North and South and between these very different landscapes and the way that they're also psychic landscapes. So the landscape of Naples is very intense, very overwhelming, very beautiful and filled with ups and downs, with hills and crags and rocks and crannies and these various stratifications, and it's very dramatic. And now I can't remember where she says this too, but it might be in something that she wrote about Milan, but Milan is very flat and it's like it prepares you for death. And Naples, she said, it's so beautiful and intense it's actually harder to create there, which is interesting. So I think that the presence of the sea is everywhere and I think part of the whole discourse about the Mediterranean as not only a geographical place but also a cultural place and a psychic place is in there.
Speaker 1:Watching you as you were talking about North and South, I couldn't help but think North being the head and everything below being South, and I was thinking. I wonder if she was thinking about that when she wrote the book. You know the North and the South of our psychology. It's a fascinating book and because of its complexities, I was wondering how is AI affecting book translations?
Speaker 2:It's an interesting question of a different angle here. Something like AI can't cope with a novel like this, for example, you know, wouldn't know what to do with it. And I don't necessarily want to say that there's this dichotomy between the more inventive or artistic or aesthetically elevated something as the harder it would be for AI to cope with. But I think, like anything, you know, it's kind of a tool, right, and you could probably have AI write you a book, you know? I mean, you can and you could use it to translate a book, but you know that that will always require a human oversight. So I mean, the impact that AI is having on the field of literary translation. Literary translation, I think, is pretty minimal actually, I mean at this time. I think that people can use it as a tool, like translators, right. The same way that it's a kind of sophisticated dictionary.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I ask questions to help, you know, help me find a phrase, or you know how I'd be saying this. But then you know it's subject to these errors, right. So I can't remember what I asked the program to do when it came up with these totally fake references. And these are the kind of these are called hallucinations, right, the kind of problems that plagiarizing students have, where, if AI doesn't know the answer, it'll just spit something out that looks plausible. And I think that that's still where it's at with language. Like if you tell AI to write you a sonnet about the sea, it might write something that's pretty good. And then if you tell you know, have it translate for you, it might produce something helpful. But it really depends what that is. I think everybody has sort of recognized, at least in, you know, literary publishing. People recognize the value of human work right. So in any case I don't think it's given people anything to worry about too much.
Speaker 1:Yes, I agree, and I can't help but wonder what would happen if you put the hunger of women into an AI program. What would happen? Because it will probably explode. Yeah, I don't think AI could handle all the emotion and the humanity within the book.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Now, the booksellers I've interviewed say that books in translation are becoming more popular. Personally, I love reading translated books and I've said many times there's something about the cadence of the phrasing that just draws me in. It's so different and unique. By the time I finish reading a book in translation, I feel I've really immersed myself in that country of origin, and it's so special. I just love it. So what do you feel is the drive behind this movement?
Speaker 2:That's a very interesting comment. Actually, I sort of wonder about the internationalization of literature, as someone who sort of studied world literature as well, whether things sort of start to sound the same, or to the extent that they do or don't, in translation. You know, there used to be this idea too, that you learn about the world and you can be an armchair traveler by reading books from different countries, and I think that's true to some extent. So I wonder I wonder how much it's true, right? Because I see that people still gravitate a little bit to things that they know or that they're interested in, and then you have to gradually push those boundaries. I think that we're really in a golden age again of translation, especially compared to when I started translating. Statistically, there are these surveys that show that 50% of readers are younger under 35. And I think that part of what's driving that is that there are a lot more translators, there is more development of the profession and there are more opportunities to study translation and more awareness of it, so that more people choose to do it or choose to try it and there's more support for that. So on the one hand, you have more people translating.
Speaker 2:Within literary translation, there's also a movement to diversify translators themselves, get more people into it and translate from a wider variety of languages and so bring in more things and showcase more diversity. And I think, yeah, on the other hand, it's a lot of independent booksellers. Remember when it was like eBooks or an Amazon are going to destroy everything, but there's been really a flourishing of independent booksellers who are hand-selling these things, and a lot of new publishers too. So a lot of small publishers and independent publishers who saw that gap, because if you were trying to pitch a foreign work to a publisher 20 years ago, it was like Grove Atlantic you know, dalky, there's only a handful of places to even go or a university press A lot of university presses have been doing things the whole time. So there are so many small and medium independent publishers and more prizes and more attention. And so, yeah, been a movement in multiple directions.
Speaker 1:Yes, and that actually morphs into my next question regarding the high cost of getting a book translated. Do you feel publishers are pulling back on translations or have you seen an increase in translation services due to consumer demand?
Speaker 2:Well, the interesting thing about translations is that they cost more from a publishing perspective. You have to pay a translator at least, and you have to market a foreign author who might not be able to physically market. But I don't have the numbers in my head, but there are so many books published in English and so something being a translation already helps it to stand out a little bit. It's like here is a work from Madagascar or somewhere that it has a little. That additional thing is a selling point, and often a translator will be a spokesperson for the work and help market it too. So the other thing is that a lot of countries are motivated to fund translations. So the countries that tend to have more robust funding for cultural promotion abroad will tend to have more translations out. There will be series and things like this, and that's a major thing. So a lot of publishers will have a foreign cultural institute or government that's supporting the translation, and that is the big difference.
Speaker 1:And what do you enjoy most about your work?
Speaker 2:It's such a broad question. I don't know why that's hard for me to answer. It's very easy.
Speaker 2:I like working with books in this very hands-on way, and I think translation was kind of a discovery for me, because before that I kind of drifted into it and before that I liked reading and I became an English major, so I dabbled in writing but didn't really go anywhere, and it's a way to work with books in a very concrete way, but in that kind of private way where you're working with the language.
Speaker 2:And I love working with foreign languages. I mean, the one I really know is the one I work with the most, but so it gives me an opportunity to use that language too, to continue to use it, especially because I lived there for a while but then I moved back to the US recently, and so it's nice to keep up and keep using the language in that way and keep up with the culture in that way. The other thing is that I did a PhD in comparative literature. So research has always been part of what I like to do and I think that over time I realized that it wasn't always the type of research you do as an academic, but it's just fun to find out stuff, and you always have to become a micro expert in some obscure topic for a day, and sometimes this stuff goes out. But all the research that you have to do is really fun and interesting, so you're always learning something.
Speaker 1:And that, to me, is the essence of life always learning something. Ok, what are you currently?
Speaker 2:reading. I read so many things at once. It's also a hard question. But I just started Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier, who is a Cuban writer, and that's a kind of neglected classic. It's a re-translation by a friend of mine, adrienne Nathan West, who is a really multi-talented translator, and so I try and read all of his work. I'll read whatever he does, and I also just started the House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone and Starnone is one of the admirers of Castali's work also and another Neapolitan writer who's big also. Jim Pellejure has translated him and this one is a quite big novel, important for him, translated by Una Stronsky.
Speaker 1:So those are the things I mentioned. Jamie, thank you so much for being a guest on the show and I loved reading the Hunger of Women. It's a beautiful book. You've done a great job with the translations and you are my first translator on the show. It was great chatting with you, thank you. Thank you. You've been listening to my conversation with Jamie Richards, translator of Marosia Castaldi's the Hunger of Women from Italian to English. To find out more about the Bookshop podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson-Bevely on X, instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop podcast is written and produced by me, mandy Jackson-Bevely, theme music provided by Brian Bevely, executive assistant to Mandy, adrienne Otterhan and graphic design by Francis Verralla. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time. Music.