Celebrate Women in Translation Month with these 6 audiobooks

Audiobooks

Each August, readers around the world celebrate Women in Translation Month.

Started back in 2014 by book blogger Meytal Radzinski, the month highlights women writing in languages other than English, promoting greater parity for their translation and publication.

The website womenintranslation.org features a wealth of resources including impressive annual book lists. For those who prefer to listen, here are some excellent recent translated audiobooks for you to check out this Women in Translation Month.

Inspired by the actual exploits of mafiosa Emanuela Azzarelli, Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s English language debut “Tina, Mafia Soldier” plunges the listener into the mean streets and stark realities of the southern Sicilian town of Gela, once notorious as the murder capital of Italy. Born amid this perilous chaos, 8-year-old Tina Cannizzaro vows to avenge her father’s mob execution through her own bloody vendetta, in a bold and reckless challenge to the patriarchal structure of the Cosa Nostra. We approach Tina through the eyes of a schoolteacher who reluctantly returns to her native Sicily in search of this mythic gangster, her quest narrated with grim resolve by actor Antoinette LaVecchia. Poised between true crime and pulp noir, this gritty tale, translated by Robin Pickering-Iazzi, reads like a nightmare version of Elena Ferrante’s popular Neapolitan coming-of-age novels.

The triumphs and trials faced by Fuyuko Irea, the 30-something heroine of Mieko Kawakami’s “All the Lovers in the Night” are far more mundane but no less serious than those faced by Tina. Fuyuko is a mild-mannered proofreader working from her Tokyo apartment who spies in her own reflection “the dictionary definition of a miserable person.” Observing her friends — the promiscuous, free-spirited Hijiri; the competitive, entrepreneurial Kyoko; and Noriko, a devoted mother — she is baffled and disenchanted with the roles and expectations available to her. Neither boozing nor romance solves her quandary. Sensitively translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd, and read with halting introspection by Mirai Booth-Ong, Kawakami’s narrative eschews the feel-good conclusions common to novels of self-realization, resulting in a subtler and truer kind of empowerment.

If you’ve been meaning to read 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux, Tavia Gilbert’s narration of her recent memoir “Getting Lost,” translated by Alison L. Strayer, provides the perfect window into the French author’s intensely passionate, autobiographical oeuvre. Journal entries of her affair with a younger man, a Russian diplomat during the death throes of the Soviet Union, cast the listener into the storm-tossed seas of her obsession with “S,” as she calls him. As for her equally ardent affairs with writing it all down, intrigued listeners will be tempted to follow Gilbert’s frank, sincere narrations of several other recent audio productions of Ernaux’s memoirs and novels, each more candid and revealing than the last.

Another recent prizewinner that works very well on audio is Geetanjali Shree’s vast, ravishing magical realist epic “Tomb of Sand,” recipient of the 2022 International Booker Prize, and read with entrancing lyricism and wry wit by prolific narrator Deepti Gupta. Depressed and refusing to leave her bed after the death of her husband, despite the urgings of her offspring, the octogenarian Ma gradually subverts her expected role as the matriarch in a traditional family saga, rewriting her own story through a series of surprising adventures. The steady cadences of Gupta’s narration guide the listener along as we meander through philosophical digressions and playful eddies, conveying the charming stylistic flourishes of Shree’s Hindi, as faithfully translated by Daisy Rockwell.

Listeners with an appetite for the shocking and surreal need look no further than the opening story in Bora Chung’s deeply unnerving collection “Cursed Bunny,” translated from Korean by Anton Hur and narrated by Greta Jung. Titled “The Head,” it concerns a ghastly visage composed of flushed waste that doggedly pops up out of the toilet when least expected. This indelibly nasty fable initiates an impressive range of similarly disconcerting tales that delight, disturb and startle in myriad resonant and unforgettable ways.

While not a translated work itself, Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay collection “Translating Myself and Others” explores the equivocal, transformative nature of translation with remarkably lucid and thought-provoking eloquence, perfectly conveyed through Sneha Mathan’s astute, cosmopolitan narration. In one essay, Lahiri draws apt parallels between the translator’s seemingly subservient and often undervalued art, and the myth of Echo and Narcissus from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” The talkative nymph Echo was cursed by the goddess Hera to only repeat the dying words of others. As a result, her plaintive wooing merely heightens the self-absorption of her egotistical love object, Narcissus. It proves an evocative metaphor for the depreciation and erasure historically common to both translators and women writers, and a fitting meditation to commemorate Women in Translation Month.