The Translation Table at the Feminist Library, Florence, 2025
The Translation Table, our reading group dedicated to translated literature and literature about translation, is running a special series of events at the Biblioteca Femminista, in Florence. Held in a historic feminist space in the city, and directly supporting its work, the focus of our discussion is the complex ideas surrounding the translation of literature. Our group is made up of poets, professional translators, students, and folk that enjoy reading translated literature. Moving between Italian and English, our conversations have focused on four works we chose with love:
Traces of Enayat, by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger
Brandy Sour, by Constantia Soteriou, translated from the Greek by Lina Protopapa
All Dogs Die by Cemile Sahin, translated from the German by Ayça Türkoglu
On A Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer, translated from the Dutch by Lucy Scott
Across this series, we have been thinking together about violence; the intimate violence the patriarchy imposes on women, colonialism and its many brutalities, and war. We have been discussing how one can write and translate works about violence, and how, as readers, we encounter it. Throughout our discussions, we refer to other works contemporary to the one in focus, and we also bring in our own experiences of writing, translating, and reading. In order to think deeply about the act of translation, we have paired each work with excerpts from Kate Briggs's seminal essay on literary translation: This Little Art.
Our conversations have taken us to reflections on the relation between the senses and reading, archives, motherhood, the emancipatory nature of writing about violence, as well as the translation of images, or the relation of art to writing. While we sit in a historically feminist space, the Biblioteca Femminista, it has been impossible not to think about the four works as striving towards uncovering different overlooked histories, from the very personal to the political. Translation, we have found, is at the heart of this process!
