 Hi everyone, welcome for coming to our panel. I'm Alta Price. Yes, Alta like Alta. And we're Margaret Carson and my co-moderator. We're really thrilled to have you all here today. And we very much wanna make this an open conversation between our expert panelists and you guys, translators, editors, what's happening in our field. This is the second in what we hope will become an ongoing widespread series of events on this topic of where women are in translation. So Margaret and I co-moderated another, a similar panel in May this year for the Pen World Voices Festival and just had a great turnout and it was a lot of reactions. Here I was talking to someone last night, said she does the same panel every year at Alta and I thought, oh no, we're doing the same panel, but it's not at all the same because we have completely different panelists and a lot has happened since May. We've had a publisher devote an entire upcoming year of their publication schedule to publishing women in translation and various other aspects of the discourse. So yeah, it's just very exciting. So we'll start by introducing our panelists and then we'll have a brief, each of them talk about where they're coming from, their experience and then sort of get at this topic from all different facets. So immediately to my right is Kaya Strowmanus. Kaya is an editor at Open Letter Books and you also translate from Lithuanian? From Latvian. Latvian, sorry. I'm leaving. Please don't leave. And then we have Maital Rednitsky. Rednitsky. Sorry, who came all the way from Israel to join us on this panel and is, I won't give you the entire credit, but you've been a major player with your blog at Biblibio of bringing attention to this matter and also founded Women in Translation Month which is happening every August this year, I believe is the second year, correct? Jim Hicks from the Massachusetts Review. Anything else you want to say? You also translated? Yeah, translated. So you're an editor, translator? And often have difficulty telling the difference. Difficulty telling the difference, excellent. Well, that's more about that, yeah. Susan Harris from Words Without Borders, editor, not a translator. Extraordinary. Publishing veteran. Publishing veteran, yeah. So in terms of, I think we'd like, and we have, we brought some images and I'd love to sort of, I think, Margaret, did you have anything to add or should we dive right in? I think we should dive right in and we thought that, well, during the course of this panel we're gonna develop a kind of a history of this issue and how it's been presented before and particularly Susan. But we want to start with Mitel and because you're really before both Alta and I got involved you were working with the 3% database and probably all of you are aware of the 3% database. It's put together by open letter, chat post and everyone probably at open letter contributes to that in some way, keeping that enormous list, like a complete inventory of titles and translation of fiction and poetry. So that's not the entire spectrum of titles and translation, but it's a fairly big chunk and it's very representative and very relevant to us. So before we started working with the numbers Mitel, you were there and you were calculating graphs, working with the data, showing trends. We were starting with you and you could take us through the charts a little bit but I do want to say and Mitel has a blog that what's it called again? Biblibio. Biblibio. Biblibio, so everyone you can google that. And I've been reviewing her postings and I thought this was an interesting, something that you wrote, thank you so very representative of where you're coming from, where we're coming from. When I started posting about the lack of women writers in translation I had one idea in mind, get people thinking. I wanted to spread awareness, make the issue known and get readers, reviewers, translators and publishers involved in the discussion. So that's what we're doing today. So Mitel, would you like to start telling us about how you got involved in this? Sure. How you kicked off this discussion? Honestly, it comes from being a reader. I'm not in the publishing world or a translator of the literary translator type. But when you're a reader and you start looking at your own, it was literally just a Saturday afternoon where I was like, huh, I think I haven't read very many books by women writers in translation this year. And that evening I went through the numbers and I saw, oh, interesting, I've read only 25%. That seems very imbalanced. And I wondered if it was my fault in the books that I was picking or if it was something in the books that I was being presented with. And so I decided I would look at the 3% database which I thought was a pretty representative account of sort of contemporary publishing. And I saw that that same kind of 25 to 30% number was reappearing. And then it kept reappearing. And I looked at 2012, 2013, since then, 2014 and 15. And the numbers just were very, very consistent and not balanced. And so my mathy side got the better of me and charts emerged. And I think that this is something that as a world interested in literature and interested in literature and translations, we need to. Yeah, no, I think that numbers speak very loudly. Anecdotes go so far, but when you see it, it's kind of bleak. So would you like to take us through some of the statistics? Some of your charts. Sure, I actually don't remember which year this is. I think this is 2014, I don't remember. But the statistics are basically the same. You see a kind of consistent 28% translation rate for women. I made this list by Googling just the names of every person in the database to make sure that I was getting accurate representations and in case someone was using a pen name or whatever. So that's why there's that 4% unknown because some writers I just couldn't find any information. But it's just shockingly male dominated in a field that sort of doesn't have that grade of an excuse, I guess. I've been told in the science has given lots of excuses for why women might not be able to advance or stay in their works. And one of the things that I've realized is none of those excuses apply to literature because there is really nothing that would stop it except for the question of what's happening in other languages. But there it's kind of hard to measure the numbers. It's very difficult to really analyze this because you have to go back a number of steps. And also I wanna say that we really make, correct me if I'm wrong, but we don't have figures of what's being published in the United States, what's being written and published in English. Do we know what the gender breakdown is in fiction and poetry? I don't think anyone has imagined that. I think Vita does. But they do that for magazines and journals. They mostly. They're not doing it for books. I think for books that the general, I feel like I saw somewhere that it's something like 55% women writers for fiction. Like there is a majority. I might be completely making this up. I would like to know that source. I would not take my word for this, but I vaguely remember seeing something that it is actually majority women in publishing fiction. Definitely they've done many studies to show that it's a majority of women reading fiction. And then Vita kinda shows that, despite being well represented in the technical publishing side, those numbers don't carry across to reviews and they don't carry across to sort of the more critical representation. And I think that we also see that in literature and translation, except it's so much harder to judge because there's such a smaller group of women to even begin to look at are they being well represented in reviews or. Yeah, and there are like seven or eight different countries. Yeah, it's. Seven or 3% database. And yet some of the major countries you see that that's where the problem is pretty consistent, so. Is there a. We do think there's. Yeah, so everyone, I just, you know, I grabbed these charts from Bidley Bio and. Yeah, these are the are, this is by the publisher, right? Yeah, this is the publisher. So you can see that most publishers are, these are the top, I think. I just took the ones who had published more than eight translations that year. I don't fully remember, I'm sorry. But you can see that it's mostly men, which is the red. Yeah, red. So, yes, you have a couple of publishers who are devoted to women, like the Feminist Press or a couple of other publishers who were all women, but it was two or three books. And then you have the most prominent publisher of literature and translation with no women. So. That will. It's talking, yeah. Yeah, that, I guess that's pretty small. It is. In the back. And then also in language, it's, you have a few kind of, this is by percentage, so it looks a little more positive than it actually is. But if you look at the major languages, like French, that's under 30% and French is the most translated language, I believe, kind of consistently, it's still really weirdly low. And I'm pretty sure that French is actually, it looks higher than it is because Quebec, oddly enough, publishes a lot of women writers, but France doesn't. So that's a weird little statistical tidbit that is not mentioned here. We have that also with Spanish. For some languages, they are many countries and many different publishing. The country breakdown also is pretty interesting and not entirely fixed. Do you have a chart by country? I'm not sure in which, since language, I think this was the other year. Yeah, those are the ones we were talking about. We don't have them by country. Yeah, we have a Tumblr. Did you mention the Tumblr? I have yet mentioned the Tumblr. Yeah, so tumblr.womenintranslation.whateveritis. But yeah, if you go Tumblr, womenintranslation, that will take all of these graphics with the exception of Maytals. Maytals will be there later this afternoon. I'll get them up. But that is our general, any time we're coming across, new information linking to articles as more sources are talking about that. So we're maintaining that. Yeah, if you go back to May on the Tumblr, then that shows a full array of... By country. By country that we did. Charts that we generated. And we're just gonna keep up and it'll be very different next year after that. That's a process. Yeah, it's a process. I have a question. Maytal, how old are you? Because you're... Because this is really important, actually. That you're not... Almost 24. Okay, so you're a very young activist who's taking up this cause. And I think that's really crucial. 21 year old me who started it would be certainly surprised. But yeah, it's a cause. It's important. Could you talk about the Women in Translation Month that you started and... Yeah, sure. So August is Women in Translation Month. If you wanna know why it's in August, it's because that's when I have the least amount of tests in school study. So. But the idea actually was not mine. It was a blogger who just kind of sent a Twitter private message and said, you know, hey, do you think that maybe you should take this sort of... You've been posting a lot about this. Do you wanna maybe host kind of a month looking at it? And then I was like, oh, that's an interesting idea. So. The idea was originally to raise awareness and to encourage people to read books by women writers in translation. It's kind of morphing into aggressively pushing the cause and hoping that people not only are exposed to more women writers in translation, but recognize that there is this big problem and kind of trying to together figure out what we can do. So this year was the second year and in a few months, preparations for the third will begin. And hopefully in a few years, it will not be necessary because we'll be at a fantastic equilibrium. I am an optimist. And when you say you aggressively pursued it, could you be more specific or what about your activism? A lot of people respond, I think, in general to causes that look at minorities or representation of women or marginalized groups and you're kind of labeled a radical. And then that's discouraging because it's the perception that you're doing something wrong. And so it's difficult, I think, to explain to people what the project is, especially since most people aren't aware of the problem. And so that's why there's the focus on just like, know the problems, see the graphs, see the statistics. And I guess in that sense, it gets aggressive. And you're on social media, you tweet. Yes. Is that where it gets a little heated? It can get heated. Usually it's actually been in blog comments where I had one particularly nasty one in the first year of Whitmonth where I was called a lot of contradictory names and just roll with it. I mean, well, this is part of the feminist activism. We fight. It gets a lot of comments, you know, in those comments and blogs. Okay, so just hang in there. We have to keep the discourse positive, right? Yeah. And I think, I mean, it's interesting thinking about even just how we're talking about it and looking at some of the graphs. Like, are we gonna talk about men versus women? Or, yeah, it's talking about parity versus balance versus equilibrium. People are really sensitive to language which as a translator myself, I find it really interesting how people react. And sometimes if you just tweak the way you talk about it a little bit, they're more open or not. But our aim here is definitely to look at the positive steps that we can take. And with that, I would like to ask you, Susan, we actually had a look at work without orders data in terms of gender. Just a couple of months. A couple of months. It's pretty daunting to look at. And so for everything seems very balanced. Oh, I'm glad. And I'm glad that you had no question. You got a clean deal. That you were so representative of what's actually out there in the world. So given what everyone's saying about how women publish less frequently than men worldwide, how do you guys do it? What's your editorial process? I do also want to mention, I think World Without Borders had the first article on this by Alison Anderson several years ago. So tell us a little bit about where that came from. And how are you guys pulling it off? Well, Alison's article came about because she was at London Book Fair and was in conversation with our founding editor, Samantha Schnee, who has unfortunately defected to London and is now part of the UK publishing mafia over there. Translation mafia, excuse me. Keep our mob straight. But Alison was talking to Sam about the discrepancies that she'd noticed. And again, like Maytall, having a sense of something, having a suspicion and then actually running the numbers and discovering that it was, if anything worse than she realized. And Sam encouraged her to write a blog post for us, which she did. And what I think was instructive was that Alison mentioned that there were at that time, and I tend to get the statistic incorrect because it's both translators and writers, but the International, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, which recognizes both writers and their translators had at that point, not had a female winner. Is that right, Danny? There was one, I think in retrospect, it was like 2001 or something, there was a weird... Yes, there had been one. And Alison actually went to the panel on the prize at London and said she rather timidly raised her hand in the Q&A and said, there's no gender parity here. And actually, Elie Schofach, who was one of the jurors, spoke very eloquently to that issue and said that it certainly was being, that it was something that they had noticed that they were aware of. And I think it's the awareness. I know that we did have one funny, when I was relieved that our genders were balanced, we did have one inadvertently amusing issue closer to the beginning of Words Without Borders, where we had a guest editor who sent us a batch of stories and they were Turkish. And for me anyway, Turkish names are completely ungender identifiable. Well, it turned out we had an issue of all women, which was delightful, but we had no idea. And interestingly, of course, since we did not know that, we had no indication from the contents of the writing or any indication that they would be more interesting or not. I think in terms of how we do it, as you all know, we work with people who are on the ground in the field. I mean, we obviously, we work with publishers, we work with agents. We work with the people who are putting writers into print and who are controlling their rights, but we're also working with people who are researching languages and literature at the source and are perhaps living in those countries or are tapped in. Certainly now, people have much more access to digital resources and international publications that can read more widely in their source languages. And I talk to people and find out what is being published in your countries. I mean, there's quite a difference between what we found for, for example, our October issue, which is Estonia, which is a very established publishing industry, has a very, very active and very supportive literary grant program in the government, funding both translation and publication. You have the difference of that. And then we have Cambodia, which is our November issue. And of course, you're not going to go to what, the Cambodian version of the New York Times and look who's being reviewed, I don't think so. So it's a question of knowing how to identify the sources and how to, again, how to work your networks, which sounds terribly, I realize just sounds really terribly cynical. And as if I should be talking about branding any minute now, but it's a question of knowing who's working in the field. And also being available and being visible to those people. Thank you. You have a ton of follow up questions to that. Oh, what were you going to say? No, go ahead. Well, so it's exciting and I didn't even know about the all female Turkish issue. So very much inadvertent maybe in a way, but the people that you are, your guest editors or whoever is sending things and are aware of this issue. Absolutely, when we talk with people, when we engage our guest editors, obviously we rely a great deal on consulting editors. To date, we've published work from 128 countries and 106 languages. Obviously we don't have that expertise among our two full-time editorial person staff. But when we talk with our guest editors, we say we're looking for any number of things in this issue. Obviously literary quality is paramount, but we want balance. And if you're not bringing me balance, then you need to bring me a good argument about why. And generally, sometimes we don't hit 50-50, or well, my preferred one would be 80 female and 20. But sometimes we don't hit 50-50 and it's more challenging, but we are always working to get at least some, close to balance, at least some representation. So you're not leaving that to chance, basically? Not at all. It's a way to do it, it doesn't happen. No, it doesn't happen. And I think that it was something that we were not necessarily as aware of as we could have been in the early days just because there were so many other considerations. But certainly now that we're, when we're doing our planning, when we're looking at who we're publishing, when we're looking at balancing not only genders, but countries, languages, people of color, which is related, but similar conversation, there are just a lot of things to keep in mind, to keep that balance and to make us a worthwhile publication. Excellent, so in a similar vein, Jim, you guys had a marvelous, we looked at it a few months in terms of... Yeah. And you guys are, it's true that you aren't exclusively working in translation, but... Yeah, so, Jim, if you could talk about the Massachusetts Review, and basically your history with it, because I know that it was an existing journal when you took over as editor, and you have, obviously, your editorial vision is now. It's changed, and you are not only... Well, what don't you describe it? Okay, well, let me start just by saying that this is, you know, the... I think you really have to work on brand consistency here. I think WIT, you used once. I think it works very well, and it could be... But anyway, the WIT project, or the WIT caucus, which I think we've now established, and we'll get the names, you know, is absolutely perfect for us. I've done it, and I've been an editor now for six years, which might seem like a long time, but since I had basically no qualifications whatsoever before starting, I really feel like I ought to be out there taking notes. But having done it that long, you know, it's time to take stock. The magazine, yeah, it's been around since 1959, and particularly in the first 15 years or so, it was a real political force in, you know, if a small magazine ever can be. I mean, we were really one of the few places where you could publish black arts writing, black power, we had an essay by Stokely Carmichael, that was his name at the time, which was called something like Whitey Blackman's Gonna Get Your Mama, or something like that, which the editors changed to something like towards black liberation or something like that. But anyway, and we've also, two years ago now, we were lucky enough to hire a managing editor, Emily Wojcik, who for over a decade was working one of the people helping to run Paris Press, which is a really small feminist press that publishes only women. So one of the things that Emily's really been a driving force behind is to do just this sort of work, to do counts, right? And so we decided, well, let's look at the, at that time, it was five years, the Higgs regime, I guess, and then five years before that, just to really figure out what we've been doing. The other thing I would say, just for kind of the history side of what we have done, I mean, one of the things that was fantastic, I was going through the desk and I found some notes that had been there forever. And I found one note in particular from our poetry editor for 25 years, a woman named Anne Holly, who was a wonderful poet and a translator. And I found this note where she said, and it was just kind of scribbled in there. I don't want to be part of any magazine that doesn't have at least one woman as a senior editor. And I think she won that fight, but you can understand as well, just from the fact that she had to fight, you know, what things were like then, right? In 1972, I think, or 1970, one of our founding editors retired and named two women to replace him. And they published an issue called Women and Issue. And it was, you know, literally the first two things in this, an essay by Bella Abzug, the next one by Anais Nin, had worked by Angela Davis, Lucille Clifton. I wrote this down, I don't remember at all. Tina Midotti, Maxine Kuhmann, Audrey Lorde. And, you know, so, 1972. But the reason I bring it up now is not to brag. I mean, this kind of could sound that way, but I actually want to point out the fact that when we had the 40th anniversary, and I had just been editing a couple of years then, we had a long discussion about whether we were going to celebrate it with some sort of so, you know, women today an issue or something like that. And I was kind of talked out of it, which I still think, why? What? And, you know, some of the comments, one in particular, and I think it was hopefully mildly humorous, was, you know, gender, it's not really a relevant category. But I think more of the discussion at that time was sort of with everything that's going on, do we really want to focus on women as a sort of known category? And, you know, obviously the tremendous progress that's been made in multiplying and complicating our understanding of gender is tremendous. But if it means, you know, it's an end around to doing something that, you know, the word I use is parody. And so anyway, and oh, I'd also say that we just had a symposium for another 40th anniversary. We published Chinua Chebe's image of Africa essay, which, you know, was one of the things that helped launch post-colonial studies. And we just had a symposium. It was absolutely wonderful. In fact, one of the things that was wonderful about it was they invited five or six African writers and the majority of the panelists at this symposium were women. And that's going to be a special issue. But I'm also offering it in contrast to the special issue we didn't do, right? The other anniversary. So that was then. Now the magazine, you know, as I said, we're trying to count every which way we can. But just for this, let me say, in my six years, although I probably didn't count correctly, I must be close, 778 contributors, 400 of those were men. 378 were women. So that's basically what, 51 and a half percent male, 50, 48 and a half women, which, you know, it probably reverses the actual population differential. But, you know, it's not awful. So then I started doing what we came here to talk about, translation. I mean, people who've heard me at Ulta before have heard me talk about, when I came in, I said, I want the political energy we started with back, and I want to do it by publishing more in translation. Those were the two things I said at the time. And I think we've done pretty well. Probably last time I talked about this, I think I've overestimated now that I've counted better. I think we're up to about 15 and a half percent over the six years in translation, which is different. I mean, again, you know, nobody has done more for translation than Susan, but I also think that taking a magazine like ours and saying, this is what we want to do, also contributes to a different kind of change. So in a typical issue, you would have maybe 25 different pieces, essays on fiction. And I'm counting the artists too, because yeah. And art, yeah, that's a new feature of the magazine. And then that portion, that percentage would be translation. Yeah. When I was looking at the magazine, I didn't say, oh, I'm just going to look at the translation. I looked at the entire table of contents to see who was being represented. And I found it absolutely, I found parody. Yeah, yeah. Well, but that's what, again, I want to get to, when I started doing the numbers for translation, here's what it came down to, right? You would think that we would have parody, right? Over the same period, male authors in translation were favored over female authors in translation, 67% to 33%. Yeah, there you go. And that sounds, I mean, we're actually kind of at the high end of appalling. Oh, it's better than average. Yeah, and if you look at the numbers that Witt has compiled, we're at the high end of appalling. Yeah, and it is. It's twice as many guys as women, right? And then male translators versus female translators, it's not as bad, but they're still biased and it's still apparent. It's 54% men, 46% women. Yeah, wow, interesting. And what I think is also interesting is you didn't expect to find that. No. And I've read pieces where editors say that they thought they had almost parody and they actually went back and counted and it was not, it was more like, yeah. Yeah, so one of the things that I'm just trying to emphasize here is that awareness isn't enough, but attending to counting, seeing what's really happening, you do get surprises and at that point, you can start to do something about it. And we will. I should stop there, I guess. Can I add one thing about the translators? By all means. One of the first things that people were sort of responding and this included publishers, when I began to put out the numbers and my observations was that, well, you know, there are actually a majority of women translators, so obviously it's not that there's any sort of misogyny at work. And I think that the observations that are at the Tumblr, the women in translation Tumblr where there is the breakdown and you see that it's actually less than 50% is very interesting because the narrative that every single person set up until that point was that women are translating more and so obviously the problem is not anywhere in the system, it's in the original countries or languages or whatever, but then the numbers just do not support that. And it's a great example of how when women are close to a majority, or close to 50%, close to parity, it seems like a majority. So that's a well-known thing and it's here again. One other thing I'd emphasize too is that, basically the main point I want to make is that we set out to publish more in translation, we did publish more in translation and we replicated this bias, right? And so we're doing something wrong, right? When we get an issue and we realize there's a big bias, we do like Susan said, we look to fix it by sorting through the slush and saying we need more women, let's find something we want to publish. There's no reason you can't do that with translation, but also one of the things that makes publishing more in translation hard when you really want to, like as I've told you, we do, is that we don't have a ton of things to sort through. So it's not just our problem, it's also Alta's problem, right? Why is it, yeah, why isn't we get, you know? We're gonna get back to that issue. Yeah, we're gonna solicit whether you give your, before we get too far out of ourselves, Kaya, I would love to hear from you and I've noticed you've been taking notes. So hopefully you'll have a lot to say not just about what's going on in an open letter, but I think it was Chad who posted, Chad posted something about, you know, their growing awareness there about this issue. But yeah, I wanted to ask you about your editorial experience there, especially if you want, would like to talk about your knowledge of the editorial scene or publishing scene in Latvia versus the US, getting back to this idea of, oh, it's not our fault, it's the source, the countries who are originating these authors who are unbalanced and we can't help but replicate the unbalances, you can just give us a little overview. Should I figure out where to start? So I will say really briefly that with the exception of a couple of interns helping out, the translation database is like 99.9% Chad. He sits there and he is the one who looks through the books, looks through the copyright pages, does the research online, so I can take exactly zero credit for any of that. So he is the sole person behind the translation database and I do not know how he manages that, but he does. So an open letter, we publish 10 books a year. One of those books generally has poetry, there's a different editor who takes care of that. That's just to point out the differences between Words Without Borders and Mass Review. And generally what we do when you talk about factors or elements to consider when preparing a season or a year of books, we do look at gender. We try to get as close to a 50-50 as we can. Sometimes it doesn't all line up in one season and we'll end up having just that's the way that we've set the contracts and the manuscripts and the translators schedules. That's how it ends up where we'll have like most of the women in the first half of the year, most of the men in the second half. Sometimes it's more scattered. But we also take into consideration origin, country, language, things like that. So I mean, for example, Chad is our publisher. His hobby horse is Spanish language literature. That's what he did in high school. That's what he'd read in college. So we end up sort of back loading a lot of our editorial schedule with Spanish language literature because again, that's his hobby horse. That's what he's always liked. We could theoretically publish 10 books from Spanish language authors in one year, but we try not to do that because there are so many other languages in the world. And I don't wanna say that gender is not something that we do not consider, but I feel like from my editorial perspective, the number one thing that I look at is whether or not I like the book. Does it fit in with our aesthetic and our backlist? And I really don't wanna be the person that says that all other categories, including language, gender, origin, country, or secondary that my main concern as an editor is do I like it? Does it fit in? And is it something that I wanna stand behind 100% as an editor that works at a publishing house? And then when it comes to the gender things, that's we, you know, that's something that we do keep in mind and do consider. And that's one thing that I feel like I may be on sort of a versus side of the spectrum here, but everyone's been sort of tossing around the terminology of awareness or excuses or reasons and things like that. And I personally do believe that the origin country should not be discounted for what they're publishing. And to use Latvia as an example, I think that historically, male authors are more prominent in Latvia. However, the female authors are the ones who get the more press and the more recognition publicly. And I don't know that much deeper than that, but I think I'm just thinking back on my childhood and of course it is a society where, however, 100 years ago, 50 years ago, that's what it was where men were the better ones and all that, but currently in 2015 and in the last 10 years, I think female authors have had more publicity and they've been more publicly acknowledged. And I don't mean that in an anti-misogy way, just like when you look on the news, the reviews are of books written by women and things like that. And I guess where I would go as an editor if I'm sitting at my desk and I have a manuscript A and a manuscript B and I think manuscript A is kind of middling and manuscript B is fantastic and I would cut people to publish it and it just happens to be by a male author and the other one, the one that's middling happens to be by a female author. I'm gonna take the one that I would cut someone over because that's the book that speaks to me as a book. And I guess to, I feel like I'm gonna walk into all sorts of mires here in Swamplands, but as a reader and as an editor, I tend to find myself blind to gender as a first step where that doesn't influence my decisions as an editor. And again, we are aware of the gender and we do wanna 50-50 that as much as possible as Susan and Jim have been saying, but it's not the first thing that I consider as a reader and as an editor. And we also only have 10 books a year, so we try to, I don't know, I could just digress and completely digressing. I have a question, could you talk about how a project, a potential book lands on your desk? What are the, how far back can you go? Can you trace, you're coming, this is the problem. We're coming from so many different countries. And there is, say, gatekeepers. There are many different points in that path where there is gonna be a gatekeeper and it's not always gonna be the same. Every book may have its own path. So I'm just wondering if what agents, cultural organizations, what is it that brings a book to your attention as a potential book that will be published? Do you mean what as in content or what as in who? Just in kind of a way, how does it get to you? Because are you soliciting manuscripts? We do everything. We do our own in-house research. We are constantly in contact with agents. We haven't made it to, physically made it to bookfers of late, but you have to consider the bookfers that we go to the agents and publishers we meet with. We get emails and booklets from agents and publishers with their back lists. We get manuscripts from translators, people we've worked with before, people who have worked with people who we've worked with before. Obviously coming to Alta and talking to people about what they're working on. Sometimes it's, we read a book in translation and we enjoyed it and we sort of wonder, keep an eye on what is happening with that author's career and translation in the future. Is that something where, for example, if FSG decides to not continue with, is that something that we can jump on and continue with it ourselves? So really, it's all over the place. I mean, we don't have one specific source. It's all over the place. And sometimes it's even authors who say, oh, this friend of mine or someone who's up and coming in whichever respective language I, as an author, speak. I would be happy if you'd read it and give me your feedback and things like that. So yeah, no one specific thing, but it's from all over. Yeah, sure. I'm just kind of wondering, besides what you just said about the author, if he recommends another author, if that happens to be a male author, then the recommended author might very likely be another male author. It's sort of like an oboise network. And I'm just saying in general, I mean, there are these sort of invisible ways that this pattern is perpetuated. Yeah, and I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm not saying that Jimmy's word awareness. And I believe that, I guess, my stance is that there's a difference between gender shaming, publishers and translation, and encouraging them to be aware and to make that something that they consider actively in their backlist. Because I remember when you sort of joked about it right when we sat down, it took me a minute to remember, but right when this started being a sort of a Twitter thing, I remember looking at it and momentarily feeling a little bit defensive and thinking, well, I'm reading and I'm considering what is offered to me, and that's not to say that I'm pure and innocent in this and that I couldn't go and look for more women authors in these respective countries. But I feel like there's a lot more than just saying, pointing to, for example, to open letter and saying, you're not trying hard enough. And it's like, well, if I go to Malta and they have 10 authors and nine of those are men, let's just say as hypothetically, Malta has only 10 authors and nine of them are men and one of them is a woman. If from my perspective, the woman's book is not something I wanna publish, I'm not gonna go there. And then, is that my fault that I, that I as a publisher and with my backlist and consideration don't publish her book because I found one of the other nine authors' books to be more of my alley? It's possible that I find all 10 of them to be crap and then Malta just doesn't get published by open letter. But I mean, I feel like there, I'm not saying that that's not something that's being considered, but I feel like it would be maybe more fair to shift the weight to speak about equality a little bit more evenly and say that maybe there are agents who should be pushing their women authors a little more or there are the presses that are doing a year of women authors. For example, we are doing a five book series of Danish women authors, which initially started out as just we wanted to do five Danish books. We went to Copenhagen, met with publishers, agents, authors, booksellers, tastemakers. And as we were coming back from the trip, we had already figured out three authors we wanted to publish. Those happened to be three women. And at that point we went, friggin' why not? Let's just do the last two as women as well because that seemed to be a pattern at that time that the Danish authors that we were reading about, the ones we found a little more interesting for our press happened to be women. And so, maybe that's cheating because we just sort of made it into a women series. But there are ways around it as a publisher and there are ways to make that a thing. But I guess from my perspective, if I think something is middling and there's something that's better than that, I'm gonna go for the thing that's better than that regardless of man, woman, child, bear, that wrote it. Yeah. Sure, I would love to publish a bear book so if anyone knows a bear that has written a book. We actually have an iguana issue. Oh, shit. I'm on board. Okay, yeah, we're definitely, it's very hard to find the right kind of activism that doesn't rub some of the points in the wrong way. But surely, and this happened to be the two, but it has had a reaction in the publishing industry. And I think it's good to have responses from publishers and you happen to be at this conference and that's why we would like to have other publishers respond and maybe that's a future project. So, well thank you. Should we turn to our looking at our next set of questions? And actually, we kind of started a little bit when questioning how does a book get to you? Where are the mechanisms? And so I wanna kind of pick your brain because you've been in the business for a while. Jim, you know, what is it, how do you perceive, well let's start with you. And you actually, in putting together your issues, you seem to have a very enlightened approach and going to people, knowledgeable people in that country or that theme and they're coming up and they're putting together an issue that is representative. And so could you talk about how much effort does that entail on your part and how do you locate those people? And are you, yeah, what are your strategies? It varies of course month by month but and also by the amount of lead time we have but certainly I'm always trying to find people that we have, trying to find authors in countries we haven't published from yet. Again, as I said, we have 127 countries that still lead 70 depending on how you count. And some of those obviously, I don't think we're gonna nail anybody from the Vatican but there are other countries that there must be literature, maybe some of it's oral, maybe some of it is just not going to be accessible. But regardless, we don't want to be arbitrary and you don't wanna say I want to be complete at the expense of quality. And certainly we also have had situations where we've had a batch of work come in and actually in this calendar year, I won't be any more specific from that but we declined a poem by a woman contributor just because it just was weak and she had nothing else available. There was nothing else that could be translated on our timetable. And although superficially I didn't want, I was unhappy about not being able to include a woman writer. Realistically, I don't wanna give a forum to someone whose work isn't that great. But I think, again, it takes a lot of research. I'm always online, I'm always talking to people, asking people, I don't travel as much as I'd like but any time you go to conferences, especially someplace like the London Book Fair where you have lots of different people, you have an opportunity to find out what's going on in fields and languages that you're not necessarily regularly exposed to. Our Africa coverage, for example, is disgracefully scanty. We have, the colonial languages are just great but we're still really, really skimpy on the African languages. That's something I'd like to change. It's been a constant source of frustration for me that that's one example where I just haven't been able to make any headway. But I'm not going to stop working on it. Sure, do you have any idea the pieces that are translated from lesser known languages? Do you have any idea how many go on to actually being published as a book? We are aware at this point of somewhere around 20 authors who have landed book contracts for work that originally appeared in our pages. And although in some of those cases the direct cause and effect may be somewhat blurry, in many of them we did actively promote them and we did actively, and we did definitely assist in their acceptance for publication. We have a periodic newsletter that we send to editors and publishers both in the US and around the world highlighting books that we've published extracts from that we think would work well in English translation. And those newsletters are very brief because we publish a lot of terrific work, but not all of it is going to work is something that we necessarily can promote as being something that an English language editor is going to want to take on. A collection of short stories, for example, most editors are just not going to be particularly receptive to that. And we do publish a lot of short stories. But, so it's a huge part of our mission in introducing writers who have not had an English language audience before and in expanding that audience and in hopefully making that an audience that comes to these writers in print. Actually, Jim, maybe we can turn to you and you can talk about some of the mechanics of soliciting articles and do you have guest editors and do you talk about your selection process? Yeah, yeah, because you did mention the slush pile earlier, so. Yeah, well, and specifically I wanted to emphasize the fact that when we started with this project of publishing a lot more in translation, the next question was, so how do we get it? I mean, the first thing I heard from one of our editors was, you know, well the problem with translation is we don't get very much and what we get isn't very good. And, you know, it's a bit like the question of parody. I mean, I somehow just cannot bring myself to believe that there's not more great writing outside the English language than there is inside it. I mean, because there's more writing. So, there must be. And the same thing with parody. I just can't bring myself to believe that there are not equal numbers, at least, of writers from both sides. So then, so what, yeah. Is this a question of translators? Women, translators who are translating women getting the manuscripts to you? Yeah, yeah, and it's as simple as that. But it's not as easy for, you know, one of the things that, you know, I was really happy when, you know, I guess three years ago now, Liz Harris invited me to come to Alta to be on a panel. And not only being great fun, I thought this is really something we have to do because we have to let people know that we're doing this. It's hard to, you know, it's hard to get the word out. We started a translation prize for the same reason. Just to make people know we're serious. I published some of my own translations so they would see, look, the editor translates. They must actually be serious about this. And the other thing is going to book fairs and talking to the small presses that are doing it. And, you know, we've worked with the open letter. We've worked with Archipelago. We've worked with, you know, other press. We've worked with a bunch of different presses that are doing fantastic work. And, you know, when the question's about quality, you know, you also have to understand that for a small press, the risk is so much higher than it is for us. I mean, if you publish 10 books a year, you know, how many books can you afford to be failures, right, before you're not publishing at all anymore? Like zero. Yeah, exactly, right. Whereas, you know, at some level, a magazine's ephemera, you know? It's, you know, we treat it like it's a book. We talk about it as a book, but it's not a book, right? You have a chance to just do stuff to see if it's gonna work in a way that the small press simply can't do. And we're also on, typically, on a shorter timetable. So we can be not only proactive but responsive. And there's always a danger, certainly for my own days in book publishing, there was a danger of signing something up and then by the time it came out, having it be either superseded or old news or just something that was not hot anymore. Not that I ever did anything particularly hot. Yeah, so, I mean, that's basically the strategies I've used so far, trusting the translators and the good small presses, figuring that they know where the quality work is and that if they know that we really are interested in publishing it, then we've started to get much more. Okay, and do you think that having a translation published in Massachusetts Review will help visibility of both the author being translated and the translator? I mean, it... You have a nice success story, is there? Yeah, I know. A few, I mean, not as many as Susan, I'm sure, because she's focused squarely on that and has been doing it longer. But yeah, we've got at least a couple of cases where, when you really, especially working with the small presses, when you get to know what they're doing and when they get to know what you're doing and you see and understand each other, then you can say, look, we published this, you should really look at it. And you just have a sense that this is something that could go there. No, I mean, I think both of you are filters in a way for publishers and it becomes that in your magazines. And I'm also certainly very much dedicated to the idea of presenting not only unknown authors but emerging translators. And a lot of people have published their first translations with us and or other early translations with us. I'm always receptive to that because I think that's also part of our mission in the field. People come to us, book publishers often come to us, one in particular, keeps coming back and I keep saying, haven't you figured it out in the book? But again, publishers come to us for references and we are very happy to be able to provide those. Referrals, excuse me. I didn't answer the question about special issues and guest editors. And the answer is basically when we have a special issue, it's usually guest edited. And that's a real opportunity exactly to do this kind of work because usually what that means is we don't tend to, we have but not recently done sort of specific regional, well, regional a little bit but say a country issue or something like that. But we do get people as guest editors to have real expertise and deep knowledge of other languages and other cultures and therefore that means they're tapped into something that isn't yet in English. The best example I've got I think recently is about a year ago now we published an issue we called Mediterranean's and the idea was that there are plenty of them and we need to hear more about it. And the main thing we did, we had two guest editors, one was Michelle Mushavak who runs interlink books and so we were able to bring into that issue over half of the work comes from North Africa and the Middle East because that's what interlink does and they knew what was going on and what we could do there. So it was important that you knew them and could make that. Yeah, yeah, so. But am I hearing the message correctly that you guys need to get more work from translators? Why do you think that? Okay, translators take note. Okay, you know, I really do like coming to ALTA because it's fantastic but this year I'm actually gonna make the magazine pay for it because they should be, you know, in the past. Absolutely. You're at work right now, Jim. Yeah, well, I mean, as I said, getting the word out is really the only way to get past the, because obviously, as Susan was saying, the question of quality is true for everybody. Maybe the risk is smaller for us but we're not gonna publish anything we're not excited about and we need to find out about stuff that we don't know about. I mean, that's what I put on the little blurb on our website about translation. I said, we wanna publish the best writers we've never heard of, you know? And how are we gonna hear about them? Coming here and saying stuff like this. Okay, so if you get a submission and it doesn't quite fit, would you give any feedback to the translator about why it doesn't fit or just, you know, because the question of ejection also has come up in the VEDA at this course at when then take rejection or men just come back, you know, next, they just send something else. Or they probably already submitted it 20 places in. Yeah, or men will ask for feedback. Well, we're not, and those of you who read the magazine know that we no longer do random pieces. Everything that we do either fits into the theme of the issue or a smaller feature that runs every month. So I am not looking for, we're not looking for random submissions and I actually tend to get a little shirty when I get one because it does mean that someone hasn't really bothered to pay attention to the magazine, which I never point out. That's the kind of feedback I'd like to give. Pay attention. But we certainly are receptive to people coming to us with ideas for features or issues if they have a solid proposal. And that's the kind of thing that, but if somebody would come to me and say, I would, you know, for example, somebody wrote and said, I'd like to do work from ex-country. And I said, well, you know, we just did that issue two months ago. You either weren't paying attention or you really don't, you know, this isn't how we work. You do it once, you don't do it every month after that. So we don't give, we're not able to give feedback on that kind of submission. But if somebody came to me with a proposal for an issue or a feature and had something that I thought was promising but didn't work, I'd certainly, you know, that would certainly be a conversation that I'd have. What about you, Jim? I've occasionally kind of personally given long feedback to pieces that I thought were interesting, but we couldn't publish them. And at least in one case, there's a writer that I did that a second time and said, you know, I don't know how explicit I should be about this. But I said, you don't really want to be doing brown face the rest of your life, do you? There's a market for that, but you're really talented and you can do more than that. And it's actually somebody who, about eight months later sent us something else and we're gonna publish it because it's fantastic. But generally the question of feedback is you won't get any from us because we can't keep up. Yeah, we just can't. I started out doing that about three or nine, started with open letter three years ago and I thought it was the nice thing to do because I approached it as, you know, also I translate myself and so I feel like I have one foot on both sides of that line, but you just, and by you I mean sort of the royal use slash myself and sort of Jim was saying, one person you can't with the amount of submissions that we get, it's exhausting, you can't do that. It's emotionally tasking and with the exception of the ones that are like about dragons or detectives where it says on our website to piggyback off of Susan's, please pay attention to what a website submissions say, open letter does not do genre literature. So someone sends me something about, which has happened and not infrequently about dragons, I write back and just say in bold we do not publish genre literature and that's the most I'll do and I've had people email and if anyone in this room has submitted to me and we decided not to take on the project and you asked for feedback and I just didn't answer, it's because I just don't have the time to sit down and I used to give the feedback in the rejection letters and also sort of spitball ideas of other presses that could be approached, but then I've spent half an hour writing a letter and I just can't afford to do that time-wise. Yeah, none of us are in a situation, as much as we'd like to, none of us are in a situation to be other people's research assistants and that's often what it comes down to. Sorry, that did sound really small. What's even worse is sometimes the case is that my feedback would just be I didn't like it and I'm sorry, it's literally, it's not you, it's just me and I think that's one thing I say this frequently, that's what makes literature as an entity interesting is that you're not gonna like the same books I like, you're not gonna like the same books I like and that's fabulous and it's fascinating because it keeps things moving and pulsating and interesting, but I'm not gonna write that to someone, I'm not gonna say feedback, colon, I just didn't like it because I also when I first started out, my number one concern was that people would think, oh, it's my translation, I'm terrible at this and then I found myself justifying frequently and saying the translation is beautiful, I like the way you did the rhythm or the meter or the dialogue, something like that, but at a certain point you have to realize that we're all adults and everyone's gonna get rejected at some point, if you haven't, what's your magic potion? But it's gonna happen and that's just part of the process and maybe you were just one tick short of the right press and the next you're gonna send it to is gonna be the right one and I also have a fairly firm belief that the books that we do not end up taking on, I get really excited when there's a book that I end up projecting and a few months later or a year later, it pops up on my Amazon feed and I'm excited and I've written emails to people saying congratulations, like we didn't take it but that's fabulous that someone else did because it was a great translation, it was interesting, it just didn't work for our press. How are we doing for time? But we have about five minutes. No, you're right. I didn't want to be that person because we could hear all day. Okay, well let's take some questions and we started late, so let's, or Pama's reaction Well wouldn't you say Knellsgard is the ultimate woman writer with his focus on the quotidian and the detail and the agonizing over the tiniest? I'm saying that sardonically, but I think there's a bit of truth in that. No, it's interesting you bring that up because I think, and I don't think we wanted to do too much name naming but Amazon Crossing is one of the most balanced, I don't, yeah, we don't have it. Last year they were the only one to pass by. It's amazing, you can talk about this. Yeah, and so there they are on the left-hand side but at a lot of presses, I think, when talking about this issue, they say, well we don't take that kind of, and you know, I don't know if we want to start talking about chiclet, but I think you have some articulate things to say about stylistics and aesthetic. The term aesthetic, which Kaya raised, I've heard a few times and I've seen it in very negative connotations that it's often used as an excuse for why a publishing house might have, open letter has generally a really good one if I recall correctly, it's around 40% which is above average but you'll see a lot of times people coming and saying, we have an aesthetic, women don't write according to that aesthetic and that's also why I find what Susan said earlier about the fact that they couldn't tell if something was written by a woman as being really, really important because aesthetic is very, very influenced by what you're perceiving and your kind of previous biases and so having this thing of well, we believe in a certain, you know, one person's chiclet is another person's complicated, humorous, intelligent assessment of a romantic situation and interestingly enough, it's called chiclet when it's written by a woman and comedy when it's written by a man so a lot of times these kind of genre definitions do have a gender bias and there is a little bit of sexism in how people mark it and how they subconsciously mark it and how they subconsciously perceive it and I don't want to publish or blame it all here in the sense of everyone is terrible and sexist or whatever but we all have unconscious biases whether it's towards gender, race or whatever it may be and I think that that kind of question of the genre or the aesthetic or the style is very tied into them. No, I would just add that everything I've learned about the history of the magazine that I'm now in charge of is exactly this question. I mean, when they started, they said, look, literary magazines are completely dominated by a kind of hegemony of new critical aesthetic, you know, T.S. Eliot is God and we actually don't think that that's the only good writing that's out there and so they started publishing women, they started publishing black writers, they started publishing Latino writers and it's risky but it worked, I mean, it made a magazine that's lasted over 50 years, right? You know, the big publishing phenomenon everybody knows in translation this year is Ferrante. Ferrante is writing about female friendship. Gee, maybe there's a market, you know and the fact that you guys and this movement has already convinced a couple of small presses that they're going to go in that direction, again, they're gonna publish maybe 10 books a year or less and they're not doing it because they think it's not gonna sell or that it's the political correct decision to make, they're doing it because they think that and they realize that this should work. I mean, the publishing industry is a really small world, sometimes parochial in different ways and aesthetics is part of that but that also means it's not that hard to change. It shouldn't be, it's, you know and shaming, I'm kind of in favor of actually. Well, that's a shame, I don't know. And if any other? Well, I'm in favor of shaming the capitalist side because it's fundamentally shameless. I mean, in networking, you know actually we used to call that organizing, yeah, yeah, so. Okay, any comments? Say something just, I thought, voices by Rob Spillman, they talked about the lengths that he went to, to ensure that there were more, I thought, you know, it kind of came up a little bit here about how we write a rejection letter, how you solicit was very important, you know, the language and the curating of that magazine. It seems pretty obvious that when you don't pay attention at all, it's always going to result in a, it has to be a conscious decision, not quotas. I don't think I've ever heard anybody say they're having quotas. The publishing house decides to go all women, that's great, but that if you aren't paying attention, whether you're a woman or a man, the default is always going to be a woman. Yeah, and he obviously put a lot of work into that effort, and I think that's where things get difficult for editorial people, but it represents a lot of work, and it represents a lot of work among women too, to put our interests forward and to make these kinds of things happen and to keep it on the agenda. It's what my child has been doing, so. Well, another thing that didn't come up, but came up in sort of the pre-discussion, was reviews. Yeah, I had a poll, there's no, okay, just pick. We're just going to stay here and take a poll. Can I make a suggestion? I don't know if you want, but don't do it. We will repost any review that fits the criteria of this panel. If Chad does one, just send it to us, we'll post it again, you know? Okay, yeah, just one. Because that's part of it, getting the word out and changing the discourse is making sure it gets to as many people as you can. And you said review, review by women? Yeah, we're starting to try and do more book reviews on our blog, but again, we don't have a lot of time. It's hard to find the people to do it. You know, my former fiction editor, he stepped down and he said, but I will keep writing reviews for you guys, and why don't you just send me books in translation? So now I can think, okay, now I'm only going to send books by women in translation. Yeah, yeah. See how long it takes if we catch one. Yeah. I mean, I can say at least part of the idea of Whitmonth and kind of having this structured environment for discussing women writers in translation was very much also to encourage people to write reviews because you really don't see as many reviews of books by women writers partially because there are fewer. And I think also that kind of the Vita observation that it's often perceived as less literary and most of the outlets are very literary and so there's definitely also a problem in the reviewing world. And of course the fact that translations in general are not quite at the level of reviewed as much as regular literature. And that's a problem. And that's a separate problem, but I think that you're all probably really well aware of it and care about it. But definitely they're encouraged reviewing. I can say that from the reviewing side. Okay, all right. All right, well thank you all for being on the panel. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Translate.