Celebrate #WITMonth with Two Lines

Women In Translation(opens in a new tab) Month “seeks to rectify the imbalance in world literature, promoting women writers from across all walks of life, all languages, and all experiences. Whether translated into English, translated between different non-English languages, or still untranslated: women from all over the world deserve to have equal opportunities when it comes to literary recognition.” 

We’re committed to seeking out and publishing great work by women—especially those from underrepresented languages and regions. Much of the most innovative and exciting literature around the world is being written and translated by women, and we’re proud to reflect that in the work we publish in our titles from Two Lines Press and on our online journal, an oasis for the work of emergent literary translators and international authors since 1993.

Take a look into some of the exciting and varied work we’ve published by women in our journal by browsing the short stories and poems you’ll find below, including work translated from Swedish, Thai, Hebrew, Spanish, Ukrainian, and more.

“I’m sitting in the kitchen. I’ve been sitting here throughout my visit. There’s also four other women here, four generations ranging from ages eighteen to seventy-eight. They speak a language I don’t understand. I glow against their faces. I glow against their breasts. They’re all loud, with enormous breasts, and shiny cheeks. W pours salt into her beer. G has a deep cleft beneath her clavicle. A crucifix sandwiched between her breasts. She lights a candle the shape of a pale, yellow penis. It’s supposed to remove tobacco smoke residue. Dolores smokes cigarette after cigarette. It’s eight o’clock. We don’t eat dinner. Today, we drink beer and ägglikör with Läkarsprit. We have donuts, chicken pie, and beer. All of the windows are fitted with side curtains; the rooms are filled with a soft light. Later, everyone is too full to realize that the ceiling light should be turned on. No one notices the darkness, that the curtains no longer let any light through. We’re just happy to be together.”

“The black hand of night wrings out the sky,

squeezing out sparks, shards of stars, fragments aglow.

Along the sky’s rim had shone a line of red

that’s now given way to darker hues.

Once the sun has wandered out of sight,

the night sets the moon out in its place

and underneath its cool, gentle light,

a chorus of stars rises in song…”

“At night, when my daughter is asleep in her bed, I comb the newspapers, striving to find some logic in the melody of names that I contemplate out loud. No rule ever crystallizes from this humming, but for a moment my heart lifts with a feeling of enlightenment: a guttural syllable at the beginning of a name, a weak syllable at the end, a letter in the middle of a word. But right away, always, one after another, the exceptions emerge, and everything fogs up again, and once again my body wanders about in terror like a pagan approaching what his eyes perceive as a caprice of nature. Nature has no whims. Nature has law.”

“a cicada starts the summer like a letter is opened; we open our friendship like a festival is opened, something with half board, buffet, and a pool landscape. something that should make up for everything else.

it is the summer that I am here, in a love that it so serious that I have to practice it, that is meant so seriously I have to practice, and even this love doesn’t really know how things should go on. the blue-collar love of my friend q. and her factory worker body that lifts me up every time we see each other, because she doesn’t know where else to go with our joy but up.”

“There is an oppressive heat that morning in Campana. And suddenly, as if swept over the land, a warm breeze. The father goes downtown to take care of the last bit of paperwork. He takes the Citroen to get the water, oil, tires checked. Around noon they’ll take off for the coast. Jani climbs the orange tree, ready to squander the remaining hours. And if she stopped counting them once and for all? Four hundred and seventy-seven, she corrects herself, because the last one was a sleeping dog. Do the sleeping ones count? A dog that dreams he’s a man and wakes up howling beneath a tree. A dog like any of those seven that now appear again in a pack and, strutting, go off in search of leftover garbage or who knows what. The stray from the corner and an enormous, bone-colored one and another and another join the ones from yesterday. Jani can’t believe it. She begins counting again with enthusiasm, almost frenzied.”

“I wanted to cry and to escape,

to leave, not wasting time, far away, never to return

and when at the border they ask, “What is in your luggage?”

I open the bag with ringing fragments

and I cannot explain what broke.

All the words have flown out

into an enduring winter song.”

“A book sits open on her desk. You sit down in the chair and turn the pages, but you don’t read it. You only look at the drawings sketched in the margins and notice how she’d underlined certain sentences and folded down the corners of pages. It seems she spent a great deal of time studying these lines. You touch the book carefully, as if it might crumble beneath your fingers.

You stand up and walk over to the bed. The smell that rises from it is one you know very well. You crawl under the covers, wondering what dreams have been dreamed here, and then you close your eyes and fall asleep.”

“No one will shackle me.

Sin out of suede and bats

has hung in the attics of terror, its half-mouse snout upside-down—

At dusk I’ll slip out the tower, escape the fortified tower,

through slash and slice of wasp,

barbed wire of poisoned herb—

…

the fanatical night will threaten to stone me with stars,

I’ll slip through their fingers like mercury.

Nothing will shackle me.”

Illustrations by Antonio Carrau and Thomas Colligan

Forthcoming September 26

“These extraordinary translations of Caribbean voices surge with defiance and music…radical and reclamatory.”

—Alina Stefanescu