Maryse Condé
When Ann Morgan started her A Year of Reading the World project, she came up against the tricky question of what to do about reading works in translation. She is able to read in French and German "slowly and with a very big dictionary" and felt that surely it would be better to read something in its original language. Yet she had quite the inner struggle about the actual importance of translation to her project and the unfortunately disadvantaged position of non-English writers who must both face the juggernaut of the English language's massive literary output and the disinterest of English publishers in publishing translations.
In the end, she embraced translation, and you can read all about her process of making the decision here. As a translator myself, I certainly understand the importance of promoting work in other languages and ensuring that people are able to express themselves naturally and to the best of their abilities in their native language. I too am going embrace translation as I read the world, but I'm not going to shy away from reading books in French and Spanish when I can. It will open up more options to me, especially from further-flung places like Mauritania or Paraguay, and will help me keep up my skills in those languages.
I read Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé's book La migration des cœurs in high school and, to be honest, I don't really remember much about it. I did discover that it is now available in English translation under the title Windward Heights, an allusion to Condé's reinterpretation of Wuthering Heights in the colonial Caribbean. One thing I do remember is that the dialogue was often written in French Creole – a most disconcerting fact to high-school-French-reading me. It would be quite interesting to see how the translator approached this sticky wicket and whether he or she used analogous English West Indian Creole.
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