The life of a literary translator is thankfully a lot less gory. Nevertheless, we are occasionally called upon to offer our authors a lifeline. This week, news reached me that Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, an Equatorial Guinean author whose novel By Night the Mountain Burns I translated for And Other Stories, was being pursued by his country’s dictatorial regime. Ávila Laurel and five others, including Salvador Ebang Ela, founder of Elefante y la Palmera, the Elephant and Palm Tree, a political party known for conducting peaceful protests against police brutality, had requested permission from the Provincial Government of Bioko Norte to hold a demonstration in Plaza Ewaiso E’pola on 23 February. The request was refused and followed by an announcement that Ebang El and his sympathisers were to be rounded up.

When writers come under threat in their own countries, translators can act as a bridge to the outside world. Sometimes publicising what’s happening can make a real difference, letting writer and tormentor know that the rest of the world is watching. When Orhan Pamuk was formally charged with insulting Turkishness, Maureen Freely, his English-language translator, published as many articles as she could about the case in the international press.Shirley Lee translates from Korean and has focused her attention on exiled North Korean writers. She provides them with a lifeline simply by being interested in what they have to say, but she also has to coax and encourage them: it’s not easy expressing yourself freely if you’ve been conditioned to writing under the scrutiny of a repressive regime.

Becoming a translator is not a political act in itself – Lee says she was drawn to North Korea by the peculiarities of the country’s language and literature, not its politics – but it’s hard not to be politicised by such exposure to tyrannical regimes.

Pietro Zveteremich was political. He withdrew his membership from the Italian Communist Party after translating Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which was published in translation before it was ever published in Russian. The Soviet Union went to great lengths to try and prevent publication, even forcing Pasternak to sign a telegram sent to Zveteremich, asking him to withhold his translation. But Pasternak also sent Zveteremich a handwritten note saying precisely the opposite; Zveteremich licensed publication of his translation and the book was launched to great fanfare and acclaim.Pasternak and Pamuk were both given the Nobel Prize and the international prestige that goes with such awards can be vital in protecting writers from persecution at home. In the UK, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize provides prestige and some media coverage, while doing a sterling job in recognising the contribution of translators and championing translated works from distant lands.

They don’t come much more distant than Annóbon Island, the setting for By Night the Mountain Burns. Annóbon is a remote island off the west coast of Africa, administered by Equatorial Guinea but periodically cut-off by the regime, for reasons of power and control.

I first met Ávila Laurel in 2012 in Barcelona, where he’d fled after going on hunger strike in Equatorial Guinea, a protest against government oppression. We went for a drink in a bar in the Raval area that was run by another Guinean exile. It was a friendly place, but there was a sadness to it. As Ávila Laurel explained: ‘Barcelona’s a lovely city, but we’re not here out of choice.’ Critics of President Obiang’s regime are bullied into leaving as a matter of course, and Ávila Laurel had been proud of the fact that he’d stuck it out, that he was an outspoken writer living in Equatorial Guinea.I asked him whether he was working on anything in Barcelona and he said that he was: he was writing his memoirs, he said, to leave them in Barcelona when he flew back to Guinea, por si acaso… just in case.

It was a chilling thing to be told: here was a man calmly preparing for the worst, yet determined to go home.

And go home he did. He’s at home now in fact, literally so, for although he’s been advised to go into hiding, he refuses to do so: he’s done nothing wrong, so why should he hide? All the same, he’s been forced into keeping a low profile, to being confined to the neighbourhood and suspending his public work. He’s safe for now, but there’s no telling whether the danger has passed: Equatorial Guinea’s regime creates a climate of fear by making threats, real and veiled, and by following up on some of them.So it’s left to myself and David Shook, Ávila Laurel’s poetry translator, to stay alert and watch our author’s back: to act as his bridge and keep the world informed, por si acaso.

About the author
Jethro Soutar is a translator of Spanish and Portuguese. His translation of Hotel Brasil by Frei Betto will be published by Bitter Lemon Press, while By Night the Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel will be published by And Other Stories in the autumn. Both books were awarded a PEN Writers in Translation award. Soutar is currently editing a book of translated football-themed writing from Latin America, The Football Crónicas.

About Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel
Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel was born in 1966 in Equatorial Guinea, Africa’s only Spanish-speaking country. His parents were from the remote Annobón Island, off the African coast. His books include the novel Avión de Ricos, Ladrón De Cerdos(The Pig Thief And The Rich Man’s Aeroplane) and the short story collection Cuentos Crudos (Raw Tales). Ávila Laurel has been a constant thorn in the side of his country’s long-standing dictatorial government. A nurse by profession, for many years he was one of the best known Equatorial Guinean writers not to have opted to live in exile. But, in 2011, after a week-long hunger strike in protest against Obiang’s regime, timed to coincide with the President of Spain’s visit to Equatorial Guinea, Ávila Laurel moved to Barcelona. He writes across all media, in particular as a blogger, essayist and novelist.

Additional information
By Night the Mountain Burns was awarded an English PEN translation grant. To further support the book’s publication, visit the And Other Stories website.

Set on Annobón, a remote island off the West African coast governed by Equatorial Guinea but completely neglected by the government, By Night The Mountain Burns recounts the narrator’s childhood, growing up among countless siblings, several mothers, ever absent fathers and an unusual grandfather. We learn of the dark realities of island life: bush fires that destroy crops and threaten homesteads, cholera outbreaks, the sometimes uneasy marriage between folklore and religion and the imposition of an official language that is not their own and, which has very little context within their isolated world.

By Night the Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel is translated from Spanish by Jethro Soutar and will be published in November 2014. To support the publication of this book, subscribe by 5 March.

Jethro Soutar wrote about Juan Tomás for the Guardian Books blog.

David Shook, Juan Tomás’s poetry translator, writes about the current situation in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

A panel of translators and human rights activists will be considering the role of the translator as ‘literary activist’ at this year’s London Book Fair. The discussion will take place on 10 April at 1pm.

The post The translator as literary activist appeared first on English PEN.

In recent times, Day of the Dead has also become a date for protest. Following the murder or disappearance of dozens of Mexican journalists, editors, bloggers and writers in recent years, PEN centres around the world have begun holding their own Days of the Dead. Last year in the UK, English PEN and PEN International gathered outside the Mexican Embassy to remember all missing and murdered writers. We prepared a traditional altar with candles, photographs, bowls of water, fruit, and paper skulls; handed out mementos containing information about individual writers and  read real-life case studies in both Spanish and English.

In the first six months of 2012, more writers were murdered in Latin America than in any other region in the world. Between January and August 2012, eight print journalists were killed, making Mexico the second most dangerous country in the world in which to be a writer, closely followed by Honduras and Brazil.To mark Day of the Dead this year, we’re posting poems by Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco on the PEN Atlas. These poems will appear in PEN International’s anthology Write Against Impunity 2012, the first texts of which are released Friday November 2. The full anthology will be published on November 23, the International Day to End Impunity

Three Poems by José Emilio Pacheco (1939 ~)

1. The Altar of the Dead

This atrocious month has finally passed
And left us so many dead
That even the air breathes death
And death is drunk in the water.
I can’t resist the wound of so much death.
Mexico cannot be the plural cemetery,
The enormous common grave
Where our hopes lie exhausted.
We already drown the future
In the abyss that opens each day.

2. The Hour of the Children

The children traffic in a new species of rats,
Ringed like lobsters and colored magenta and sky blue.
Strange flavor at firstBut since hunger doesn’t lie
We grow used to baking them.
Since you are what you eat
In less than a year
We become like them.
First their panicked little eyes, fur and tail.
Then, quickly, teeth like drill bits,
Claws like a bone saw.
(Is it necessary to say that in this regard
They didn’t have to teach us much?)
Now the children who lived off the rats are men.
They operate like hit men contracted by an invisible power
And little by little but night after night
They eliminate us with gunshots.

3. Tomorrow

At twenty they told me:
“You mustSacrifice yourself for Tomorrow”.
And we offered life up on the altar
Of the god that never arrives.
At the end of things I would like to find myself
With my old teachers from that time.
They would have to tell me if
All the present’s horror truly was Tomorrow.

(Translation by David Shook) 

TRES POEMAS

1. El altar de los muertos

El mes atroz ya se fue
Y nos dejó tantos muertos
Que hasta el aire respira muerte
Y en el agua se bebe muerte.
No resisto la herida de tanta muerte.
México no puede ser el cementerio plural,
La inmensa fosa común
En que yace deshecho lo que esperábamos.
Al porvenir ya lo hundimos
En el abismo que se abre todos los días.

2. La hora de los niños

Los niños traficaban con una nueva especie de ratas,
Anilladas como langostas y de color magenta y celeste.
Sabor extraño al principio
Pero como el hambre no miente
Nos habituamos a hornearlas.
Ya que uno es lo que come
En menos de un año
Nos volvimos como ellas.
Primero los ojitos alarmados, la pelambre y la cola.
Poco después los dientes de taladro,
Las garras como sierra de partir huesos.
(¿Hará falta decir que a este respectoNo tuvieron gran cosa que enseñarnos?)
Ahora son hombres los niños que vivían de las ratas.
Actúan como sicarios de un poder invisible
Y poco a poco pero noche tras noche
Nos eliminan a balazos.

3. El mañana

A los veinte años me dijeron:
“HayQue sacrificarse por el Mañana”.
Y ofrendamos la vida en el altar
Del dios que nunca llega.
Me gustaría encontrarme ya al final
Con los viejos maestros de aquel tiempo.
Tendrían que decirme si de verdad
Todo este horror de ahora era el Mañana. 

About the Author

José Emilio Pacheco (Mexico, 1939) is a poet, essayist, translator, novelist and short story writer; a central figure of Mexican and Latin American literature. Pacheco has been a member of the National College since 1986 and is an honorary member of the Mexican Academy of Language and has received numerous awards, including the Cervantes Prize in 2009. For Pacheco, poets are the true critics of their time. His poetry is simple, blending everyday language with irony and black humour, but it is also profound and experimental. This writing, he says, belongs to everyone, not just the author.

José Emilio Pacheco (Mexico, 1939) – poeta, ensayista, traductor, novelista y cuentista. Figura central de la literatura mexicana y latinoamericana. Miembro del El Colegio Nacional desde 1986 y miembro honorario de la Academia Mexicana de la Lengua. Ha recibido numerosos premios, entre ellos el Premio Cervantes 2009. Para Pacheco, el poeta es el crítico de su tiempo. Su poesía parece sencilla con su lenguaje cotidiano y sin ornamentos, con su ironía y humor negro. Pero es profunda y experimental. La escritura pertenece a todos, dice, no a un autor específico.

About the Translator

David Shook’s poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in Oxford Magazine, Poetry, PN Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. A chapbook of his translations from the Isthmus Zaptec of Víctor Terán is available from the Poetry Translation Centre, and his work also appears in the anthologies Oxford Poets 2010 (Carcanet) and Initiate (Blackwell). His translation of Mario Bellatin’s Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction is forthcoming Shook lives in Los Angeles, where he edits Molossus.

Additional information

You can read more about the PEN’s Case list by following this link.To find out what you can do to help, please consider joining The Rapid Action Network (RAN). This network was founded by the Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International in 1991.  The purpose of the network is to alert members and supporters as rapidly as possible to disturbing developments affecting the welfare of writers and journalists around the globe, and to encourage them to respond instantly by writing a letter of appeal, taking other forms of action, and by passing the information on to their contacts.Distributed by email, each alert or ‘RAN’ gives members the confirmed facts of the case; a paragraph stating clearly what PEN’s concerns are about the case; a sample appeal; and the address or fax numbers to which appeals should be addressed. Joining the network does not mean you are obliged to respond to every RAN, although each letter can be enormously helpful in reinforcing the work we do here. However, we do ask that if you decide to send an appeal you do so as soon as possible after you receive the alert. The Rapid Action Network will also be used to bring you updates from the Writers in Prison Committee (for example, when a prisoner is acquitted) or when specific appeals arise.To subscribe to English PEN’s Rapid Action Network, please click this link.

The post Day of the Dead 2012 appeared first on English PEN.