Cover design by Emmanuel Espinal.
Press Release | Dossier on Women in Translation
Last year, inspired by the #WomenInTranslation hashtag, the Esendom editorial collective launched what has become our first dossier. Our goal was to open up a conversation on translation and the often-silenced creative work by women especially women of color.
The following dossier in PDF format features interviews and short articles that further investigate translation work and literature in the Caribbean and Latin American region and North America. It features interviews with two translators, academic researchers and professors: Sophie Maríñez (Dominican Republic/France) and Achy Obejas (Cuba/USA) as well as short, informative pieces on two poets, cultural workers, researchers and independent thinkers: Aurora Arias (Dominican Republic) and the late Aída Cartagena Portalatín (Dominican Republic).
Sophie Maríñez offers her thoughts on translation and discusses her upbringing in both France and the Dominican Republic. Her most recent work, Mademoiselle de Montpensier: Writings, Châteaux, and Female Self-Construction in Early Modern France (2017), examines questions of self-construction in the works of Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans. Maríñez is associate professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College of The City University of New York.
Cuban-born writer, storyteller, and translator Achy Obejas talks about her work as a translator, the beauty and irreverence of Caribbean Spanish and some of the challenges that translators face. Currently, she is the director of the MFA in Translation program at Mills College in Oakland, California. Obejas has written and edited several works including Akaschic Books (2007), Days of Awe (2001), and Ruins (2009).
The late Aída Cartagena Portalatín was an avant-garde Dominican essayist, cultural worker, poet, novelist, short story writer, art critic and activist. After the fall of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorial rule, a younger generation of radical artists and writers looked up to Cartagena Portalatín for inspiration and support. She also collaborated with the surrealist literary group La Poesía Sorprendida.
Poet and short story writer Aurora Arias provides readers with an alternative to traditional Dominican literature. Arias is part of the 1980s generation of writers and artists. Her writing is free like a bird and while not overtly political, her poetry carries in its interior the seeds of rebellion.
As an online medium of cultural production, Esendom documents Dominican-descended people and the communities they inhabit. Esendom looks at current and past social issues and examines these areas, thus presenting them to our public. The purpose of our work is to create a network of critical information that is to be useful to the Dominican community and everyone interested in learning about the richness of this beautiful culture.
Please feel free to share among students, researchers, professors, translators, poets and writers as well as the public.
Hope you enjoy it!
Nelson Santana, Emmanuel Espinal and Amaury Rodriguez