Kristina Reardon
Photo courtesy of Kristina Reardon
Bio
At any given moment, words in three different languages were heard around the dinner table in writer Kristina Reardon’s childhood. She finds that translating literature from her grandparents’ native Slovene and Spanish to English is a challenging—yet natural—pursuit. Reardon holds an MFA in fiction writing from the University of New Hampshire and is a PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut, where she is writing her dissertation on humor and war in early 20th-century European literature. Since 2015, she has also worked as associate director for the Center for Writing at the College of the Holy Cross, where she directs the peer writing center and teaches writing and literature. She was awarded a Fulbright translation grant to Ljubljana in 2010-2011 and a stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities to attend a summer program on World War I and the arts in 2014.
There is a well-published statistic that contends that only about three percent of books published in the U.S. are translations. Among those, relatively few come from my mother and grandmother’s native Slovene, and even fewer come from Slovene women. While I originally set out to become a fiction writer when I worked on my MFA. ten years ago, I have since redirected my voice to amplify the voices of underrepresented women who have critical insights to share. I am so grateful for the recognition that a National Endowment for the Arts translation grant provides not only for my work as a translator—but also for the work of the author, Nataša Kramberger, whose novel I will be translating in 2019. The time and space to translate that this grant affords will go a long way in ensuring that my work as a translator will not only be as accurate as possible but that I am able to trace the contours of Kramberger’s words with appropriate stylistic nuance in English. To me, this grant also represents a vote of confidence in my translation—something which will carry me through the process—and an investment in female writers like Kramberger and female translators like me. It’s my sincere hope that over time that three percent statistic will grow and that women’s voices, in particular, will become louder and better represented in translation.
From Blackberry Heaven by Nataša Kramberger
[Translated from the Slovenian]
That evening,
at ten past eight, she was crossing the bridge over the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal when suddenly instead of cold, the sharpness of night set in, shhhh, shhh, darkness. She made her next breath shallow so that it did not sound like a cry of panic. Then she blinked three times, long and hard, to make the darkness go away. The damp stench of piss rose up from the canal, and she could hear thieves hissing: “Bikesss, bikesss.” The red-light district over the bridge was no longer red, just slimy and horrible. The lamps along the road were mute, the stone houses cold and trams still. The narrow streets became even more winding and someone started shouting like a madman. Her next breath was just a bit shallow, to suppress the feeling of blood pulsing through her veins, and she crouched down near the child and said in English: “Don’t worry.”
When Europe lost power, Amsterdam was pitch black.
The silent hum under the bridge swelled up into the sky as if water were still the only living element, while here and there bicycles and their stray lights darted by. The few bicycles that had working lights, that is. She was crouching down there on the bridge in the center of Amsterdam and the child stood in front of her, his mother Chinese and his father African; he had been born there and she was his babysitter. He looked up at her, furrowing his eyebrows, and licked his lips, don’t cry, please don’t cry, the wind howled through the canal and black circles danced in front of her eyes. The child wore a cap on his head and squeezed her index and middle finger. When he pursed his lips, he looked like a little girl, and he was tiny for a two-year-old. He looked up at her under furrowed brows and waited for her to say something, until he bent his knees ever so slightly, crouched ever so slightly, and bent forward, leaning against her forehead so that his black curls ran into her mouth and her breath became even more shallow. He squeezed her neck with both his palms and pressed against her cheeks, then turned his face up so that she involuntarily turned to look, too: “Jana, maan!”
When you locked up your bike with only a single lock in this city you really risked not finding it again. She knew this all too well. She had searched up and down the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal for what felt like eternity, convinced that she had left her bike here, no, no, there, and she had given the child a piggyback ride down the bike lanes and over the bridges, past the streetlamps and cafes and under scaffolding, over the canals, until the child felt as heavy as cement and the city went pitch black in a split second. In complete darkness she now guessed the way to the tram stop—though they were not running anyways, they were stopped, how could they go anywhere—and she cursed their lock for being so flimsy and only a single lock, and she cursed the thieves for having honed in on her. The sharpness, rather the cold, was pressing down on the Oudezijda Voorburgwal canal, and the child was speaking to her in a language she could not understand.
About Nataša Kramberger
Nataša Kramberger (b. 1983) is the first Slovene writer to receive the European Union Prize for Literature (2010); she was awarded this honor for her debut novel, Nebesa v robidah: roman v zgodbah [Blackberry Heaven: A Novel in Stories], published by the Ljubljana-based press JSKD in 2007. The book was also shortlisted for the 2008 Kresnik Award in Slovenia. Kramberger splits her time between Germany and Slovenia and works as a freelance writer and journalist with several newspapers and magazines in both countries.