QWF Writes

Tag: publication

  • Dear Everyone I’ve Ever Known: Thank You. This Book Is Dedicated to You.—By April Ford

    Dear Everyone I’ve Ever Known: Thank You. This Book Is Dedicated to You.—By April Ford

    I’m two seasons away from the release of my debut novel. This will actually be my third book publication, yet there are elements of the publishing process that still intimidate me. Two I believe I’ve mastered by now are how to dedicate a book, and how to thank people who’ve helped me along the way—“mastered,” that is, until I start imagining how Person A might feel when she doesn’t see her name on the “Acknowledgements” page even though she treated me to coffee during a rough patch in my life, or when I finally admit I don’t want to dedicate my debut novel to my ex-husband even though, while we were married, I said I would.

    For all the slow writers out there like myself—and this isn’t counting the time it takes for a book to go through the publishing process—a lot can happen between the first and final drafts. It can be startling to see how these changes manifest on paper, especially if you’ve told someone you’re going to mention them in your book but you change your mind. So while you’re fantasizing about eloquent dedications and thorough acknowledgements (a fun and necessary exercise), why not keep a list to help you remember whom to thank and whom not to thank? There will always be someone’s name you add to the list and then remove. And then add again out of guilt. Seeing this name next to the ones you’re 100 percent certain you want to thank might clear your doubt. Update the list as needed, right up until the day your publisher asks for the final iteration. And do not to show it to anyone before your book is published. This is your list. Writing the book was your experience. You owe no explanation for why you did or didn’t thank someone, in the end.

    Being a writer means skillfully riding the constant waves of people’s ideas about what a writer is, does, and how we do it. For example, a past partner of mine used to urge me to write whenever I felt unhappy. He couldn’t seem to accept that it was the last thing on earth I wanted to do when I was troubled (it’s when I produce my most unsalvageable work), and he seemed truly dissatisfied by the fact that I don’t write every day. I wasn’t adhering to his vision of the writer’s life and how he might play a role in it—later to be thanked. It’s worth considering people’s motivations when you’re crafting dedications and acknowledgements. No matter how thoughtfully you execute those pages, there will always be someone who feels slighted for not receiving public recognition from you. While in your mind, all Person B did was occasionally ask you questions about the book you’d been writing “forever,” in Person B’s view, they supported you by expressing ongoing interest in your work (but mostly talked at length about themselves, their darling children, and their even darlinger Shih-Poo named Ackerly).

    Historically, the dedication page was a siren’s call to potential benefactors. Writers dedicated their works to significant public figures and sometimes even entire cities, with the goal of attracting funding for their future publishing endeavors. Today’s dedication page is more of a forum for displays of affection (“For my spouse and children: You are my life.”) or an opportunity for the author to give readers an intimate glimpse of their personality by acting as a micro-autobiography (“I dedicate this novel to my iguana, because why not?”). When it was time for me to dedicate my short story collection, my then-husband graciously helped me brainstorm (it didn’t make sense to dedicate the book to him, since I had started it years before we met). Together we came up with “for the poor children,” the title of the collection, which sets an ironic, somewhat glib tone—and as it turns out, I’m a somewhat glib person who uses irony to process the world around me.

    The “Acknowledgements” page is a demonstration of good literary citizenship. Here, you thank people by order of importance, starting with your agent (if you have one), editor, designer, publicist. Without these hardworking allies, your book would still be a MS Word file. You want to also mention sources of funding you received while you worked on the manuscript, public readings you gave from your book to be, extracts (poem, story, essay, chapter) that were published elsewhere, and peers who read and critiqued your work. Then you can start on that fantasy list you’ve been keeping! In the case of my forthcoming novel, I’m attempting to make amends for not dedicating it to my ex-husband by thanking him high up on the page, right after my publishing team and before everyone else. Were his feelings hurt when I first told him about my change of heart? Of course. We had a long conversation about it by telephone and this was when I gained a deeper appreciation for the responsibility that comes with writing dedication and acknowledgements pages: they’re meaningful and symbolic not only to the author but also to those mentioned—and to those not mentioned. 

    Nicolas01April Ford is a genderfluid author living in Montreal, Quebec with her rescue family. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in print and online journals in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Scotland. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for her short story “Project Fumarase,” and has held fully-funded residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Ucross Foundation. Her books include Death Is a Side-Effect: Poems (Frog Hollow Press, 2019) and the award-winning story collection, The Poor Children (SFWP, 2015). Her debut novel, Carousel, is forthcoming in Spring 2020 with Inanna Publications. www.aprilfordauthor.com

    Photo credits: “Cliche: Have a Heart”by Carol (vanhookc) is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 (header image); Bernardo Fernandez, Verdun, Quebec, 2019 (headshot)

  • Hadassah Arms and Other Quandaries: Translating Cultures by Anna Leventhal

    Hadassah Arms and Other Quandaries: Translating Cultures by Anna Leventhal

    douce-sweet

    In early 2015, I stood in front of a window at Renaud-Bray, looking at a poster that was taller than I was. The poster had my name on it – it was the cover of the French translation of my first book. More than amazement, more than excitement, I felt bemused. This isn’t my book, I thought. Is this my book? Ceci n’est pas mon livre.

    Translation seems to be on everyone’s langue these days, with Kim Thuy’s translated Ru winning Canada Reads, several new translations of Nelly Arcan hot off the presses, and a renewed curiosity about cultural hybridity in the air. The ethical and aesthetic considerations of moving between languages seem like fertile ground for conversations we ought to be having, especially in Quebec.
     

    “Translation seems to be on everyone’s langue these days””

     

    When I found out that there would be a French translation of my newly published book, I was thrilled; as a transplanted Winnipegger, I felt it implied a level of acceptance in a city where I’m still considered “an outside eye” after fifteen years. I was excited to think that my stories, most of which are set in Montreal, would be accessible to the roughly two-thirds of the city’s population that read in French. But the work of translation isn’t just about making stories accessible. It’s about making them legible: creating a context so that they don’t just exist in another language, they live in it.

    In Neil Smith’s funny and pointed column on this blog from February 2013, he writes about the dangers of translating English Montreal into France-French, where, as he says, a dépanneur becomes chez l’Arabe and câlisse becomes putain de merde. The result: a work that’s as absurd as Duddy Kravitz sipping Earl Grey and exclaiming “jolly good, old fellow!” There was no danger of this for my book, as its translator, Daniel Grenier, is a Québécois writer. Any fears I had were laid to rest when I saw he had titled one story “Un hostie de câlisse de gâteau” (“A Goddamn Fucking Cake”). It’s a richly Québécois translation, a translation full of pis and vinegar. Grenier gamely took on an exhausting number of puns, cultural references, word-plays, and dumb inside jokes, and made them legible to a Franco-Québec audience.

    Some of the equations were simple, he told me. One of my friends wondered how the translator would handle a sign held by an environmental protestor that read ASBESTOS? ASWORSTOS! Easy, Grenier responded: AMIANTE? ENNEMIANTE! He turned a porn star named Iona Dildo into Jaymon Dildo and some misread graffiti from AUNT to FLOTTE. He may have been having almost too much fun.

    But there were complications. At one point, Grenier wrote me to ask about the expression “Hadassah arms.” How to go about making it legible for a Québécois audience?

    Now, even among Jews, “Hadassah arms” isn’t especially well-known. It’s a mean and fairly misogynistic way of naming that particular upper-arm sag/jiggle – so called because Hadassah, a Zionist women’s organization, mainly consists of older women. But it’s not a Jewish term that’s been popularized, like chutzpah or schlemiel. I know it because my friend’s dad used to tell us to lay off the Doritos or we’d end up with Hadassah arms. It may have been specific to her family; I’ve never heard it since. But I stole it for a family I was writing about, because I liked the specificity of it, the suggestion of a family joke or family mythology. Grenier could either do some creative idioming and write “bras style-Hadassah” or something like that, or find a new way of saying it that would make the image clear, but lose the Jewishness of the phrase.

    So what to do? Keep the image, lose the Jewish? Or the other way around?

    How important is it to make your work accessible to an audience unfamiliar with your culture, whether it be ethnic, geographic or social? Do you want your readers to immerse themselves in a warm bath or a cold lake? In a sense this is what writers are always doing: walking the line between over-explaining your characters’ world, and letting the world speak for itself.

     

    “How important is it to make your work accessible to an audience unfamiliar with your culture, whether it be ethnic, geographic or social?”

     
    In the end, I told Grenier that, in this case, the image was more important. I didn’t want readers to trip over an unfamiliar word and fall out of the story’s world; there would be other opportunities for them to be seduced by unfamiliar expressions and identities.

    The solution? Les gras de bingo. Equally mean, and equally evocative, but of a slightly different family than the one I wrote. In a small way, my characters lost a bit of their identity, and were given a new one, as though they had passed through the Ellis Island of literature. This, I’ve decided, is what I love about translation. My book; not my book. My city; not my city. A beautifully imperfect balance.

    Anna LeventhalAnna Leventhal‘s short story collection Sweet Affliction was published in 2014 (Invisible Publishing). It won the 2014 Quebec Writers’ Federation Concordia University First Book Award, and the French translation (Douce détresse) came out in 2015 with Marchand de feuilles. She lives in Montréal.