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235 pages, Paperback
Published May 17, 2022
Héloïse Press champions world-wide female talent. Héloïse’s careful selection of books gives voice to emerging and well-established female writers from home and abroad. With a focus on intimate, visceral and powerful narratives, Héloïse Press brings together women’s issues and literary sophistication.
I was thrilled to be asked by Héloïse Press to translate their first women-in-translation project, Thirsty Sea. It feels like such a perfect fit, touching on so many aspects of my own work: Erica Mou’s prose is intrinsically musical, her narrator deeply human, with all her flaws, linguistic tics and curiosities, and her talent for turning life’s questions back-to-front as a form of relentless self-accusation. Challenges for the translator are trip-wired into the text, and the author has often given me her own suggestions as to how to dodge her booby traps. She and the publisher have allowed me absolute freedom to adapt the text in order to preserve its intentions. It’s hard to imagine anything better!
Every chapter has a postscript: a title word and a short poem. The 'title word' is related to the content, message or significance of the section, while the short poem is related to the meaning of one or both parts of the word. In some instances, we changed the word, in others we changed the poem and rewrote it from scratch to match the word, in others again we were inspired to change both, in Mou's words, 'improving on the original. "This word has been left behind compared to the others we've already worked on,' she would say. And off we would go, brainstorming and throwing things in the air.