We’ve loved seeing all of the awesome women being spotlighted as part of this year’s Women in Translation Month. Such an incredible and diverse group of writers. We’d like to introduce you to our own writers who are working in translation. You can read our first post here.
Catalyst was founded with the mission to amplify African voices and to publish books that let readers see Africa through a different lens. This means that we have a platform to bring English translations of Afrikaans novels to the US (as is the case with Chanette Paul’s Sacrificed), and that we have the opportunity to bring attention to writers who are writing in English, but keeping a connection to indigenous African languages. This brings us to our second highlight for Women in Translation Month, Futhi Ntshingila. 
While Futhi’s Catalyst release, We Kiss Them with Rain (out March, 2018) was written in English, Futhi is also dedicated to publishing it in isiZulu, the most widely spoken of South Africa’s eleven official languages, and is hard at work on the translation. Through her writing, Futhi tells the stories we might not hear, the stories that reflect the experiences of the South African people who may not often see themselves or their lives reflected in literature.
Futhi is a former journalist and the author of two novels published in South Africa. We Kiss Them With Rain, a story of resilience and empowerment set in a squatter camp outside of Durban, South Africa, is her US debut. On translating this novel into isiZulu, Futhi says, “I rediscovered the beauty of my language.”
From Futhi
On Her writing
For a long time, a large population of South Africans have not had stories that reflect their everyday lives written by people they can identify with. So I try to write stories that can entertain, madden, horrify and affirm.
On the inspiration for We Kiss Them With Rain
About a decade ago when I worked as a reporter for a newspaper in Durban where, in summer, there can be fearsome flash floods. While rain may be a source of joy for farmers and innocent children to jump around and dance in it, for those living in shacks, it spells death and destruction. After the rains, I had gone there in search of a story and a by line. I found women cleaning up and salvaging bits as they could, while men were drinking their worries away. One family’s grandmother and grandson were washed off and their bodies found five kilometers away under a bridge.
Music was blaring from the shebeens, taxis were zigzagging through the streets and collecting people to town, a group of Indian neighbors were dishing out breyani. I stood there looking and not knowing where to start. Two people had just died; shacks were knee deep in slushy mud; but people there were determined to keep the normalcy going. Of course, the dead would be buried, shacks would be cleaned out and life will be lived. I can’t remember what kind of article I wrote, but I just knew that people like that—with lives and circumstances lived on the margins of society—should be known.
On the translating her novel into isiZulu
In South Africa there is a renewed sense of pride for our local languages that were for a long time viewed as inferior to English. It is along the theme of decolonization of our thinking, our education, and our ways of knowing in general. The translation of Do Not Go Gentle (the novel’s title when it was released in South Africa) stemmed from having the book translated into Portuguese. We thought it would be great to translate it into isiZulu, too, and have people that I wrote about read it in a language they understand completely.
