WIT Spotlight: Ashley Nelson Levy on Dola de Jong

The list of regrets in my life is long, but I’ll share one with you: I wish I’d spent more of my time reading women. I wish I’d realized sooner how much I love to read them, need to read them, and if I could go back in time I would try to revise all the years in which I neglected them, particularly women in translation. When people ask me the first books I ever read by women in translation, my face does the same thing it does when confronted by math. Either by lack of access or my own ignorance or both, the list I can pull together is shamefully small and overwhelmingly French: Francoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse; Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed; and Colette’s My Mother’s House and Sido, to recall a few.

When I first read Dola de Jong’s 1954 queer classic, The Tree and the Vine, on submission, I had concerns about the outdated translation but felt eager to put in an offer quickly because I’d fallen for it, and hard. Acquisitions bring out the drama in me. The novel is a confessional about the complicated friendship between two women—an often fraught phrase when referring to queer love stories, but especially true here—set during the years leading up to the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. When Kristen Gehrman delivered her translation of the text, which hadn’t seen a new translation since its first English-language publication in 1959, the first twenty pages went from bright to luminous. During the editing process I was only sorry we couldn’t call up Dola herself, who died in 2003, to ask her thoughts on certain turns of phrase, about the experience of publishing the book in Holland during that time. The Tree and the Vine has been reviewed this year in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, The Wall Street Journal, and more, and I’m so happy to see it getting the attention it deserves. It’s my recommended reading for Women in Translation Month.           

—Ashley Nelson Levy