Translation Tuesday: excerpt from A Contribution to the History of Joy by Radka Denemarková

Today is International Women’s Day, and this newly translated work from an award-winning Czech writer is a passionate call to protect women everywhere from violence – in the shape of a teenager’s account of her gang rape

By Radka Denemarková and Julia and Peter Sherwood for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network

We mark International Women’s Day with an extract from the latest novel by the award-winning Czech writer and Nobel laureate Herta Müller translator Radka Denemarková. Disguised as a crime mystery set in Prague and mixing fact and fiction, A Contribution to the History of Joy (Příspěvek k dějinám radosti, 2014) is a passionate indictment of all forms of violence against women everywhere, spanning the past 70 years of history. In the extract below Denemarková puts herself in the shoes of a victim of an infamous Manchester gang that groomed vulnerable teenagers and forced them into prostitution.

–The Editors at Asymptote

Call the police. This is what I want to say but words won’t make it past my lips, my lips hurt, everything hurts

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I have no body. I don’t want this body, this body is theirs, I feel like throwing up, I thrash about

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