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To Fly to the Himalayas
(This post is based on Yuyutsu Sharma's 2010 visit to Cordoba where he was invited as a guest poet at the Cosmopoetica Poetry Festival.) My life I can tell you in two words-- a patio and a small piece of sky where a lost cloud and some bird fleeing from its wings pass by sometimes. …...read more »
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The Quality of the Fabric: An Interview with Bernardo Atxaga
Phillipe Starck´s forty-three-thousand-square-foot cultural center, the Alhóndiga, that was opened in 2010 was the setting for the Gutun Zuria literary conference that brought writers from the U.S., Spain and elsewhere to Bilbao in mid-April. Residents of the Basque city packed the auditorium…...read more »
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Literary Journeys through Catalonia: Searching for Mercè Rodoreda’s Barcelona
With Mercè Rodoreda's novel La Placa del Diamant (translated as The Time of the Doves) in hand, we took a lulling hour-and-a-half train ride from Girona to the sprawling, modernist city of Barcelona. The distance between Girona, the capital of the rural province of Gironès…...read more »
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Listening Under the Kitchen Table: An Interview with Kirmen Uribe
Kirmen Uribe is a Basque writer and poet. In 2008, his novel, Bilbao-New York-Bilbao was published in Basque. (It has subsequently been translated into more than ten languages and was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura (Narrativa) in Spain. Uribe has also published children´s stories…...read more »
Category: The City and the Writer
The City and the Writer: In London with Hisham Matar
Special City Series / London If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. …...read more »
Category: From the Archive
Musical Beds, Catalan Style
If you've finished the issue and are still in the mood, check out Empar Moliner's rollicking "Invention of the Aspirin" in our October 2007 Catalan issue. A bored wife finds she has the ability to slip into other women's identities—and their bedrooms. Shapeshifting from secretary to…...read more »
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Day Three at the London Book Fair
The highlight of the third and final day at the Literary Translation Center was a conversation among poets, editors, and translators about an exciting new book of contemporary Chinese poetry. The book is called Jade Ladder—and the panelists discussing it, and related subjects, sounded like…...read more »
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Translators of the World Unite! (With Other Writers, who are also Translators)
Word for Word / Wort fur Wort Reading and book reception at Columbia University Deutches Haus, April 12, 2012 In perhaps the best kind of exchange program, three writers from Columbia’s MFA program went to Germany last year to swap their work with students at Das Deutsche Literaturinstitut…...read more »
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Day Two at the London Book Fair
The London Book Fair runs from April 16-April 18, and WWB brings it to you from the Literary Translation Centre, a seminar dedicated to all aspects of literary translation. Follow us each day on Twitter--@WWBorders---and on our Dispatches blog, where we'll be posting daily round-ups with…...read more »
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Day One at the London Book Fair
The London Book Fair runs from April 16-April 18, and WWB brings it to you from the Literary Translation Centre, a seminar dedicated to all aspects of literary translation. Follow us each day on Twitter--@WWBorders---and on our Dispatches blog, where we'll be posting daily round-ups with news…...read more »
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The Marco Polo of Morocco
Born in Morocco in 1304, Ibn Battuta was the greatest world traveler of his time. He began his journeys in 1325, a year after Marco Polo died in Venice, but traveled five times as far before he was done. In his journeys through lands including Egypt, Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, India, and China he covered…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
The Advanced Language Class as Translation Workshop
A wonderful, and perhaps underappreciated, way to bring international literature into the classroom is through transforming advanced language classes into translation workshops. While language classes might seem an obvious home for news from afar, some people associate translation in language classes…...read more »
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“To read a text with the eyes of the world”
The book I most look forward to from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is the next volume of his excellent memoirs. But in the meantime we have Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, based on a series of lectures delivered in May 2010. A fine novelist is not necessarily a fine literary critic.…...read more »
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Poetry from the Horn of Africa
Launched in November 2011, Warscapes magazine has taken on an unusual niche: the art and literature of war zones around the world. On March 6, Warscapes hosted An Evening of Poetry from the Horn of Africa in the headquarters of Alwan for the Arts near the tip of Manhattan on Beaver Street. The event…...read more »
Category: From the Translator
From the Translator: Titling “Tana”
I’m very grateful to the editors of Words Without Borders for letting me discuss my translation of Giulio Mozzi’s “Tana.” This gives me the chance to discuss my failure. Several years back, when I first met with Mozzi in Padua about his collection Questo è il giardino (This…...read more »
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A Memoir Disguised as a Novel
Harper Perennial, which reissued A Life Full of Holes in 2008, describes it on the cover as “the first novel ever written in the Arabic dialect Moghrebi.” Yet there is more than a little doubt as to whether it is a novel at all. A Life Full of Holes was told to Paul Bowles in Moghrebi by…...read more »
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From the Archives: Poetry, Sex, and Rap
April is National Poetry Month, and our theme this month is sex, so we're going back to our November 2005 South Korean issue for a tale that fits both: Lee Gi-ho's "Earnie." The story of a young prostitute with a booming voice who escapes via a fortuitous encounter with a music impresario, it…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
From the Translator: Working with the Author
Editor's note: Translator Samantha Schnee worked closely with author Carmen Boullosa throughout the translation of the latter's "Sleepless Homeland." The following exchange, with its multiple rounds of drafts, queries, and responses, provides an instructive glimpse of the process. Did we lose…...read more »
Category: The City and the Writer
The City and the Writer: In Florence with Elisa Biagini
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. …...read more »
Category: Teaching in Translation
Teaching in Translation: The Translation Workshop
I was hired in 2009 to teach translation in Florida Atlantic University’s MFA program—something that had never been offered in the MFA curriculum. To encourage as many students as possible to register for the translation workshop, I decided that I would not require that they know a second…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Celebrating World Poetry Day
Today is World Poetry Day, and in celebration we invite you to explore our rich archives. Start with Ilya Kaminsky's brilliant manifesto on poetry in translation, "Correspondences in the Air," from our Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, and then turn to the nearly six hundred poems we've…...read more »
Category: From the Translator
From the Translator: On Translating Fabrizio Mejía Madrid
It’s funny the paths one is led down by what one gets to translate. After having translated Juan Pablo Villalobos’s stunning debut, Down the Rabbit Hole, last year, I now seem, somewhat bewilderingly to me at least, to be considered by some as practically an expert on Mexico and Mexican literature—something…...read more »
Category: Teaching in Translation
Teaching in Translation: Poet as Translator
Editor's note: This essay was delivered at the panel "Teaching Translation in the Workshop," organized by Douglas Unger and with presentations by Jason Grunebaum, Becka McKay, Malena Morling, and Douglas Unger, at the Associated Writing Programs conference, March 2, 2012. Other panelists' presentations…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Japan, One Year Later
On March 11, 2011, Tokyo was rocked by a violent earthquake and tsunami that triggered an accident at a nuclear power plant. We mark the anniversary with poems by two Japanese writers, both translated by Jeffrey Angles. In "Do Not Tremble," Ohsaki Sayaka finds the shifting earth "an unruly cradle …...read more »
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Literary Journeys Through Catalonia: Through Josep Pla’s Empordà
"Landscape elucidates literature, because literature is the landscape’s…...read more »
Category: Awards & Prizes
Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist Announced
Three Percent, the resource for international literature based at the University of Rochester, has announced the fiction longlist for the 2012 Best Translated Book Awards. The twenty-five nominees include books by WWB authors David Albahari, Sergio Chejfec, Johan Harstad, Dany Laferrière, Inka…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Celebrating International Mother Language Day
On February 2, 1952, during a peaceful demonstration to demand national status in East Pakistan for the Bengali language, four students were shot dead in the street. A postcolonial trauma that would lead to war and the creation of the nation of Bangladesh. In 1999 the General Conference of UNESCO proclaimed…...read more »
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Tahrir Square, One Year Ago
As the events of the Arab Spring unfolded last year, WWB published a number of dispatches from and about the affected countries. One of our favorites came from Egyptian graphic novelist Magdy El Shafee. With his fellow artists, Magdy was creating and distributing a graphic journal on the abuses…...read more »
Category: The City and the Writer
The City and the Writer: In Minsk with Valzhyna Mort
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of Minsk as you feel/see it? Minsk is not a city of moods.…...read more »
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Günter does India
The prolific Günter Grass has produced poems, plays, novels, novellas, memoirs, essays, and speeches, but Show Your Tongue is (at least so far) his only work that could be described as a travel book. Published in 1988 as Ein Tagebuch in Zeichnungen (A Diary in Drawings) and translated into English…...read more »
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Walser’s Berlin Stories: Primer for a Singular Landscape
In 1933, the posthumously acclaimed Swiss writer Robert Walser was living at the sanatorium he had entered four years earlier with severe depression, hallucinations, and writers’ block. Then in his early fifties, Walser had published several novels and many essays, stories, and poems—albeit,…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Festival Neue Literatur This Week in New York
The Festival Neue Literatur has been around since 2010. This festival of new writing from the German-speaking countries (Austria, Germany, and Switzerland) is put on in New York every year, in February, by a consortium of cultural institutes. It takes place over a long weekend and consists…...read more »
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A New Series: Literary Journeys Through Catalonia
Throughout history writers have, again and again, undertaken journeys—journeys of the mind and actual journeys, traveling across their respective homelands as well as exploring more distant, foreign territories. They have traveled, one could argue, to feel captivated and reinvigorated by a sense…...read more »
Category: From the Translator
From the Translator: The Eternonaut
I discovered El Eternauta while translating a poem. Until recently I considered myself to be primarily a translator of poetry. I’d made a few forays into prose, but poetry is always where I’ve situated myself as a writer, and following the conventional wisdom that one must be a poet in order…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Homeless Rats: A Parable for Postrevolution Libya
Libyan writer and diplomat Ahmed Ibrahim Fagih’s Homeless Rats is a quasi-fantastic historical novel that offers considerable insight into Libyan culture and geography, in particular that of the Western Jebel Nafusa, which played a key role in Gaddafi’s ouster. The plot revolves around…...read more »
Category: The City and the Writer
The City and the Writer: In London with Esther Freud
Special City Series/London If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. …...read more »
Category: Dispatches
MuXin, 1927–2011
Chinese writer and painter MuXin died December 21. MuXin was born in 1927 in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, to an wealthy, aristocratic family. Like most intellectuals in the late 1940s, he rallied around Mao Zedong’s vision for a new China, but he quickly became disillusioned. Between the Communist…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
On North Korea: Leaders Great and Dear, and Literature
The opacity that his obituaries attribute to Kim Jong-il extends to North Korean literary culture. WWB has published a fair amount of writing from the country, starting with our second issue in September 2003, Writing from North Korea, and continuing with our anthology Literature from the "Axis of Evil":…...read more »
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The Thing We Mean is Love
According to his own account, David Bellos’s recent book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, began as a diatribe in response to a comment made by a parent of a student at Princeton University, where he teaches. When Bellos said he was a translator, the parent…...read more »
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Crime Scene: The Festival of New Literature from Europe
Scene: Wednesday, November 16 A hard, cold rain. Trenchcoats. New York’s diamond district. Interior: The Center for Fiction, one of several hosts to New Literature from Europe, an annual festival brought together by eight European cultural organizations in New York that focuses this year on innovations…...read more »
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Illustrating Conflict: Perspectives from FIBDA
Under the heading "Algiers, Bubbles without Frontiers," this year's International Comics Festival of Algiers (Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d'Alger, or FIBDA) provides an important space for discussions and works around history, war, and conflict. I previously wrote about…...read more »
Category: The City and the Writer
The City and the Writer: In Kabul with Bashir Sakharwaz
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of Kabul as you feel/see it? Kabul…...read more »
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From the Translator: Nancy Naomi Carlson on Translating Suzanne Dracius’s “Women’s Fantasies”
Translating Suzanne Dracius’s “Women’s Fantasies,” my first translation of her work, opened a portal to an exotic Caribbean culture surviving . . . no, living in the shadow of Mount Pelée, one of the deadliest volcanoes on Earth, located in Martinique, in the Lesser Antilles.…...read more »
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From the Translator: David Iaconangelo on Translating Johan Moya Ramis
Early on in “The Other Day After the Rain,” in describing the decaying building in which he lives, the narrator identifies it as being in the “residual phase”, a phrase which puts the structure’s decline in unusual terms: not that of an arc which would account for movement…...read more »
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From the Translator: David Homel on Translating Dany Laferrière’s “Tout bouge autour de moi”
Toward the end of his chronicle of the January 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake and its aftermath, called Tout bouge autour de moi, Dany Laferrière entitles one of his sections “La notion de l’utilité”—the idea of being useful. That’s the dilemma that illuminates…...read more »
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The Narrator Never Dies: An Interview with Dany Laferrière
On October 28, the Haitian-born author Dany Laferrière appeared on a panel presented by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge and UnionDocs, with the support of the Villa Gillet and France’s Conseil de la Création Artistique. The subject was Featuring Disaster: How We Picture…...read more »
Category: The City and the Writer
The City and the Writer: In Dubai with Nujoom Al-Ghanim
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of Dubai as you feel/see it? Today, Dubai is a very busy…...read more »
Category: Teaching in Translation
Teaching in Translation: Teaching the Sagas
I started teaching the Icelandic Sagas just over twenty years ago. I had read some of them as a student, and though they didn’t feature in my research when I did my doctoral thesis, I was glad to get back to them as a teacher. A colleague asked me to teach his Icelandic course for him while he…...read more »
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A Closer Look at FIBDA: the Renaissance of Algerian Comics
Last week I shared an overview of this year’s International Comics Festival of Algiers—FIBDA. In this next installment I take a closer look at the origins of the creative energy in Algeria today and the current state of comics in the country. Festivals have always played a key role in encouraging…...read more »
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Argos Books: A New Form for Translation
The Other Music: Selected Poems from the 1970s, by Francisca Aguirre, translated by Montana Ray If I Were Born in Prague: Poems of Guy Jean, versions by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky Argos Books, established last year by three poets and translators, has already built an impressive catalogue, with chapbooks,…...read more »
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A Dispatch from FIDBA, the International Comics Festival of Algeria
The fourth International Comics Festival of Algiers (Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Alger, FIBDA) took place between October 5 and 8, 2011, featuring a wide range of activities, from exhibitions to panel discussions, ending in an awards ceremony. Here’s a first look…...read more »
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Private Acts: An Interview with Guadalupe Nettel
Born in Mexico City in 1973, Guadalupe Nettel had already won Radio France Internationale’s award for best French-language short story from outside the Francophone world by the time she was nineteen. Since then she has published—among other things—a novel and numerous short story collections,…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
The Black Hat: On Self-Translation and Freedom
There is a lively interest in literature in Iceland, although the foreigner tends to see this in a somewhat romantic light. Although there are Viking festivals each summer and the foreigner might be under the impression that most Icelanders are widely read in the sagas, this is far from true. Most…...read more »
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Roussel, Dreamer of Infinite Space
New Impressions of Africa, by Raymond Roussel, translated by Mark Ford (Princeton, 2011) Impressions of Africa, by Raymond Roussel, translated by Mark Polizzotti (Dalkey Archive, 2011) Of Raymond Roussel’s two books with the word Africa in the title (both of which appeared this year in excellent…...read more »
Category: From the Translator
From the Translator: Yu Jian and the German Enlightenment
Living on “Ilha Formosa” and being one of those translators who likes to get to know his authors before he represents them overseas, I don’t often translate poetry from mainland China, but I couldn’t resist translating Yu Jian's "Beethoven Chronology" and "Immanuel Kant."…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature: It’s Tomas Tranströmer
The Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Sweden's great Tomas Tranströmer. The Swedish Academy said it recognized the eighty-year-old poet "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality." From his "Prelude," translated for us by Rika Lesser: In the first…...read more »
Category: Teaching in Translation
Teaching in Translation: These Pines
With this post we launch our new series on teaching in translation. Whether teaching in their areas of specialization or shouldering introductory world literature courses, teachers at all levels face questions about how to frame foreign literature for their students. How can instructors make foreign…...read more »
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There Is No Escape from Hope: A Memoir of Reading Naguib Mahfouz
The Coffeehouse by Naguib Mahfouz. Translated by Raymond Stock. American University in Cairo Press, 145pp, £16.99 April 2011, ISBN 9789774163517 Reading Naguib Mahfouz in my teenage years was a singular education. I had read a few of his most popular titles—Children of the Alley (1959), The…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature: Countdown!
News flash: The usually coy Swedish Academy has announced that the Nobel will be awarded Thursday. In the home stretch, Ladbrokes keeps Adonis and Tranströmer to win and place, while Murakami moves into show; Unibet has Murakami leading, with Adonis passing Vijay dan Detha into second and Les Murray…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
After the Revolution: Tunisia, September
The improbable woman was dressed in black Her diverse shadow and her hallucinations were there only to redefine the furtive with appropriate optimism, I could not elude her —Slaheddine Haddad,"A carters’ tea" September still feels like summer in Tunisia, even more so after a revolution. The…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature: Round Two
Resuming last week's conversation, the speculation continues. Britain's suspiciously accurate Ladbrokes bets on Adonis at 4:1, followed by Tomas Transtromer at 9:2 and Peter Nadas at 10:1. Thomas Pynchon and Assia Dejebar are at 12:1, with Ko Un in sixth position at 14:1. Any number of…...read more »
Category: Interviews
The City and the Writer: In Portland with Flávia Rocha
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. …...read more »
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Beyond the Limits of Genre: An Interview with Muharem Bazdulj
Muharem Bazdulj lives in Sarajevo, works as a journalist for Oslobodjenje daily, and has published more than ten books (novels, short stories, essays, poetry). His books have been translated into English, German and Polish, and his short stories and essays into a dozen more foreign languages. He has…...read more »
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Translating the Invisible with Tahar Ben Jelloun
Literature, claims the director of this year's International Literature Festival in Berlin, Ulrich Schreiber, can be our society's political and moral compass. Since 2001, the Festival has given some of the world's most influential writers a place to come together. The Festival…...read more »
Category: On Being Translated
On Being Translated from English to English, by Way of Spanish
I was born into Spanish but grew up in English. I was born in Guatemala and lived there until we moved to South Florida with my family, the day of my tenth birthday, in August of 1981, and I immediately fell into this new sound, into this new identity, called English. I grew up in English. Discovered…...read more »
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“The Truth About Marie” by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
“The good, the admirable reader,” said Vladimir Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature, “identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.” Perhaps he was anticipating that current sacred cow of American…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature: Our Office Pool
Between the World Cup and the World Series comes high season for world literature: time to place your bets on this year's candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature. You can read two of the usual suspects, Adonis and Ko Un, right here, as well as laureates Herta Müller, J. M. G. Le Clézio,…...read more »
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Virginia Woolf on the River Plate
I arrived in Montevideo on the first full day of winter in the southern hemisphere. The dark, muddy winter light was a shock after the bright, metallic air of New York on the eve of summer. Montevideo is not a particularly beautiful city. Too much of the old art-deco architecture was torn down in the…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
A Berlin Diary, in Memory of September 11
I spent the academic year 2001–2 in Berlin. This was a year bracketed by tragedies that took place in my absence—one huge and life-changing for millions of people, one small and life-changing for just a few. The year began with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Layers of Dust and Debris
Another year and its layers of dust and debris. Ten years gone by and the pictures, the words still as sharp and vivid. Glass you dare not touch with your fingers. It all happened across the Atlantic, very far away. The horror reverberating around the planet in a matter of minutes. It has never stopped…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
“I Still Belong to My Country”: An Interview with Ali Al Jallawi
Poet Ali Al Jallawi fled Bahrain in April of this year, one of many political activists, journalists, and writers who left the country rather than risk arrest during a crackdown against pro-democracy protests. In the 1990s Al Jallawi had been imprisoned twice, and tortured, as described in his memoir…...read more »
Category: On Being Translated
On Being Translated: To Be Written in English
There he was. The Main Character. The description of him. All the words, verbs, nouns, pronouns, syllables. I knew them all. Already. But only in Danish. Not this way around. Because here he was, The Main Character, in English. So much the same. But still so different. In some ways much more classy—but…...read more »
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Reimagining Hölderlin: A Discussion between Writers and Translators
In a courtyard gathering at NYU’s Deutches Haus, Martin Rauchbauer and Deike Benjoya sat down with Ross Benjamin, Alfed Goubran, and Richard Sieburth last month to discuss the life and work of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). The idyllic setting of trees, birds, food, wine, and of course,…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
The Graffiti of Benghazi
Six months after the February uprising, there are several major differences in the physical appearance of Benghazi, Libya’s rebel capital. The city is unmistakably cleaner, the result of a few pre-uprising civic works (including the cleaning of Benghazi’s putrid central lake) as well as the…...read more »
Category: WWB to Book
From WWB to Book: Success Stories, III
Continuing our series on WWB authors who've sold English-language rights to their work as a result of appearing in WWB, we're delighted to announce the publication of Johan Harstad’s Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? The novel tells the story of the quiet gardener…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
PEN Translation Prizes Announced
PEN has just announced its literary awards for 2011. The award for poetry in translation went to Khaled Mattawa for Adonis: Selected Poems by Adonis (Yale University Press, The Margellos World Republic of Letters Series), and for prose to Ibrahim Muhawi for Journal of an Ordinary Grief by Mahmoud Darwish…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Najati Tayyara, Still Imprisoned
On May 11, 2011, Al Jazeera conducted a phone interview with my friend the writer and Syrian rights activist Najati Tayyara. In that interview, my friend spoke with complete candor about the brutal, bloody practices of the Syrian regime’s apparatuses against peaceful protestors demanding…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Mistral, One Hundred Years Ago
My father-in-law, Walther Franke-Ruta, was born in 1890 in Leipzig, Germany, into a family of furriers and musicians. He became a poet, a prolific novelist, and a popular radio playwright and social satirist, although the satire, first to last, was gentle, without acid or bitterness, as if the…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
How Long It Is, This Arab Spring
It's now seven months since Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire and ignited the Arab Spring. As we wrap up the first of two issues of writing from the uprisings, it's instructive to look back at Dispatches filed as events were unfolding. At the end of January, Chip Rossetti considered the "rumbling…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
NEA Translation Awards Announced
The NEA has announced this year's fellowships for translation projects, and we're very happy to see so many WWB translators among the recipients. Congratulations to Eric Abrahamsen, Ross Benjamin (you can read an extract from his project here), Peter Constantine, Kristin Dykstra, Michelle…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Rise and Fall of an Algerian Warlord
Translator's note: Kamel Daoud's novel O Pharaon (Editions Dar el Gharb, Oran, 2004) describes the rise and fall of a warlord in one unhappy town in Western Algeria during the 1990s civil war. Read from today’s perspective, the novel offers a microcosm of events in the rebelling countries…...read more »
Category: From the Translator
On William Carlos Williams’s Translation of Ernesto Mejía Sánchez’s “Vigils”
What influence can Spanish have on us who speak a derivative of English in North America? To shake us free for a reconsideration of the poetic line. . . . It looks as though our salvation may come not from within ourselves but from the outside. —William Carlos Williams in his talk on poetic form…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Flipping Out
Oswald de Andrade would have loved FLIP. So confirmed Antonio Candido, Brazil’s most revered literary critic, in his opening talk at the ninth annual International Literary Festival in Parati, more widely known by its playful Portuguese acronym (from Festa Literária Internacional de Parati),…...read more »
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How to write about Africa, revisited
I am currently editing an anthology of memoirs from the continent of Africa, so I was excited to see that the long-awaited memoir by the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina is scheduled to appear this summer. One Day I Will Write About This Place grew from the essay "Discovering Home," Wainaina's first…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Singing Lands of Freedom
Echchaâb yurid isqât ennidhâm! The people want the fall of the regime! Each word rhythmically chanted by the crowd. A slogan ringing in Tunis in January, now resounding in cities all over Syria, as protesters bravely face snipers and security forces every day, every evening. Echchaâb…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
An Algerian Self-Immolates, the Desert Spreads
He sells fruit and vegetables from a pushcart. The heat is intense and so is the poverty. A cop ambles over and gives him a shove. The vegetable vendor is humiliated. He goes off and comes back with a can of gasoline, and sets himself afire. They take him to the hospital, where he dies. Sounds like the…...read more »
Category: WWB to Book
From WWB to Book: Success Stories, II
Continuing our series on WWB authors who've sold English-language rights to their work as a result of appearing in WWB, we're delighted to announce the publication of the graphic novel Farm 54, written by Galit Seliktar and illustrated by Gilad Seliktar, now available from Fanfare/Ponent Mon.…...read more »
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From the Translator: Elizabeth Harris on Translating Marco di Marco
In this installment of "From the translator," Elizabeth Harris weighs in on dialogue, scene, exposition, and the fascinating process behind rendering Marco Di Marco's Moving Like Geckos for Words without Borders. You can read the piece in our June 2011 issue over here. I'm very pleased…...read more »
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Literature is a Dangerous Game: Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses
Roberto Bolaño was the kind of writer who belonged to a species that is hopefully not as endangered as appearances suggest: writers who read more than they write. Bolaño read a lot, and he loved that Borges boasted about the books he read instead of the books he wrote. In his own fiction,…...read more »
Category: Interviews
The City and the Writer: In Athens with Dimitris Athinakis
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. …...read more »
Category: Dispatches
LGBT Korea on Film: Anonymity and Representation
In recent years, gay male characters have been featured in South Korean television and cinema—and even in a commercial or two. Movies like The King and The Clown and A Frozen Flower and the television shows Coffee Prince and Life is Beautiful have proven popular with audiences, even as the social…...read more »
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Edward Gauvin Wins Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award
We're thrilled to report that our magnifique translator Edward Gauvin has won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award for his rendering of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud's Life on Paper: Stories. The collection was also short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. Edward published…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Moacyr Scliar, 1939–2011
On 27 February 2011, the Brazilian Academy of Letters lost one of its most internationally renowned and widely translated members, Moacyr Scliar. Whatever the vagaries of literary fashion to come, Scliar’s place in the annals of Brazilian history seems assured, as the first author to give Jews…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
The Bolaño Guide to WWB
If you're compiling a reading list from Roberto Bolaño's Between Parentheses, you can find many of his recommended authors right here at WWB. Looking for "the best woman writer in Mexico"? That would be Carmen Boullosa. Is César Aira "mainly just boring," or "one of the three or…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Eduardo Halfon Awarded Guggenheim
We're delighted to report that Eduardo Halfon has been awarded a Guggenheim Latin American and Caribbean Fellowship. In "The Polish Boxer," from our July 2009 Memory and Lies issue, Halfon gives voice to his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, whose revision of the past has enabled him to live into…...read more »
Category: Dispatches
Teachers’ Pets, and Fools for Love
Marco Di Marco's "Moving Like Geckos" has a fraternal twin in last year's queer issue. Polish writer Eva Schilling's "Fool" also features a teacher-student pairing; in this case, though, the characters are female, and the classroom is not in an urban university, but in a provincial…...read more »
Category: Artists Talk: Israel/Palestine
Artists Talk: Israel/Palestine. An Interview with Raji Bathish
In her latest dispatch for our Artists Talk: Israel/Palestine series, Azareen Van der Vliet speaks to Raji Bathish, a Palestinian poet, novelist, screenplay writer and cultural activist born in Nazareth. Bathish’s work has been widely published across the Arab and Israeli-Palestinian worlds. He…...read more »
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Intuitive Translation and Experimental Writing: Ashbery and Rimbaud
When a translator and author are well-paired, we have what Joy Williams has called John Ashbery’s new translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, “a marriage divine.” Ashbery, now eighty-four, holds a laundry list of literary awards and honors—Pulitzer, National Book…...read more »
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“Mr. Pamuk, did all this really happen to you?”
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, translated from the Turkish by Nazim Dikba, is based on a series of lectures delivered at Harvard by Orhan Pamuk as part of the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lecture series. Pamuk seems to have had a good time writing this book: In 2009, after air flights in…...read more »
Category: On Being Translated
Through the Looking Glass, and What the Author Saw after Being Translated
Until I was published, I viewed my stories as my own, personal things, extensions of my mind that could be compared to an article of clothing, changed according to the day and season; or, perhaps, some easily alterable part of my anatomy, like my nails, or hair, things we do, let grow, and that even…...read more »