Archives
January, 2012
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…...
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…...
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…...
December, 2011
The City and the Writer: In London with Esther Freud
Part of the 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. …...
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…...
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":…...
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…...
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…...
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…...
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…...
November, 2011
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.…...
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…...
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…...
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…...
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…...
October, 2011
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…...
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…...
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,…...
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…...
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,…...
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…...
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…...
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."…...
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…...
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…...
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