All Articles by Date
May, 2013
The Week in Translation
GO Lorca in New York: A Celebration: the largest-ever festival in North America celebrating the work of acclaimed Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. With more than two dozen events throughout Manhattan, it focuses on the brief but prolific period (1929-1930), during which Lorca came to New York and wrote one of his most significant works, Poet in New York. what: To an Unknown God (1977). Directed by Jaime Chávarri. Circumstances surrounding the tragic death…...
Education Editor (Freelance)
Words without Borders seeks an Education Editor to participate in the creation and launch of its education site, Words without Borders Campus. The Education Editor will work with WWB’s magazine staff and education committee to identify content from our archive, commission and edit supplementary material for high school and undergraduate use related to the various units, and develop the Web site. This is a part-time freelance position with the possibility of transitioning to full-time.…...
Where Are the Women in Translation?
I’ve never been good at math, or maybe I should say, I never liked math enough to be good at it, even if I did get the odd A in the subject in high school. So I don’t have a clue how to divide 3% by 26%, for example. I searched on the Internet, and found calculators that were very handy for the research I was doing for what has turned into this blog, but I’ll have to leave it to you to work out what twenty-six percent of three percent is. Not an awful lot. As most of the readers…...
The Week in Translation
Lorca in New York: A Celebration: the largest-ever festival in North America celebrating the work of acclaimed Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. With more than two dozen events throughout Manhattan, it focuses on the brief but prolific period (1929-1930), during which Lorca came to New York and wrote one of his most significant works, Poet in New York. what: Lorca: Así que pasen cien años (1998). Directed by Javier Rioyo. This beautifully crafted…...
From the Archives: Exiles
This month’s North Korean defectors join the numerous WWB contributors writing in exile. Most of April's Iraqi writers, many of November's banned Chinese writers, virtually all of our July and August 2011 Arab Spring authors, and many others write from countries not their own. Some are political refugees, expelled from their countries, often after brutal prison terms; others emigrated voluntarily, if not happily, fleeing starvation, oppression, poverty, and political and economic collapse.…...
PEN World Voices Festival Dispatch: Palestinian Writers in Conversation
The decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict has yielded many harrowing developments, but none, arguably, more absurd than the un-improvable bit of legal coinage that deemed a portion of Israel’s Palestinian residents as present absentees. The term applies to tens of thousands of Palestinians who resided inside what, in 1948, became the newly founded land of Israel, who had fled their homes or were expelled after the war broke out in May of that year, and who had chosen…...
PEN World Voices Festival Dispatch: “Bones will Crow”
To celebrate the publication of Bones Will Crow, an anthology of Burmese poetry, poets Zeyar Lynn, Khin Aung Aye and James Byrne joined Philip Howze for a conversation and reading at The Public Theater on May 5. Mr. Lynn and Mr. Aung Aye began by reading from their work in Burmese and English (Mr. Byrne read Mr. Aung Aye’s English versions). They then launched a discussion about the genesis of Bones Will Crow. “I couldn’t accept the idea that the world would want to read Burmese…...
The Week in Translation
Lorca in New York: A Celebration: the largest-ever festival in North America celebrating the work of acclaimed Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. With more than two dozen events throughout Manhattan, it focuses on the brief but prolific period (1929-1930), during which Lorca came to New York and wrote one of his most significant works, Poet in New York. what: Trip to the Moon (1998), directed by Frederic Amat and Mudanza (2008), directed by Pere Portabella.…...
PEN World Voices Festival Dispatch: The Translation Slam
The Translation Slam has become a popular tradition in the PEN World Voices Festival, and this year’s event saw a full house at The Public Theater on Friday evening. For years it was held at the Bowery Poetry Club, which lamentably closed this past week. Host Michael F. Moore was clearly dismayed by this loss and by the quiet, bare, black room that served as its substitute. Nonetheless, the event remains remarkable for its dedication to both poetry and translation, especially when considering…...
PEN World Voices Festival Dispatch: South Africa in Two Acts
Siphiwo Mahala set the stage for this engaging discussion of South African literature and media at the Cooper Union on Saturday with an opening brief on the political state of the country, focusing on freedom of speech rights. The looming issue is a bill, already passed by both chambers of Congress, which could curtail certain journalistic rights in the name of guarding “state secrets.” Writers and journalists have become increasingly wary that their efforts to expose corruption…...
PEN World Voices Festival Dispatch: Haiti in Two Acts
When an earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, among the 300,000 killed were Georges Anglade, the president of PEN Haiti, and his wife Mireille Neptune. Today novelist Jean-Euphèle Milcé and poet and novelist Emmélie Prophète, his wife, serve as president and vice president. The newly opened Maison Georges Anglade in Thomassin provides a center for cultural exchange, with the goal of offering a retreat for visiting writers. Both Milcé and Prophète were…...
PEN World Voices Festival: Master Class with Eduardo Galeano
"I learned the art of writing and the art of storytelling in the cafés of Montevideo," said the great and loved Eduardo Galeano during his hour-long conversation with Jessica Hagedorn Saturday night. It was as though all 500 of us at the filled-to-capacity auditorium at the New School were transported to those cafés, listening to the master tell his tales. Much of the evening Galeano spoke about and read from his new book, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, the idea…...
PEN World Voices Festival Dispatch: A Literary Safari
My safari began in apartment 101A. Czech writer Michal Ajvaz sat beneath a Matisse print in a corner of the living room. It was almost 7:00 p.m. and the only seat I could find was on the floor, eye level with tulips that adorned the table between Mr. Ajvaz and his audience, my fellow adventurers. We had all embarked on A Literary Safari at Westbeth, the artists’ housing complex in the West Village, to hear twenty writers from all over the world read their work from the apartments of gracious…...
PEN World Voices Festival Dispatch: Speaking in Tongues
At the Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at NYU, Speaking in Tongues: A Poetry Reading opened with an introduction from Creative Writing in Spanish Director Mariela Dreyfus, who spoke about the historic thread connecting the readers: “Poets in Spanish-speaking countries, but none of which write in Spanish.” This is the reading’s second year, something that shouldn’t be overlooked considering how recently such collaborations were simply impossible. As Dreyfus said, “It’s…...
Mia Couto in Conversation with Anderson Tepper
what: Mia Couto the bestselling author of Sleepwalking Land and The Tuner of Silences, joins Vanity Fair‘s Anderson Tepper in conversation. Drinks and light refreshments will be served.
when: Saturday, May 4, 7-9pm
where: The Powerhouse Arena [DUMBO]
RSVP: RSVP@powerHouseArena.com
more information: http://ow.ly/kFQpM
PEN World Voices Festival Dispatch: “Speaking in Languages on the Edge”
The Speaking in Languages on the Edge event, held on May 1, featured Gillian Clarke, Joy Harjo, Natalio Hernandez, and Bob Holman. There are approximately 6,000 languages in the world, and more than half of them are endangered. This was one of the facts that introduced the PEN World Voices event Speaking in Languages on the Edge on Wednesday at Joe’s Pub. The event began with a clip from host Bob Holman’s forthcoming PBS series, Language Matters, which focuses on one of language’s…...
PEN World Voices Festival Dispatch: “The Critic’s Global Voice”
The Critic's Global Voice event, featuring Jean-Euphèle Milcé, Ursula Krechel, and Mikhail Shishkin (moderated by Albert Mobilio), took place on Wednesday, May 1. Reports of the death of American literary culture have been, well, at least a little exaggerated. There’s no other way to explain the steady stream of lively essays bemoaning the health of book reviews, book critics, and literature itself. “Like hazing, reviewing is inflicted by the old and…...
Introduction
Two days ago, I stood at the DMZ with one of the authors in this issue, Jang Jin-sung. We looked across toward North Korea together from a guardpost on the South Korean side. Only a barbed wire fence below separated him from home. A flock of birds flew over us in an arrow formation, pointing north; but neither he, nor those he loves on the other side, can cross that border. North Korea is enclosed by borders. In material terms, North Korea is a large holding camp, as most Koreans living inside the…...
I Want to Call Her Mother Again
My mother’s last words to us as we stood in the middle of the empty potato field, her voice carrying above the razor-sharp wind that seemed to carve away at our flesh, still ring in my ears. “You’re on your own now. I don’t have the strength to go any farther with you two.” Despite the howling wind that ripped and tore at my body, I felt no pain. Even when my frostbitten toes began to rot and ooze with pus, it did not hurt. Nothing could have hurt more than her words……...
The Poet Who Asked for Forgiveness
At its essence, the purpose of North Korean literature is to praise the Korean Workers’ Party. While South Korean poetry deals with topics such as love or life, North Korean poetry refers only to Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un, constantly reinventing itself as a mechanism of hymnal thought-control. In North Korea, whatever literary genius poets may possess, ignoring Party ideology in their work is a certain path to being mentally or physically broken by the state. This was the case…...
Pillow
Both the seller And the buyer Have nothing to offer but themselves In Pyongyang’s marketplace The filters of cigarette butts Provided cotton for this blanket on display “Face-wash for sale!” The ladies shout And clutch at passers by With nothing to offer but a bowl of water For one face-wash The traders sit here To sell their poverty The reasons for their poverty Are on display In every street In every alley On the dark posters Of murderous intent: “Death by firing squad to…...
The Arduous March
We stayed in the mountain village up until we left the North. Before that, when we had been living in the farming village, we couldn’t afford to visit our relatives in China. But after a few years in our new location, we started applying for temporary passports so we could travel back and forth across the border. With both my father and mother making trips to China, our family seemed to be among the better off in the village. My father, who traveled frequently to procure materials for the government-run…...
A Rice Story
1 As harvest season begins, the field slowly reveals its bare body. The thousand-year-old promise is that you reap what you sow. The land of promise stretches out behind the footprints of man. Winds blow. Snow falls. Holding the aching cold of ice in its breast, it passes the long tunnel of summer, spewing pain and nourishment. Then, in silence, it offers up teardrops of rice. 2 Here in Seoul, there are people who make a fuss about saving rice from death. I don’t understand why rice must…...
A Blackened Land
So many miracles have happened to me in the last few months. I left behind my beloved homeland where I was born and raised and made my way through hell, just under the nose of the grim reaper. Today, I enter through the gates of heaven. The Republic of Korea! This is heaven. When the gates of this paradise open wide—a heaven once glimpsed only in fairy tales—that beautiful world I so ardently longed for will spread out before me. I will no longer be forced to struggle against oppression,…...
After the Gunshot
Dark clouds were scattered low and despondent in the sky, loitering above the creeping flow of the river. As it always had, the Aprok River echoed through the deep ravine. The water was rising after a sudden, unseasonable squall, and seemed massive under the gleaming moon. A loud gunshot sounded not far away. At the noise, a night bird dozing in the leaves of a willow tree fluttered its wings and shot, startled, into the sky. At the same time, a young man dressed in black appeared on the riverbank,…...
