All Articles by Date
June, 2013
Sweet Days of June, Sweet Days of Uprising
As I write these words, unarmed protestors in and around Taksim Square are under relentless police attack. Not only in Taksim, either. People throng the streets all over the country: Ankara, Izmir, Tunceli, Hatay, and many, many more cities. People who’ve had it with government oppression. Whose anger has been honed. Who are at work by day, and on the streets by night. Also at work are the state's and imams' army of police, with tanks, noise bombs, tear gas, and truncheons at the ready.…...
Crossing Language Boundaries in Palestine’s Emerging-Writer Workshops
PalFest – the Palestine Festival of Literature – took place this year in the last week of May. It was the festival’s sixth year and, as in other years, it flew in more than a dozen artists and writers to travel with the increasingly elaborate festival. For the first time, there were two separate groups: a southern group in Gaza and a northern group that traveled to Ramallah, Birzeit, Jerusalem, Hebron, Haifa, and Nablus. Author Jeremy Harding traveled to more than a half-dozen cities…...
The City and the Writer: In Kathmandu with Rabi Thapa
Special City Series / Kathmandu, Nepal 2013 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 Kathmandu as you feel/see it? The Kathmandu Valley is three medieval towns that have sprawled into each other in the last half-century. Depending on where you are, the mood is chaotic and…...
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: Poet in New York: Reading Lorca Join us as special guests who have devoted much time to reading, writing about…...
From the Archive: Girls, and Women
Oksana Zabuzhko's "Girls" portrays a passionate adolescent friendship that explodes into more. In the hothouse of a Ukrainian elementary school, the charismatic Effie seduces the studious Darka; decades later, the adult Darka revisits, and interrogates, her obsession. Zabuzhko's parenthical asides deftly portray the shifting perspectives of girlhood memories and adult reconsiderations of Effie's duplicity, Darka's revenge, and the inevitable, shattering ending. In Askold Melnyczuk's…...
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: LIVE from the NYPL: Celebrating Federico García Lorca With appearances by John Giorno, Will Keen, Tracy…...
An Introduction to Our Fourth Annual Queer Issue
This June, Words without Borders publishes its fourth annual Queer issue. The United States is celebrating LGBT pride month. The country’s Supreme Court is scheduled to deliver verdicts on two landmark cases relating to gay rights in America, both concerning the rights of same-sex couples to marry. In France, the new Socialist president François Hollande signed a “marriage for all” bill into law in late May. In response, massive demonstrations erupted around the country,…...
The Opposing Shore
The room is covered in dead leaves. Two benches are placed just so, conjuring up a bucolic garden scene, in the first days of fall, in the countryside, waiting for the season to roll by and take our memories with it. And yet we’re a mere stone’s throw from the Place de Clichy in Paris, in the eighteenth arrondissement, and it’s spring. On a small stage, a young performer from Toulouse, the twenty-eight-year-old AJ Dirtystein, is naked and covered in white rice powder. Images of…...
On the Moscow Metro and Being Gay
In the catalogue of sins in his Divine Comedy, which is as random as it is insanely detailed, Dante found room for the sin that “dared not speak its name” long before Oscar Wilde’s trial—one of which Dante’s beloved guardian and tutor Brunetto Latini was also guilty. (He placed such sinners in the Seventh Circle of Hell, near the suicides and usurers, but above thieves and bribe-takers.) I always wished that Dante had added another sin, one which probably couldn’t…...
from “The Confession”
In the spring of 2005 an exorcism took place in a small, unfinished monastery in Vaslui County in northwestern Romania. Casting out demons is more common in Romania than in the West, but there was nothing typical about this rite. A single priest officiated, whereas Church policy requires three. The person undergoing the ritual is generally a willing, quiet participant, accompanied by family. On this occasion, the hallucinating and unwilling victim lay restrained on an improvised stretcher of planks…...
To a Young Man Who Arrived at the Party Dressed in a Lady’s Fur
When you got to the party, sent by God knows whom—contingency, probably—wearing only a lady’s fur, at the outset closed, though only thrown on, shut but unbuttoned, nothing else on and totally bonkers like some awesome Saturday night exotic dancer at the apocalypse, then, implausibly, the mood softened; goddamned obnoxious, obviously, but also with a waft of honesty from your naked lodging in that savage cloak, soaked in the skin’s perfumes and washed unexpectedly…...
from “The Amman Bride”
We really needed to talk. This was a difficult situation that we needed to find a way out of. He absolutely refused to share me with anyone else, and he wasn't prepared to lead a life with me where he was in the shadows, constantly in second place after my family. And he certainly didn't want to be my secret lover or be complicit in deceiving someone else, an innocent person. But I do want to get married and to have a family, both of which would be impossible with him. I suggested that he…...
Very Cheesy and Also Rather Blah
carefully giving it some thought the lines on my palm[1] have deflected for you some now I suppose my dirty beard, my fiendish leg hair will graduate in time that someone of my years should care about minutiae but it’s true I never held you in my arms those training grounds where one prepares for hardship even the most majestic backdrop wouldn’t be a match for this bucktoothed “Cheese” into the camera ke-cha! then good-bye good-bye no one can escape his position dreams,…...
Letters without Envelopes
Mara's first letter came in the autumn of the late 1980s. The fact that she had gotten my address in Switzerland, as she explained at the beginning, seemed incredible to me, almost mysterious. She lived in Dalmatia, in a town I had never been to. She wrote me a two-page letter, mentioning more than once that she was a lesbian, probably the only one in Dalmatia, if not the whole of Croatia. For a number of years, she had been visiting her uncle in Zurich and particularly her friend Uli, whom she…...
Harpooned Woman
Two lonelinesses that sometimes came together to feed the ego of destruction. –Marilin Roque Upon a bed of frustrations, bed of lost hopes, a ghost ship bed, suddenly too wide, too deep, too chimerical, I watch the smoke of our cigarettes fade in the air, watch the puffs of smoke float and dissipate, disappear without trace, suddenly substituted by other gusts, vaporous and unpredictable. I will never again be able to enter this room. I will never again be able to enter my room,…...
Georges Perec’s “La Boutique Obscure”
Georges Perec is known best for his eccentric characters and madcap story lines, the results of complex experiments, like those in Life, A User’s Manual, a novel arranged via chessboards and Euler squares, and A Void, a lipogram which omits the letter E. His fans might then be surprised to discover that La boutique obscure, in a gorgeous new translation by Daniel Levin Becker, comprises a very personal dream log; Perec, after all, is a follower of rigorous writing rules, not an interloper into…...
An Introduction to Sri Lankan Literature
Sri Lanka, which boasts a 92% rate of literacy—the highest in South Asia and among the highest in Asia—has a long storytelling tradition. What is perhaps special about literature in this country is the extent to which the oral tradition has complemented a vast body of literature spanning many genres in written form. Given the powerful impetus that Buddhism had and has on scholarship and literature in Sri Lanka, both prose and verse in the country have drawn heavily from Buddhist parables.…...
The Hunter in the Wilderness of Sansara
A long time ago, sixteen leagues from our village, Navagaththegama, there lived the hunter. The area was called Mullegama Galkanda. The hunter lived on Mullegama Rock and in the surrounding jungle. The impenetrable area between our village and the Thammannar-Anuradhapura road was covered by thick jungle. Regardless of its length and breadth, it is the wilderness proximate to Mullegama Galkanda, which lay sixteen leagues from our village, that is of importance to our story, and that’s because…...
Rizana
(Note: This story is based on the life of Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan girl convicted and subsequently executed in Saudi Arabia for the alleged murder of four-month-old Naif al-Quthaibi.) “Aunty, when will Rizana come? Any news about her?” Rizana’s cousin (a relative likely to marry her) works for a multipurpose store for a meager salary. He hadn’t known of her departure for Saudi Arabia. Had he known, he would have stopped her going. But no, everything happened in secrecy.…...
Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo’s “Where There’s Love, There’s Hate”
The narrator of Where There’s Love, There’s Hate, like so many of his fellow writers, is continually seeking out “pretexts” to avoid getting down to work. “How solicitously doth reality provide those pretexts,” he laments, “and with what delicate devotion does it conspire with our indolence!” In this instance, the distraction inconveniently supplied by reality is a murder, and moreover one whose investigation Humberto Huberman, a doctor summering in…...
from “The Graveyard of Bitter Oranges”
In front of a tropical fruit stand in the Piazza dei Cinquecento, lit up by low-hanging bare bulbs, I stood and observed the red flesh pierced by black seeds of the melons, the yellow pineapples split in two, the ovular, yellow-green bunches of grapes, and the segmented coconut flesh laid out in large basins. I heard Arabian music, camels knelt down before a Corpus Christi altar covered over with flowers, blessed mendicants meandered through the streets among the dead cobras, playing panpipes. Starvelings…...
Lakshmi’s Story
People are curious to know about hijras. How do we live? Behave? What do we do? Do we kidnap children? What funeral rites are performed for a hijra after his death? Is he cremated or buried? Such questions do not have answers. Only scholars can answer these questions. Because we hijras are so secretive about our lives, hearsay rules the roost. As hijras we live ordinary lives, like everyone else. Like the underdog, we are respected by nobody. Except for the newly introduced “Adhar Card”…...
At the Supermarket
Red, rosy, and full they cluster in unusual collectivity these kehel-mal, the plantain-bloom under an unfamiliar, coolness-dripping roof trembling for the fingertip touch, pick, and cuddle of ladies made elegant with blush, paint, and perfume. And don’t eye-sweep the foot of the mighty Jak tree there’s no reason to sweat, not any more for these blessed seeds; they are packed and ready-to-go into the hands of gentle men clad in the leg-baring shorts made for evening ease. ©…...
May, 2013
Translator Relay: Alfred Birnbaum
Our "Translator Relay" series features a new interview each month. This month's translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. Stephen Snyder passed the baton to freelance translator and cultural critic Alfred Birnbaum. In addition to many of Haruki Murakami's early novels, Birnbaum has translated the work of Miyabe Miyuki, Natsuki Izekawa, and Nu Nu Yi. He also compiled the short story anthology Monkey Brain Sushi: New Tastes in Japanese Fiction. …...
Exploring Unfamiliar Territory: Translating “Poor Grandpa”
For decades I stubbornly refused to translate my own work into English. For most of my life, I lived and worked in East Africa, the cradle of the Swahili language, so I didn’t realize how little of Swahili literature was read outside the region. I have since realized the need to share the riches of Swahili literature through translation. It also dawned on me that poor translations done by others may ruin the beauty of the original. This point was driven home by the frustration I…...
