All Articles by Date
April, 2012
The Sex Life of the Writer
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. —Ernest Hemingway A friend recently lent us a book called The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant.1 Its author, one Jean-Baptiste Botul, examines the philosopher’s lifestyle, which besides the usual mingling and chitchat boiled down to study, study, and more study. And thus Kant not only preserved himself from marriage but from ever making room in his life for a woman, not the smallest corner. For a man to be chaste his whole life is unusual;…...
Andrey Kurkov’s “The General’s Thumb”
A retired general is found dead in central Kiev—hanged, apparently, from a giant Coca-Cola advertising balloon. Stranger still, orders from the Ministry request that Lieutenant Viktor Slutsky, a petty-crime detective who has never worked a murder case, take charge of the investigation. He might not know why they’ve picked him, but he knows enough not to ask too many questions: “It’s terrific. Perks, promotion, pay increase . . .” Meanwhile, Nik Tsensky, a former Russian…...
March, 2012
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 you in a game of dice? Did you escape from us in one snort? In which junkie’s syringe did you become trapped, my Homeland? Maybe some Nordic addict’s from the north? When did they [brand]…...
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. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of Florence as you feel/see it? Quoting the Italian writer Tondelli,…...
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 language. Working from the premise that proficiency and flexibility in English were the most important requirements for students in this particular workshop—and that together we would find resources…...
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 published. You'll find poems from languages minor and major, by old masters and young finds, on the quotidian and the otherworldly, in tones elegiac and ecstatic. But as Ilya says, "One must…...
Osamu Dazai’s “Schoolgirl”
Written in 1939 but only now translated into English for the first time, Osamu Dazai’s Schoolgirl—a slim, precocious novella narrated by a schoolgirl of indeterminate age—was stylish and provocative in its time. Almost three-quarters of a century later, its prescience seems eerie; hardly anything about this book seems to have aged, least of all the narrator herself, who is perfectly preserved somewhere along the road to adolescence. Though she’s still young enough to entertain…...
Jan Phillip Sendker’s “The Art of Hearing Heartbeats”
This debut novel, originally published in 2002 as Das Herzenhören in Jan-Philipp Sendker’s native Germany, went on to become a national bestseller, and it’s easy to see why. Sendker tells the story of an incorruptible love, forged by two kindred spirits, set against the rustic yet lushly exotic backdrop of Southeast Asia. Other Press has made it available in English, in an expert translation by Kevin Wiliarty. From its start the tale shimmers with the allure of some “hidden…...
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 I am not by any stretch of the imagination and do not claim to be. I was recently asked to participate on a panel talking about social realism in the Latin American novel,…...
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 will follow. Translation is an art of analogy, the art of finding correspondences. An art of shadows and echoes… Baudelaire said poetry is essentially analogy. The idea of universal…...
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 / A cruel cradle that lets / Neither adult nor child sleep"; Hirata Toshiko's "Noisy Animal" declares, "I am an animal that walks about speaking endlessly / I am not unable to speak only…...
Literary Journeys Through Catalonia: Through Josep Pla’s Empordà
"Landscape elucidates literature, because literature is the landscape’s memory through time." —Josep Pla, Cartes de lluny The Empordà, the northernmost territory of the Province of Girona, stretches from the northern border of the Gironès to the…...
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 Parei, Thomas Pletzinger, and Magdalena Tulli, and translators Thomas Beebee, Ross Benjamin, Margaret B. Carson, Deborah Dawkin, Ellen Elias-Bursać, David Homel, and Bill Johnston. We invite you…...
A Report from Hell
The so-called "war on drugs" began five years ago. According to official sources, the victims—children, teens, adults, women, men—number roughly 50,000; other sources claim over 60,000 have died. Neither figure includes the tortured, the maimed, the kidnapped, the disappeared. This war did not emerge out of nowhere. It developed over the course of two decades, perhaps more, of government and police corruption, terrible social inequality, and the growth of illegal businesses,…...
Violence and Drug-Trafficking in Mexico
In Mexico, people will pay up to $70,000 dollars for a license to hunt and kill a bighorn sheep. Killing a man is much cheaper—about $2,000, according to the rates charged by hitmen in Ciudad Juárez, the most dangerous city in the world. And yet, on occasions, death comes free. On August 24, 2010, in Tamaulipas, seventy-two migrants were murdered before they could achieve the golden American dream. The workers, who had no passports, came from Brazil, Central America, and various parts…...
The Way to Juarez
The doctor didn’t try to hide from me the storm my father was passing through: “It’s called delirium. Hallucinations, amnesia, psychic disorder. It could also be a case of dementia caused by psychotic depression. We need to do a serum electrolytes test and an unenhanced cranial tomography.” The neurologist wanted to look inside the theater of my father’s brain, to become a spectator of that absurd drama, as if there might be a new Ionesco trapped inside my father’s…...
The Mystery of the Parakeet, the Rooster, and the Nanny Goat
The Tate Drugs Gallery Inside the Ministry of Defense in Mexico City is a museum that’s not open to the public. It displays all the jewels, weapons, clothing, and reliquaries that have been seized from drug traffickers since 1985. The collection is an example of the symbols the Mexican drug trafficker draws strength from: a gold Colt .38 studded with emeralds that belonged to Amado Carillo, leader of the cartel from the northern state of Chihuahua, and which was a present from the leader of…...
Death Count
In the small hours of March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese ended her shift at the bar as usual, took her car, and parked a few yards from the apartment complex where she lived, in Kew Gardens, Queens. As she started to walk toward her home she noticed a shadow behind her. Terrified, Genovese ran to Austin Street, closely followed by a man. Before she was able to take refuge in a building, the attacker stabbed her twice in the back. She screamed for help. Of the dozens of apartments in the area, only…...
Notes on a Zombie Cataclysm
(Opening Song) Hey, sweetheart, don’t go picnicking in the cemetery: don’t go drinking in the cemetery: don’t go doing drugs in the cemetery: don’t dress and make up like a Goth tonight. Because things are turning weird: because they found just the arm while the rest of the body remains a mystery; because they found just the ear of another mystery and teeth from the devil knows whose smile; because things are turning hardcore: hey, honey, listen to this…...
Tijuana: On the Pozole-Man’s Hill
1 A writer from Tijuana told me: “If you want to know what Tijuana is all about, you have to go there.” There was the village of Ojo de Agua, in a dusty valley on the outskirts of the city, that you reach after crossing the hills dotted with houses that appear in all the stories about Tijuana. On the top of a rise, like Dracula’s castle, stands the shack of Santiago Meza López, aka The Pozole-Man1 of the Arellano Félix brothers’ cartel. A man who has dissolved…...
The History of the Present: Sergio González Rodríguez on the Mexican Literary World and the Drug War
Carmen Boullosa: When I approached you for this interview you said you were convinced that the situation in Mexico should not be read as a conflict between “good” and “evil”—criminals attacking innocent people—but rather within an altogether different frame of reference. Sergio González Rodríguez: Yes, the situation in Mexico today adds up to much more than some filmlike scenario with good guys and bad guys. There’s malice in it, of course,…...
Noisy Animal
Language is the first disaster that humanity experiences. Language is the violence that we, as people, continue to experience everyday. We experience this disaster, this violence, and, still babies, begin to speak, unable to keep quiet. They repeat somebody’s words just as they are, reproducing the form of someone else’s experience with disaster. As a result, I do not know where “this disaster” begins, nor where it ends.—Author's note. …...
Friedrich Christian Delius’s “Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman”
Crafted by one of Germany’s most acclaimed contemporary novelists, Portrait of the Mother As a Young Woman is a single-sentence long, and its 100-odd pages chart a young German woman’s inner monologue. This might suggest tedium and muddle. But not in the hands of Friedrich Christian Delius, who confirms his facility with experimental form and skillfully creates a varied and textured experience for the reader by embracing the psychological complexity of his protagonist, Margherita,…...
Do Not Tremble
It trembles It is trembling again today I did not know that the earth Is an unruly cradle A cruel cradle that lets Neither adult nor child sleep It is March, it is spring It should be a gentle season of vernal sleep When one sleeps so deeply there is no dawn But spring this year Shakes us to keep us From falling asleep Earth, it is enough For you simply to Keep spinning happily Leave the trembling To windblown flowers and Laundry hanging in the year You should simply…...
The Heart’s Secret Moves
It happened on a Wednesday, this tale of enlightenment. Tuesdays Pedro was The Heart, which meant cracking heads. He was a Lightweight, and a real brawler. Wore a red mask and had a red, triangular kaboom painted on that smooth chest of his. Got his opponent in a Boston Crab till the trainers threw in the towel and The Heart told the ref, count. It didn’t really matter if the ref didn’t count, or if he counted too fast, because it was all just part of the show. It was the buzz that mattered,…...
