To Fly to the Himalayas (Dispatches)

By Yuyutsu RD Sharma | May 15, 2012

(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…

The Quality of the Fabric: An Interview with Bernardo Atxaga (Dispatches)

By Cristina Slattery | May 9, 2012

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…

Insularity, Mobility, and Imagination: Writing from the Indian Ocean (Mag: Articles)

By Françoise Lionnet | May 1, 2012

In early March 2011, two news items about Mauritius landed in my inbox almost simultaneously: one, a glowing article in the U. S. news magazine Slate, titled “The Greatest Country on Earth,”…

Center of Flacq (Mag: Articles)

By Barlen Pyamootoo | May 1, 2012

At the first rays of dawn, when the dogs abandon their posts and the vagrants their cardboard boxes, the most pointless of prayers ascends into the sky. A plea. God, grant us this day our daily bread .…

Translated from French by Danielle McLimore

The Iron Caterpillar (Mag: Articles)

By J. William Cally | May 1, 2012

Strange phenomena can strike such dread into human hearts that I ask you to believe in the one that knotted the stomach of the young diver named Paolo, who noticed the haze of the tunnel when he was returning…

Translated from French by Paul Curtis Daw

Traces of Our Fathers (Mag: Articles)

By Alain Gordon Gentil | May 1, 2012

Writer, journalist, and filmmaker Alain Gordon Gentil has recently finished shooting four documentaries that retrace the great Indian, African, French, and Chinese adventure of immigration to the Mauritian…

Translated from French by Alexis Pernsteiner and Antoine Bargel

Diary of an Old Mad Woman (Mag: Articles)

By Umar Timol | May 1, 2012

I am a cliché. An exotic cliché, indeed, I’ve been living here close to thirty years and like clockwork, I am asked the same questions, the same commentaries. So you come from there,…

Translated from French by Joyce Fortuné-Pope bilingual version

Isle Say Blood (Mag: Articles)

By Michel Ducasse | May 1, 2012

our fragmented history written with a large axe told by the bordertracers slaves of their prejudice   our marooned history chained by hatred whitewashed memory, creole coolie color anger pain dockers…

Translated from French by Alexis Pernsteiner and Antoine Bargel bilingual version

Weaving Dreams (Mag: Articles)

By Ananda Devi | May 1, 2012

And as he gazes at her, their soul-child is conceived (Henri Michaux, Life Within the Folds)   That day as she finished weaving the few meters that would wind seamlessly around her body, she tied…

Translated from French by Jean Anderson bilingual version

The Crossing toward Hope (Mag: Articles)

By Nassuf Djailani | May 1, 2012

1997. Day breaks under a raging downpour. It’s raining buckets. Raining screams. Raining mothers’ screams that drown out the thunder of the bullets raining down on their sons. It’s raining…

Translated from French by Nicole Ball and David Ball bilingual version

Ludwig and I Kill Hitler for No Reason (or, A Berlin Springtime) (Mag: Articles)

By Etgar Keret | May 1, 2012

"Another piece of pepperoni?" Ludwig offered generously. "Thanks, I'm full." I patted my stomach. "Full," Ludwig repeated the word, enchanted. "It's been so long since I heard that word." He glanced…

Translated from Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger

The Sea Horses’ Ball (Mag: Articles)

By Boris Gamaleya | May 1, 2012

Below the Mipham plane the Himalayan sky. The wind florifies the snow. Fa-fa-mi . . . mi-fa-fa   . . . Shadows gain in luxuriance, tufts of omphalodes and orthosiphon. Don’t stay grounded.…

Translated from French by Alexis Pernsteiner and Antoine Bargel

Wild Daffodils (Mag: Articles)

By Nathacha Appanah | May 1, 2012

It was only during our first weekend together in the Vosges Mountains that I noticed how in tune we were. Before that, whenever we met I felt as if the city, the noise, and other people were preventing…

Translated from French by Geoffrey Strachan bilingual version

Moorings: Indo-oceanic Creolizations (Mag: Articles)

By Françoise Vergès and Carpanin Marimoutou | May 1, 2012

Moorings (amarres in French), in Reunion Island Creole a profoundly polysemous term, also means   link, ties, enchanted, bewitched, to be in love, to be enraptured, to be bonded, to care (amar lë…

Translated from French by David Ball and Nicole Ball bilingual version

Famine (Mag: Articles)

By Jean-Luc Raharimanana | May 1, 2012

  Frogs invariably proliferate in a flood. My countries, crass latitudes and borders of hell, often encounter these blessed times. Winds and rains. Frogs. Toads. Pelobates and other pelodytes. Inflated…

Translated from French by Antoine Bargel and Alexis Pernsteiner bilingual version

Peshawar (Mag: Articles)

By Wojciech Jagielski | May 1, 2012

I liked Peshawar. I preferred it to hot, racing Rawalpindi, or grand, haughty Islamabad. I think I preferred it to any other city in the world. Indolent in the autumn sun, it was the perfect place for…

Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

The Hole in the Garden, Part III (Mag: Articles)

By Sakumi Tayama | May 1, 2012

“Hello?” There was no answer. I put the phone back down. I turned to go back to the kitchen and it rang again. I picked it up, wordlessly this time. Again nothing. As soon as I hung up it rang…

Translated from Japanese by Mark Gibeau

Adania Shibli’s “We Are All Equally Far from Love” (Mag: Book Reviews)

By Emma Garman | May 1, 2012

With the publication of her debut novel, Touch (translated from the Arabic by Paula Haydar)—told from the point of view of a little girl living at the time of the Sabra and Shatila massacre—Palestinian…

Kratos (Mag: Articles)

By Jean-Luc Raharimanana | May 1, 2012

From my face made puffy by the swelling of centuries my shithead laughter, I gaze at you from my manure where negro death unfolds in mass, crater bodies in rotten piles, pink abscess on vagina in bloom,…

Translated from French by Alexis Pernsteiner and Antoine Bargel bilingual version

Literary Journeys through Catalonia: Searching for Mercè Rodoreda’s Barcelona (Dispatches)

By Azareen Van der Vliet & Leonardo Francalanci | April 30, 2012

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…

Listening Under the Kitchen Table: An Interview with Kirmen Uribe (Dispatches)

By Cristina Slattery | April 30, 2012

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…

The City and the Writer: In London with Hisham Matar (Dispatches)

By Nathalie Handal | April 26, 2012

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…

Musical Beds, Catalan Style (Dispatches)

By Susan Harris | April 25, 2012

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…

Day Three at the London Book Fair (Dispatches)

By The Editors | April 19, 2012

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…

Translators of the World Unite!  (With Other Writers, who are also Translators) (Dispatches)

By David Varno | April 18, 2012

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…

Day Two at the London Book Fair (Dispatches)

By The Editors | April 17, 2012

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…

Day One at the London Book Fair (Dispatches)

By The Editors | April 16, 2012

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…

The Marco Polo of Morocco (Dispatches)

By Geoff Wisner | April 16, 2012

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.…

But Your Eyes (Mag: Articles)

By Esther Nirina | April 16, 2012

But your eyes heard The brilliance of the laughter Residing in the pale bone Of our faces Your pupils will read The thread woven by time’s Imprint Upon the brow of the present With the red note of…

Translated from French by Alison Anderson

Abdellah Taia’s “An Arab Melancholia” (Mag: Book Reviews)

By Shaun Randol | April 16, 2012

Abdellah Taïa is Morocco’s highest profile gay writer, a point underscored in the accompanying blurb to his recently translated An Arab Melancholia. Since the book is billed as an autobiographical…

The Advanced Language Class as Translation Workshop (Dispatches)

By Jason Grunebaum | April 13, 2012

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…

“To read a text with the eyes of the world” (Dispatches)

By Geoff Wisner | April 11, 2012

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…

Poetry from the Horn of Africa (Dispatches)

By Geoff Wisner | April 11, 2012

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…

Etgar Keret’s “Suddenly, a Knock on the Door” (Mag: Book Reviews)

By Andrew Seguin | April 11, 2012

If a man comes knocking at your door to steal your magic goldfish, what do you do? Do you a.) politely ask him to leave; b.) assault him with the nearest metal object at hand; or c.) ask the goldfish to…

From the Translator: Titling “Tana” (Dispatches)

By Elizabeth Harris | April 9, 2012

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…

A Memoir Disguised as a Novel (Dispatches)

By Geoff Wisner | April 6, 2012

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…

From the Archives: Poetry, Sex, and Rap (Dispatches)

By Susan Harris | April 4, 2012

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…

Throwing Out the Baby (Mag: Articles)

By Xu Zechen | April 1, 2012

The frog was leaping away but we were closing in on both sides, running along bent over, our eyes fixed on its yellow-green back, the mud  squishing under our feet. There had just been a cloudburst…

Translated from Chinese by Nicky Harman

Beyond this Darkness and this Silence (Mag: Articles)

By Care Santos | April 1, 2012

  The world has become aware of its invisible citizen. But no one knows you are here. —H. G. Wells   I warned her in one of our first conversations, though she didn’t take me seriously:…

Translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney bilingual version

Tana (Mag: Articles)

By Giulio Mozzi | April 1, 2012

The rain began that morning. Tana was coming home from school. Thursday afternoons they had sewing class, and now on the bus, she realized this was the first day she'd left school in the dark. It would…

Translated from Italian by Elizabeth Harris bilingual version

To Troy, Helen (Mag: Articles)

By Fernando Iwasaki | April 1, 2012

                         The two lay down together on the bed. Atreus's son paced through the crowd, like a wild beast, searching for…

Translated from Spanish by Jeremy Osner bilingual version

The Hunchback and Botticelli’s Venus (Mag: Articles)

By Rubem Fonseca | April 1, 2012

Fluttering locks of reddish hair whipped by the wind and rain, smooth and radiant skin, she is Botticelli’s Venus walking down the street. (The one in the Uffizi, born from a seashell, not the one…

Translated from Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers bilingual version

The Schoolyard (Mag: Articles)

By Mar Gómez Glez | April 1, 2012

That Monday, her classmates were playing dodgeball again. She watched them from the step, hoping that they would formally invite her, so that she could say no until they insisted, like her mother did on…

Translated from Spanish by Sarah Thomas bilingual version

The Ringing Body (Mag: Articles)

By Fatima Yousef al-Ali | April 1, 2012

She always recognized them by the  trembling behind their bravado. From his first “Hello” she was certain  he wasn’t one of them . . . that he had meant to call her, in particular.…

Translated from Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins

Horst (Mag: Articles)

By Sebastiano Vassalli | April 1, 2012

I’m thirty-nine. I’m a chemist, graduate of the university of ****. For the last twelve years I’ve been working as a lab technician for a pharmaceutical company. Practically speaking,…

Translated from Italian by Gregory Conti

Good Women and Bad Women (Mag: Articles)

By Eduardo Halfon | April 1, 2012

We never discovered how they found us out. My brother insisted that Márgara had stumbled across them accidentally while she was putting clean sheets on the bed, and that she had squealed on us.…

Translated from Spanish by Daniel Hahn bilingual version

The Bicycle Factory (Mag: Articles)

By Adrian Sângeorzan | April 1, 2012

In 1966, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu issued Decree 770, criminalizing abortion. After that, women found their own ways to end unwanted pregnancies, no matter the risk. With money and contacts,…

Translated from Romanian by Jean Harris

Meow (Mag: Articles)

By Félix J. Palma | April 1, 2012

To Juan Bonilla, who endured the first part of this story I can’t see it from the terrace, so I don’t know how big it is, or what color. The only thing I know is that every night, perched up…

Translated from Spanish by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson bilingual version

The Hole in the Garden, Part II (Mag: Articles)

By Sakumi Tayama | April 1, 2012

The woman showed up exactly one month to the day after the pigʼs arrival. I had just finished cleaning the house and was thinking about feeding the pig before I started waxing the floors when the…

Translated from Japanese by Mark Gibeau

Review (Mag: Articles)

By Hanoch Levin | April 1, 2012

After the intermission, when they prepped the audience and warmed them up with an acrobatic display, clowns, and other supporting acts, the second part began, the main one, the part with the adored women.…

Translated from Hebrew by Atar Hadari

The Sex Life of the Writer (Mag: Articles)

By Nadine Bismuth | April 1, 2012

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…

Translated from French by Alison Strayer bilingual version

Andrey Kurkov’s “The General’s Thumb” (Mag: Book Reviews)

By Christopher Tauchen | April 1, 2012

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…

From the Translator: Working with the Author (Dispatches)

By Samantha Schnee | March 30, 2012

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…

The City and the Writer: In Florence with Elisa Biagini (Dispatches)

By Nathalie Handal | March 23, 2012

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.      …

Teaching in Translation: The Translation Workshop (Dispatches)

By Becka Mara McKay | March 22, 2012

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…

Celebrating World Poetry Day (Dispatches)

By Susan Harris | March 21, 2012

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…

Osamu Dazai’s “Schoolgirl” (Mag: Book Reviews)

By Mythili G. Rao | March 16, 2012

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…

Jan Phillip Sendker’s “The Art of Hearing Heartbeats” (Mag: Book Reviews)

By Malcolm Forbes | March 16, 2012

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…

From the Translator: On Translating Fabrizio Mejía Madrid (Dispatches)

By Rosalind Harvey | March 15, 2012

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…

Teaching in Translation: Poet as Translator (Dispatches)

By Malena Morling | March 13, 2012

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…

Japan, One Year Later (Dispatches)

By Susan Harris | March 10, 2012

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…

Literary Journeys Through Catalonia: Through Josep Pla’s Empordà (Dispatches)

By Azareen Van der Vliet & Leonardo Francalanci | March 7, 2012

"Landscape elucidates literature, because literature                                            …

Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist Announced (Dispatches)

By Susan Harris | March 1, 2012

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…

A Report from Hell (Mag: Articles)

By Carmen Boullosa | March 1, 2012

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…

Translated from Spanish by Samantha Schnee bilingual version

Violence and Drug-Trafficking in Mexico (Mag: Articles)

By Juan Villoro | March 1, 2012

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,…

Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa bilingual version

The Way to Juarez (Mag: Articles)

By Rafael Pérez Gay | March 1, 2012

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…

Translated from Spanish by Catherine Mansfield bilingual version

The Mystery of the Parakeet, the Rooster, and the Nanny Goat (Mag: Articles)

By Fabrizio Mejía Madrid | March 1, 2012

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…

Translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey bilingual version

Death Count (Mag: Articles)

By Jorge Volpi | March 1, 2012

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.…

Translated from Spanish by Daniel Hahn bilingual version

Notes on a Zombie Cataclysm (Mag: Articles)

By Luis Felipe Fabre | March 1, 2012

(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…

Translated from Spanish by Amanda Hopkinson bilingual version

Tijuana: On the Pozole-Man’s Hill (Mag: Articles)

By Hector de Mauleon | March 1, 2012

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,…

Translated from Spanish by Nick Caistor

The History of the Present: Sergio González Rodríguez on the Mexican Literary World and the Drug War (Mag: Articles)

By Carmen Boullosa | March 1, 2012

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…

Translated from Spanish by Ollie Brock bilingual version

Noisy Animal (Mag: Articles)

By Ohsaki Sayaka | March 1, 2012

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,…

Translated from Japanese by Jeffrey Angles

Friedrich Christian Delius’s “Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman” (Mag: Book Reviews)

By Rosamund Hunter | March 1, 2012

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…

Do Not Tremble (Mag: Articles)

By Hirata Toshiko | March 1, 2012

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…

Translated from Japanese by Jeffrey Angles

The Heart’s Secret Moves (Mag: Articles)

By Yuri Herrera | March 1, 2012

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…

Translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead bilingual version

The Politics of Mourning (Mag: Articles)

By Rafael Lemus | March 1, 2012

“Acapulco, September 18 [2010]. Two unidentified men, decapitated in the town of Coyuca de Catalán. Heads thrown into a soft-drink bottling plant from two moving vehicles. One has its eyes…

Translated from Spanish by Daniel Hahn bilingual version

Notes on the Violence in Sinaloa, Mexico (Mag: Articles)

By Magali Tercero | March 1, 2012

For two weeks I sensed violence as an invisible force. I only experienced one act of direct intimidation: a thirty-something, ultra-well-dressed woman with five-centimeter nails adorned with precious stones…

Translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney bilingual version

The Hole in the Garden, Part I (Mag: Articles)

By Sakumi Tayama | March 1, 2012

I stared up at the moon, large and round in the sky, clenching a fistful of pebbles. I donʼt know what time it was. I suppose it must have been around midnight. Just beyond the cinder-block wall all…

Translated from Japanese by Mark Gibeau

Sleepless Homeland (Mag: Articles)

By Carmen Boullosa | March 1, 2012

…   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…

Translated from Spanish by Samantha Schnee bilingual version

Celebrating International Mother Language Day (Dispatches)

By Suzanne Ruta | February 21, 2012

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…

Tahrir Square, One Year Ago (Dispatches)

By Susan Harris | February 17, 2012

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…

César Aira’s “Varamo” (Mag: Book Reviews)

By Heather Cleary | February 17, 2012

One finds rhythms while walking down the stairs, poems strewn in the middle of the street. — Oliverio Girondo Can literature be composed by chance, rather than design? Where does one draw the line…

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s “The Letter Killers Club” (Mag: Book Reviews)

By Christopher Tauchen | February 15, 2012

“As per Article 5 of the Regulations, this manuscript is committed to death.” The chairman of the Letter Killers Club throws the contraband notebook onto the flames as the other members watch…

The City and the Writer: In Minsk with Valzhyna Mort (Dispatches)

By Nathalie Handal | February 15, 2012

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,…

Günter does India (Dispatches)

By Geoff Wisner | February 14, 2012

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.…

Walser’s Berlin Stories: Primer for a Singular Landscape (Dispatches)

By Emma Garman | February 8, 2012

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…

Festival Neue Literatur This Week in New York (Dispatches)

By Susan Bernofsky | February 6, 2012

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,…

Letter to the Mother (Mag: Graphic Lit)

By Mazen Kerbaj | February 1, 2012

Because of you I fancied killing a hundred times.

Translated from French by Mazen Kerbaj and Ahmad Gharbieh

Demonsterate (Mag: Graphic Lit)

By Nawel Louerrad | February 1, 2012

I've been wearing this tutu since I was a kid.

Translated from French by Canan Marasligil

from “The Eternonaut,” Part II (Mag: Graphic Lit)

By Héctor G. Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López | February 1, 2012

There are other survivors!

Read Part I here

Translated from Spanish by Erica Mena

A Great Step Forward: Memoir of the Famine (Mag: Graphic Lit)

By Li Kunwu and Philippe Ôtié | February 1, 2012

Even the roaches in the village are dying of hunger.

Translated from French by Edward Gauvin

from “Les Mohameds” (Mag: Graphic Lit)

By Jérôme Ruillier | February 1, 2012

I loved Renault like you'd love a mistress.

Translated from French by Edward Gauvin

Romanticism (Mag: Graphic Lit)

By Krysztof Gawronkiewicz | February 1, 2012

Our technology enables the resurrection of an incomplete body.

Regular readers of Words without Borders will remember Otto Bohater, the downbeat Warsaw detective, and his faithful partner, Watson the White Rat, who appeared in an extract from Essence in 2007. Their…

Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

from “The International” (Mag: Graphic Lit)

By Roannie and Oko | February 1, 2012

The old man had his eye put out by the colonists a few years ago.

Both travel book and testimony, L'intruse records the experiences of a French human rights activist in the Middle East. Roannie, a retired pediatrician and member of Amnesty International, spent nine months…

Translated from French by Edward Gauvin

It was a November of bitter rain and snow blackened by use (Mag: Articles)

By Vénus Khoury-Ghata | February 1, 2012

we filed the dead leaves by size to ease the task of the forest that was absent for      reasons known only to itself The parents had left with the door We mistook puddles for creeks pebbles…

Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker bilingual version

God, the mother claimed, is behind every tree in the forest (Mag: Articles)

By Vénus Khoury-Ghata | February 1, 2012

his right shoulder lower than his left heavy with rocky snowfalls from such endurance It’s his motionless breath that fissures our walls in the night when one winter hands    power over…

Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker bilingual version

O. Cuniculi (Mag: Articles)

By Hye-Young Pyun | February 1, 2012

A rabbit. He turned at the sound of rustling in the bushes and spotted a ball of white fluff. What he’d mistaken for a white dog was staring at him with red eyes. He wouldn’t have known it…

Translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell bilingual version

When did their language mingle with ours (Mag: Articles)

By Vénus Khoury-Ghata | February 1, 2012

so my brother spoke the words of the arbutus so the mother thickened her sauces with the ash tree’s black resin   The female branches made off with the laundry on our lines the young shoots…

Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker bilingual version

A Necessary Distance from Reality: An Interview with Rutu Modan (Mag: Articles)

By Meg Storey | February 1, 2012

Rutu Modan is a rarity. One of the few established comics artists in Israel, she is also one of the few established female comics artists in the world. After graduating from Bezalel Academy of Art and…

Dead (Mag: Articles)

By Vénus Khoury-Ghata | February 1, 2012

the mother looked like the linden tree in the square like the wood of the table on which she wrote our faces like the log that didn’t sweat or complain about the smoke dead she began to avoid us…

Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker bilingual version