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

As night became talkative (Mag: Articles)

By Vénus Khoury-Ghata | February 1, 2012

we were lent a window on a fragment of the world We we re the house and the road that led to the house The mother moved the door each time a train went by and at each procession toward     the…

Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker

Admiel Kosman’s “Approaching You in English” (Mag: Book Reviews)

By E.C. Belli | February 1, 2012

  I can write poems that bang. Loud. Like the shutters. With a vengeance. Poems made of rain. And poems for the poor made of tin.   *   Leave me everything, beautiful. Fasten everything…

Alexandra Chreiteh’s “Always Coca-Cola” (Mag: Book Reviews)

By Emma Garman | February 1, 2012

In the opening section of Always Coca-Cola, the savage and heady debut from young Lebanese novelist Alexandra Chreiteh, our narrator Abeer is flipping through a women’s magazine when an article extolling…

Her apron drawn on her skin (Mag: Articles)

By Vénus Khoury-Ghata | February 1, 2012

the mother sent us out in the street naked Walnut husks served us for ink Fences we’d jumped were the pages we leafed through Euphoria in the evening when she multiplied her arms two to embrace us…

Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker bilingual version

Necessary or True Happenstances: An Introduction to the Work of Hye Young-Pyun (Mag: Articles)

By Jo Kyung Ran | February 1, 2012

“O. Cuniculi” is featured in Hye Young-Pyun’s third collection of short stories, Evening Courtship, for which she was awarded the prestigious Dong-in Literature Prize last year. The story…

Translated from Korean by Heinz Insu Fenkl

How to find the mother when her face disappeared behind the hills (Mag: Articles)

By Vénus Khoury-Ghata | February 1, 2012

How to find the mother when her face disappeared behind the hills leaving us a body without contours two packets of cold for the armpits white grass for the pubis   Gone off with her friend the fire…

Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker bilingual version