November 2008: Immigration

Image:


Also in this Issue

Fiction by Julio Ramón Ribeyro

Music, Maestro Berenson, and Yours Truly

Father cultivated in us an appreciation for classical music from an early age, playing Bach fugues, Mozart sonatas, and Chopin nocturnes on his old wind-up Victrola with a steel needle and humming arias…

Translated from Spanish by Katherine Silver

Poetry by Danila Davydov

Fragments from the Dollmaker’s Life

1 A woman tells the Dollmaker. —What happens in your shop Why do you spend all night and day in there It can't be for the sake of money You wouldn't have time to spend it anyway So why the…

Translated from Russian by Peter Golub

Fiction by Zafer Köse

For Years

The hospital odors do not offend anymore. We have been here since yesterday morning and I am used to them. There are two beds in the room. Day is breaking. The man in the other bed is my brother. His still…

Translated from Turkish by Candan Baysan

Book Reviews

S. Yizhar’s “Khirbet Khizeh”

Reviewed by Tsipi Keller

Long considered a classic, Khirbet Khizeh—also spelled Hirbet Hizeh (Arabic: The Ruins of Hizeh)—was first published in Israel in 1949, some months after the end of the 1948–49 war. On…...

Peter Stamm’s “On a Day Like This”

Reviewed by Robert Buckeye

When Andreas, the narrator of Peter Stamm's On a Day Like This, first arrives in Paris from Switzerland to teach school, he sees Chet Baker play. "He sat slumped on a barstool with his trumpet jammed…...

Nonfiction by Paul Celan and Yehuda Amichai

An Exchange on Nation and Exile

"Perhaps I am one of the last who must live out to the end the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe." Why "must"? Writing from Paris in August 1948 to relatives in the new state of Israel, Paul Celan,…

Translated from German by John Felstiner

Interviews by Suzanne Ruta

Scheherazade, C’est Moi? An Interview with Amara Lakhous

Algeria was imploding into civil war in 1993 when Amara Lakhous, born in 1970 in Algiers, wrote his first novel. But no bombs go off in The Bedbugs and the Pirate, the inner monologue of a Gogolian forty-…

Translated from Italian by Suzanne Ruta

Fiction by Amara Lakhous

The Truth According to Parviz Mansoor Samadi

I'll tell you about Mario the Neapolitan some other time. Now you want to know everything about Amedeo—that is, start dinner with dessert? As you wish. The customer is king. I still remember…

Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein

Nonfiction by Milton Hatoum

Brazilian Arabesques

At the very beginning of the twentieth century, at the height of the rubber boom, my paternal grandfather left Beirut for the Bolivian territory of Acre, where he worked as a peddler on the rivers from…

Translated from Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers

Nonfiction by Alexander Cuadros

Out of Sight

A new publicity campaign called Colombia is Passion hopes to soothe travelers with an unlikely promise: "Colombia, the only risk is wanting to stay." A couple of months ago, the Huffington Post ran a travel…

Poetry by Lidija Dimkovska

Ballad of Aunt Else’s Refugees

It's cold in Schlossberg. The stoves are full of our nails and hairs. The lift with coal and matches remained stuck in the middle of the hairdresser's by the City Gate. We had our forelocks trimmed…

Translated from Macedonian by Peggy Reid and Ljubica Arsovska

Nonfiction by Alexei Bayer

Translating to and From a Native Language

My first English word was KNIFE. I learned it at a preschool center run by the highbrow weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta for the children of its busy writers and editors. It was like a boarding school where…

Fiction by Sebastiano Vassalli

Sebastiano

I'm fifty-nine years old. I live in the country, in a locality pretty far removed from the places where the destinies of people living in this era are decided. I work as a writer in a peripheral language.…

Translated from Italian by Gregory Conti

Nonfiction by Saša Stanišić

Three Myths of Immigrant Writing: A View from Germany

Migrant, immigrant, intercultural or multicultural literature today (in Germany and elsewhere) is considered a category of literature by authors who write from a perspective refracted by at least two cultures,…

Translated from German by Saša Stanišić

Subscribe to Words Without Borders

Next issue: December 2008    Previous issue: October 2008