I spent the academic year 2001–2 in Berlin.  This was a year bracketed by tragedies that took place in my absence—one huge and life-changing for millions of people, one small and life-changing…

Another year and its layers of dust and debris. Ten years gone by and the pictures, the words still as sharp and vivid. Glass you dare not touch with your fingers. It all happened across the Atlantic,…

Poet Ali Al Jallawi fled Bahrain in April of this year, one of many political activists, journalists, and writers who left the country rather than risk arrest during a crackdown against pro-democracy…

I was the one who killed Borges.

If I was a cactus, what kind of plant was Midori?

“Come now, Hemingway,” she teased, “you really don’t know this gentleman’s stories?”

Maestro, I said, tell me, / reveal to me the secret of poetry.

Because we lived in brothels / and in dungeons

That night / Of Greek drunkenness/ In a Berlin tavern

for one stray word / would mean the fall of kingdoms

If he and I had been able to exchange space and time, he might well have become “Trout Fishing in America.”

He recommended Valium and a trip to London.

And you need to promise me one thing: don’t let them give me any injections.

He writes the way someone who is no longer impatient speaks.

There’s no such thing as comfort for unhappy men.

only i am cruelty-free

By Zeus, do you know how to bring owls to Athens!

Amazing spring, warm, humid / and full of backlit trees.

Every word Du Fu uses, he read somewhere.

All the hazel eyes are rotting now underground.

He gave me a very serious look and said there would not be any more murders.

More to see left and right than he can list.

Verbs swell before your eyes or / burst their seams.

Hard as he tried, he could not save himself.

And then she died on us, utterly.

There he was. The Main Character. The description of him. All the words, verbs, nouns, pronouns, syllables. I knew them all. Already. But only in Danish. Not this way around. Because here he was, The…

In a courtyard gathering at NYU’s Deutches Haus, Martin Rauchbauer and Deike Benjoya sat down with Ross Benjamin, Alfed Goubran, and Richard Sieburth last month to discuss the life and work of Friedrich…

Six months after the February uprising, there are several major differences in the physical appearance of Benghazi, Libya’s rebel capital. The city is unmistakably cleaner, the result of a few pre-uprising…

Continuing our series on WWB authors who've sold English-language rights to their work as a result of appearing in WWB, we're delighted to announce the publication of Johan Harstad’s Buzz…

PEN has just announced its literary awards for 2011. The award for poetry in translation went to Khaled Mattawa for Adonis: Selected Poems by Adonis (Yale University Press, The Margellos World Republic…