The state police came for Great Granddad only in April, and just when he’d made such a nice adjustment to the people’s republic and its tattered legitimacy!

The sound of pigeons in flight / is the everyday beauty of the sky.

If they show up, one by one I will grab them by the neck with my left hand and, with that machete in the right, I’ll stir their guts until they fall down dead, dead, dead!

To a guy looking like the law was after him she gave Pest, and to some other homeless sorts, she gave Buda.

Nobody is hated as much as I. Every day when I go to school, I think this will be the last.

That rotten, stinking thief got on the bicycle carefully, respectfully, that’s great, he said, first I pick up speed, and with that, picking up speed, he took off quick as lightning

The two of us met during a particularly gritty winter in our first year of graduate school at Brown University. While Chana, an Israeli fiction writer, translator, and scholar, had just begun working…

Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Self-Portrait Abroad collects the Belgian writer's impressions of his travels to destinations as diverse as Kyoto, Berlin, Hanoi, and Prague. The extract published in…

We're delighted to note the publication of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud's Life on Paper, a collection of short stories selected and translated by Edward Gauvin. Châteaureynaud…

This essay is written as an accompaniment to the poem “Drawings on a Soccer Ball,” but since this poem is a good representation of Sen-Senkov’s work in general I would like to write…

Ana María Shua's Rematch, from our August 2005 issue, goes twelve rounds with the story of Argentine boxer Carlos Monzón, the World Champion Middleweight from 1970 to 1977.  Our…

The Banff Centre Press has just published a collection of essays on translation, Beyond Words: Translating the World, edited by Susan Ouriou, director of the Banff International Literary Translation Center.…

If the end of the World Cup has left you, in the words of Mexico's Álvaro Enrigue, “socceristically disoriented,” we prescribe Enrigue's elegiac “Readymade” from…

In a special piece for Dispatches, Elizabeth Harris, translator of Fabio Stassi's piece The Revenge of Capablanca in this month's issue, talks about the ins and outs of translating Stassi. I’m…

This past May, in the buildup to the World Cup, the New York Times’s soccer blog, Goal, ran a roundup of new soccer-related books timed to be released just before this summer’s tournament. …

It’s a discouraging sign of the state of translated literature in this country that The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújoby Germano Almeida arrived here only after appearing…

the last name of the player / on the german team / translates into russian as / pig crawling up / a blond graceful creature

The match was held in an arena, semicircular in shape, behind the town hall.

As usual, the boy missed the fly ball that anyone else would have caught with his eyes closed, and it rolled into a thicket of reeds by the river.

At about three Farwick leaves the office building at one end of the market place. Just outside the door he stops. Is it warm or isn’t it?

Actually the thought of any kind of sport filled him with violent distaste

After lunch, my grandmother always insisted we go take a nap.

It’s the son’s idea: he’ll hide in an armoire and, when his father walks by, he’ll jump out and scare him.

Husband and wife contemplate the silhouette of the tower. The woman feels particularly affectionate, and she hugs her husband.

Of Wonder's songs the saddest / about the downfall of New York City

We exist on innumerable photographs. Whoever you areyou exist. In a country landscape there is no place

Translating an excerpt from Gunther Geltinger’s Mensch Engel for the June 2010 issue of Words Without Borders was a singular challenge. Geltinger stretches the limits of German syntax so as to capture…

“We mourn the man whom death takes from us, and the loss of his miraculous talent and the grace of his human presence, but only the man do we mourn, for destiny endowed his spirit and creative powers…

Before you head out to your local pride parade, stop by Padua's, courtesy of Matteo Bianchi's “Maternal Pride.” Bianchi's droll panorama captures both the teeming crowd and the…