Skip to main content
Outdated Browser

For the best experience using our website, we recommend upgrading your browser to a newer version or switching to a supported browser.

More Information

All Articles

An overhead shot of an empty brick elevator shaft
Paul Sableman, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr
vox
By Iryna Shuvalova
I want to speak like a woman who burns a pile of old paper in the street / and the flame dances but you can’t see her face
Translated from Ukrainian by Uilleam Blacker
Multilingual
A dark window at twilight
Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash
The Guest
By Fatma Shafii
It was highly unusual for him to be this late.
Translated from Swahili by Hassan Kassim
A photo of Daniel Hahn. He is seated on a bench inside an art gallery, and turns to the left to...
Copyright (c) John Lawrence.
Daniel Hahn to Receive 2023 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature
By Words Without Borders
WWB's annual award for the promotion of international literature will go to Daniel Hahn this year.
black and white drawing of a boy with smoke coming up behind him floating over a red mound
Julia Griffin, "Smoke." Copyright Julia Griffin
Three Poems
By Imran Sada’i
I sit on the shores of emptiness / and watch my soul foaming red
Translated from Uyghur by Joshua L. Freeman
MultimediaMultilingual
A loom with Mapuche textiles
Marco Antonio Correa Flores, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Following Luminous Traces
By Daniela Catrileo
Daniela Catrileo reaffirms the existence of Mapuche literature—historically considered static or even nonexistent—as a vital, diverse, and growing body of work.
Translated from Spanish by Edith Adams
Multilingual
A portrait of writer Giusy Sciacca.
Photo credit: Marcello Bianca.
The City and the Writer: In Siracusa with Giusy Sciacca
By Nathalie Handal
Literature and, inevitably, theater, have belonged to Siracusa since its Greek colonization.
Portrait of author Dubravka Ugrešic
Photo: Judith Jockel
Dubravka Ugrešic’s Postcard
By Chad W. Post
She was golden. As was her writing, which will live on forever.
Portrait of translator and editorial fellow Isabella Corletto
Introducing WWB’s Editorial Fellow, Isabella Corletto
By Words Without Borders
Everyone around me spoke both languages and we could move back and forth between them almost unconsciously, which is why I often say that my real first language is Spanglish.
Photo of rocks and brush in Fitatimen, Río Negro
Photo: Liliana Ancalao
I Write to Purge This Memory
By Liliana Ancalao
Liliana Ancalao honors her Mapuche identity and records the violence the state committed against her people in the Conquest of the Desert and Occupation of Araucanía, violence that continues to this day.
Translated from Spanish by Liliana Ancalao & Seth Michelson
Multilingual
an image of an old TV that is turned off
Photo by PJ Gal-Szabo on Unsplash
Local News
By Karosh Taha
The German language felt like a conspiracy against my father.
Translated from German by Grashina Gabelmann
A sunset behind a line of trees
Photo by Niels Weiss on Unsplash
vesper
By Iryna Shuvalova
do you see—the trees have gathered at the gates in the twilight
Translated from Ukrainian by Uilleam Blacker
Multilingual
White foam swirling on a river's surface
Photo by kallern, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I float on worry
By Rania Mamoun
I live on the lip, split / between slipping & holding
Translated from Arabic by Yasmine Seale
The covers of the books featured in the Watchlist: Walking Practice, Banzeiro Okoto, As We Exist,...
The Watchlist: March 2023
By Tobias Carroll
Tobias Carroll recommends new books you won't want to miss translated from Korean, French, Esperanto, Japanese, and Portuguese.
Portraits of Elisa Taber and Liliana Ancalao
Elisa Taber (left) and Liliana Ancalao (right)
Living Words: An Introduction to Five Contemporary Mapuche Texts
By Elisa Taber & Liliana Ancalao
Liliana Ancalao and Elisa Taber discuss the genocide of the Mapuche people, and how Mapuche writing both stitches together that open wound and recognizes the historical and cultural continuity of this people.
Translated from Spanish by Elisa Taber
Multilingual
Portrait of writer Roberto Alajmo in front of a stone wall
The City and the Writer: In Palermo with Roberto Alajmo
By Nathalie Handal
Palermo moves a lot but hardly budges.
Translated from Italian by the author
Multimedia
A 1960s black and white photograph of a street in Rostock, East Germany
FORTEPAN / Nagy Gyula, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Five O’Clock Train to Rostock
By Brigitte Reimann
I can still hear her faltering voice today. My mother must have been the only one who had known what Konrad was planning.
Translated from German by Lucy Jones
Two pears hang from a branch in front of a blue sky
Photo by Mario015 Medeiros on Unsplash
Keder
By Yordanka Beleva
Way back, the old Turks believed that when you die, you bequest to your nearest and dearest precisely forty sorrows.
Translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel
MultimediaMultilingual
The covers of the books featured in the list
Your #IWD2023 Reading List
By Words Without Borders
In honor of International Women's Day 2023, WWB recommends 10 forthcoming books written and translated by women and published by small presses.
A boat on the coast of Gujarat at sunset
Photo by Pandav Tank on Unsplash
Translating Gujarat: On Raising Visibility and Sharing Literary Wealth
By Jenny Bhatt
For translators from under-represented languages like ours, the act of translation can also be a mode of recovery and reclamation.
A black silhouette with a soccer ball over the chest over red flames and a yellow background with...
Image by Omar Momani
Men without Women
By Moeen Farrokhi
There was not one single woman present in any of the stadiums I had attended during any of my teams’ matches.
Translated from Persian by Poupeh Missaghi
Portrait of Dr. Sachin Ketkar
Into English: Sachin Ketkar on Bilingual Translation
By Jenny Bhatt
Translation is an extension of my preoccupations as a creative writer.
Multimedia
Illuminated highways in Kyiv at night
Photo by Levi Kyiv on Unsplash
a moving grove
By Iryna Shuvalova
In this poem written a year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Iryna Shuvalova proposes an aesthetics of escape.
Translated from Ukrainian by Uilleam Blacker
MultimediaMultilingual
Rows of headstones in a cemetery
Kgbo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Name Day
By Adam Zagajewski
I wasn’t sure how to pray for the dead / in such tumult, in the shriek of recollection.
Translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh
Black and white portrait of writer Maria Borio
The City and the Writer: In Assisi with Maria Borio
By Nathalie Handal
In this corner of Europe, so many places have a humanist significance that’s truly contemporary, made of beauty and nature, in harmony with global change.
Translated from Italian by Danielle Pieratti
A colored floral illustration on paper
Detail of “Leopard Bearing Lion's Order to Fellow Judges", Folio 51 recto from a Kalila wa Dimna. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Alice and Nasli Heeramaneck Collection, Gift of Alice Heeramaneck, 1981
All It Seems
By Befaam
Even grief now becomes / a kind of delight, or so it seems.
Translated from Gujarati by Meena Desai
Multilingual
The covers of the books featured in the Watchlist: Sweetlust, Stravaging Strange, Black Foam, and...
The Watchlist: February 2023
By Tobias Carroll
Tobias Carroll recommends exciting new books translated from Arabic, Croatian, Spanish, and Russian.
A black microphone on a stand
Photo by Ilyass SEDDOUG on Unsplash
A Village Fest
By Alisa Ganieva
“It needn’t be me. I mean . . . I . . . I’m not much of an orator.”
Translated from Russian by Will Firth
A pair of wire-rimmed glasses with a crack in one lens lying on a piece of striped fabric
Photo by Jorien Loman on Unsplash
Éva Popa
By Edina Szvoren
Rather audaciously, given her age, she wore her hair in a buzz cut on the sides and in the back.
Translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet
Portrait of writer Cristina Bendek in front of green plants
Photo: Karen Bendek
The City and the Writer: In San Andrés with Cristina Bendek
By Nathalie Handal
Violence—slow, fast, indirect, direct—is exercised against the islands and our way of living here.
Portrait of Dr. Tridip Suhrud
On Gandhi, Translation, and the Gujarati Intellectual Tradition
By Jenny Bhatt
Gandhi was a very close reader of languages and literatures.