More than once I have reworked a sentence with its translators in mind: to make it better or clearer, not lazy or self-indulgent: making sure it is worthy of their attention and their talent.

Although I’m inclined to become a novelist and narrative journalist, I secretly wish I was a poet, and often find myself poring over lines written by my college poet-friends and WWB contributors.

Ultimately I am curious to explore how we can cultivate appreciation, access, understanding, and preservation of the literary arts (and the arts more broadly) with the digital technologies of today.

If every generation of language users expresses this constantly churning discomfort about the unworkability of language, then literary translation acknowledges the discomfort, examines it, and places it front and center.

As editorial fellow, I would like to draw readers in and provide them with the opportunity to pursue their own paths by engaging with our contributors and their stories every step of the way.

I began to understand that a lot of the work that I found most interesting wasn’t coming out of English, but from other languages instead.  

I have been opening this book since 2018 and over the years, I have become many different readers.

Translation, an obsessive interpretive art in which the boundaries between guest and host are tenderly and strenuously unstable, is my constant companion while I learn what it means to build a life in a country and culture different from the one I was…

Languages are particularly challenging to exhibit physically in museums—how then to tell the story of our most precious forms of intangible cultural heritage in a tangible form?

We want to showcase the best translations from South Asia, and help make visible authors, translators, and literature that are still largely invisible outside of South Asia.

I thought he was in search for something meaningful and, thus, he was exposing himself to conditions he hoped would light the way for a coming revelation.

“To me writing is an act of listening. And if I am writing well then what I write will necessarily be new to me as well. Writing is a journey into the unknown.”

We’re living in a world where both languages and people are constantly in flux. In this novel, I wanted to focus on a small group of people making their way through that world.

I started working on [the book] in 2016 when my grandmother was showing the first serious signs of dementia. I wanted to create an archive of sorts, in which her life was told in stories.

I always say to myself that Jawbone came to me as a nightmare, a vision full of fear and desire, but I really can’t remember how it started.

I’m always a little amazed at the subtlety of Samanta’s language, how much she can convey in so few words—that hasn’t changed over all the books of hers I’ve translated.

“One thing that makes 'Kibogo' such a compelling work is the critical distance it maintains from all the power structures it describes.”

When we celebrate the increasing visibility of translation, we should also ask about what languages and literatures—and, consequently, what human experiences—are afforded visibility.

I’ve always felt that my commitment is to the text, not the author, but it is wonderful to be able to ask for and receive permission.

Home is an ever-changing aspiration, not a truth or guarantee.

It’s sun-kissed, industrial, god-fearing, gas-guzzling, all of it built on a harrowing history of lynch mobs and expropriation.

One is drawn toward handwritten manuscripts because, unlike more mediated forms of writing (whether produced by typewriters, word processors, or automatic transcription tools), they alone retain the signs of hesitation.

It is all the more disturbing, then, that neither Gyllenhaal in her interviews nor the film’s end credits or press kit makes any mention of the translator whose work was the basis for the script: Ann Goldstein.

Despite this recent wave of SFT, there are still a number of barriers preventing more of it from going mainstream in the Anglophone world.

Answers aren’t always easy to come by in the real world when you’re a kid.

Today, a young writer working in Spanish arrives in New York City to find no shortage of role models.

On a bad night, a train car on the red line takes more than half an hour to appear, and no fewer than twenty-one minutes to traverse the eleven stations to the southern tip of Manhattan.

All she can think about is why it ever occurred to her to dress like this in public.

I have come to think of any “definitive text” largely the same way that I think of a mother tongue, at least in my case: an inherently debatable, perpetually relative concept.

A translated work’s pitch is aided by comparisons.

This game of comparisons, while not always accurate, can open doors and be thought-provoking.

It is essential that we understand comps and are aware of their limitations.

It's impossible to be the same person in the translation, because poetry itself is a kind of translation.

I tried to find books by renowned authors and illustrators from Latin America and realized that very few have been translated into English.

The most honest way to review translation is to first admit that any translation problem has multiple solutions.

This month, WWB took a look back at some of the important writing on race and racism to be found in the magazine's archives.

There are obstacles translators must face before the international sections of bookstores reflect the world more equitably.

It would be naive to speak of editorial decisions without taking into account power relationships and established patterns of prejudice that undergird the publishing industry.

Engaging the evolving dialogue that broadens definitions of global Blackness.

We have to fight for our own voice locally and nationally before we can fight for a place in the world.

We are acutely aware of the danger of the 'single story.'

Global warming manifests in obvious ways.

No single means of communication can be solely effective, because climate change is such a “wicked” problem—it is truly planetary in scale.

So this is how it all ends . . .

I was fascinated by the art of ekphrasis: the discipline of transforming the visual into the verbal to stimulate different kinds of seeing.

It's shocking to reach a place where you cannot imagine you could be still shocked by something in this country, and then you are proven wrong.

Each unexpected twist the poem takes is fatal.

The difficulty was mainly in how concise the Spanish was—to re-create that in English took some trial and error.

Making texts that are potentially wrong or slippery keeps me heedful of officious frames of correctness.

Just as the chameleon gains its identity by its precise act of mimicry, the translator begins to build a style through the words of others.

These are essays with a roving gaze whose authors travel through geographic and intellectual spaces with the same ease with which we used to walk around in New York.

Robert Louis Stevenson says that to tour lighthouses is “to visit past centuries.”

Our dignified survival as a species probably depends on finding ways to listen to each other.

I soon learned that Norwegians deliver praise in the past tense.

Hope in the right place, you said, is hope misplaced