One year after the passing of John Ashbery, three poets and translators pay tribute to the great American poet.

Ashbery fetched me a drink. I got drunk fast. And what did I prattle on about? The art of translation!

John Ashbery wrote to be read rather than heard.

“Would I take a bullet for this man?”

This issue is not a departure but a continuation.

In San Marcos I could be poor and cholo and I didn’t have the pressure of hiding or explaining myself.

They didn’t get any satisfaction from coming out.

The house knew how to determine what was important.

You can hang a man from a tree, but you cannot hang History with him.

We inherit memory the way we inherit the color of our eyes and skin.

A strange thing began to happen in the country.

“Roadkill’s something you get used to seeing in America”

“Why do you think they brought you here?”

“I’m the Girl-Homer with her eyes wide open.”

Still we couldn't stop writing.

While snow was striking the windowpanes, my ears could only hear the sound of screaming and crying from a distant land.

This month, we bring you the first of three winning entries in the Words without Borders - Play for Voices Radio Drama Contest.

Who is Italian, what is the Italian language, and who deserves to write in it?

How can we grieve for those we cannot identify?

Yiddish literature occupies the precarious position of an informed outsider.

Finegolden radiating, bursting— / Multicoloredthoughtingness.

A roaring clap of thunder and everyone’s wigs went flying through the air.

Behind the bigotry and hyperbole lurk the fear of the unknown, the threat to the status quo.

It wasn’t a question of my boss finding out I’m gay . . .

Cuba grabbed me. I don’t know how else to say it.

“I used to make twenty dollars a month teaching,” he tells me, as he collects my twenty-five-dollar fare.

Our hands could not grip anything as long as their hands gripped our lives.

Have been syntaxed and stirred into a purple.

I plugged my poem into a manhole cover

No Japanese person would call a cat Thomas Jefferson.

American chicken breasts will keep Europe at peace!”

Memory—they tell me—has no translation.

How does a person follow the path of a fairy tale?

The Iraqi love of water has inspired me to learn about the rivers of every city I visit.

All decent Jews go to America.

The appeal of the Queer Issue is in seeing that great ambition writ small, in discovering the swarm of details and experience that cohere into the big picture of world writing.

Do you know anyone who died in the army?

He finally realized why Alex had hired an investigator and invited him to the US.

Authors are translators and translators are authors.

Each text requires a different voice, a different English.

For the last thirty years, good geology has led to bad politics.

Only time, the persistence of works in time, their readings after ten, fifty, or a thousand years will say if the edifice was constructed with strong, durable, or perishable materials.

I would like to write as if I were in a passing car, with the radio on, which is one of the most delectable sensations I know.

Cutting through the inane shrubbery means, first off, not writing books that aren’t necessary.

It is a well established fact that we know our own countries better from afar.

I have realized that when a writer emigrates, it takes much longer for him to arrive as a writer than as a person.

“Madrid es un pueblo,” people here are fond of saying, their tone of paternalism matched only by pride. It’s small, but it’s ours, is more or less the idea.

What began in 1997 as an academic “excursion” became a kind of immigration experience and now seems to have turned into an indisguisable exile

Let your national zeal spur you to depict the mysteries of pain and the miracles of joy that characterize life in the East.

before them stands a primly dressed woman, her mouth open wide as though she were belting out an aria, an open book in her hand. The caption reads: Americans enjoying literature in translation.

If you’re interested in what makes contemporary Hungarian literature contemporary Hungarian literature, you will have to turn to someone else. All I can say is: it’s like this and it’s like that

How did you begin writing The Fool, and what motivated you to tell this particular story?

Aren’t we simply the humble, anonymous handmaids-and-men of literature, the grateful, ever-obsequious servants of the publishing industry?

Alta Ifland’s writing raises important questions about the legitimacy and practice of autobiography that are too often taken for granted by American writers.

Dead swans on purple waters

Danse avec moi baby under the stormy sky

In addition to her freelance writing for the New Yorker’s Goings On About Town and her frequent forays into dance criticism, Marina Harss is also a versatile and prolific translator from French, Spanish,…

Chinese rock star Cui Jian begins his song “The 90s” with the line: “Words are not precise already—can’t express this world clearly.” And in the clarity of that expression,…

As images of the bloody crackdown by government militias and plainclothes policemen on the peaceful demonstrations were broadcast after the controversial results of the tenth presidential elections in…

The pieces collected here represent the many uses of memory in shaping and completing narratives.