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Travel

June-2022-Tokarczuk-Ognosia-Flammarion-Engraving Flammarion engraving, unknown artist
Ognosia
By Olga Tokarczuk
We will need new maps as well as the courage and humor of travelers who won’t hesitate to stick their heads outside the sphere of the world-up-to-this-point, beyond the horizon of existing dictionaries and encyclopedias.
Translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft
A Night in Timimoun
By Nina Bouraoui
It’s your skin I feel sliding beneath my soapy palms.
Translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Theo
By Fahmi Mustaffa
I’m not like you, Pak.
Translated from Malay by Adriana Nordin Manan
The Forsaken
By Aichetou
Listen, all of you, to what will later be said of the Forsaken by one of their descendants.
Translated from French by Edward Gauvin
Barzakh
By Moussa Ould Ebnou
“What you are witnessing is the last face of the Earth.”
Translated from Arabic by July Blalack
April 2021 At Journeys End Iceland Life Jackets Feature
At Journey’s End
By Steinunn G. Helgadóttir
This last shift, the boats came in all night and we ran out of everything.
Translated from Icelandic by Larissa Kyzer
Multimedia
In Human-Made Society
By Eva Rún Snorradóttir
In order to get a visa, they had to explain to him how two women went about having sex.
Translated from Icelandic by Larissa Kyzer
Dawn
By Miguelángel Meza
water boils up from grouped stones, grips me.
Translated from Guaraní by Tracy K. Lewis & Miguelángel Meza
MultimediaMultilingual
Peripatetics: The Essays of Jazmina Barrera, Karen Villeda, and Mariana Oliver
By Charlotte Whittle
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.
Özdamar’s Tongue
By Mariana Oliver
Özdamar knew that arriving in a country with no return ticket meant voluntarily surrendering to an indeterminate foreignness.
Translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches
Visegrád
By Karen Villeda
Women were confined to reading prayer books and religious hymns. And they wrote in the margins. Centuries went by. Those marginalia are, in fact, the books I need to read.
Translated from Spanish by Charlotte Whittle
Yaquina Head
By Jazmina Barrera
Robert Louis Stevenson says that to tour lighthouses is “to visit past centuries.”
Translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
The Sunni and His Friend
By Qatari Oral Tradition
Cats. Carry cats!
Translated from Arabic by Tariq Ahmed
We Usually Ask Literature to Be Humanizing Only When It’s from “Over There”
By M. Lynx Qualey
Our dignified survival as a species probably depends on finding ways to listen to each other.
The Reader’s Openness to the Unfamiliar
By Emmanuel Iduma
When we ask whether international literature can make us better travelers, who are the supposed beneficiaries?
On the “Good” in “Good Traveler”
By Shahnaz Habib
Travel is a self-improvement project that has been sold to us as a world-improvement project.
The Desire to Travel Responsibly Must Come before the Desire to Learn through Literature
By Tomaso Biancardi
There is a surer way for international literature to make us better tourists.
Fact or Fiction: Latin American Reportage
By Eric M. B. Becker
The writers in this month’s feature provide assurance that the genre is source of some of today’s most vibrant and compelling stories, fictional or otherwise.
Señor Socket and the Señora from the Café
By Julio Villanueva Chang
This is a tiny country famed for its happy cows, football fanatics, and melancholy.
Translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes
The Forest of Midwives
By Eliane Brum
Sculpted from the blood of mothers and the water of children, their hands birth a piece of Brazil.
Translated from Portuguese by Julia Sanches
Carranza? Taxis Don’t Go There
By Arnoldo Gálvez Suárez
Taxi drivers are indiscreet types.
Translated from Spanish by Geoff Bendeck
From “Staying Gone”
By Ulrike Ulrich
She wonders why she’s doing this to herself. Is it supposed to be some kind of test?
Translated from German by Anne Posten
Multimedia
Fish Television
By Peter Weber
I was clouds transforming, a sinking billow.
Translated from German by Anne Posten
Easy as Flushing
By Mikko Rimminen
The teenage girls began chatting aimlessly in rhythmic tones punctuated by robust usage of the F-word.
Translated from Finnish by Eva Buchwald
Crying over Light Green
By Ra Heeduk
No, the word “green” is hardly adequate.
Translated from Korean by Won-Chung Kim & Christopher Merrill
Other People
By Franziska Gerstenberg
You're not going to cause me any trouble now, are you, the conductor said.
Translated from German by Edna McCown