Fernanda really captures the sensation of moving through a city stripped of not only most of its inhabitants, but also of most of its natural and human-made sounds.

The Nakba of 1948, and the endless states of exile and refugeedom into which it cast the Palestinian people across the Arab world and beyond, sparked many new trends and movements in modern Arabic literature and art during the second half of the twentieth…

I have learned that imperfection can be a motor for creativity.

The songs are part of our lives in the chars. They have been passed down to us and adapted through generations and are a testament to how life and religion become one in the everyday.

Mothering and translating get described in similar ways; they are often devalued in similar ways.

A conversation about Tale of a Wall by Nasser Abu Srour, a Palestinian writer serving a life sentence in Israeli prison.

“I was also fortunate to be in an environment where there was already some consciousness about the literary richness of Rajasthani, the fact that the language does not get its due, the importance of learning and speaking it.”

I’m very excited to read works from all over the world and especially hope to engage with translators of color and early-career translators.

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.

As a writer, I don't ever place myself with a point of view about morality or ethics. I have characters whom I create, and I try to give each of these characters his or her chance.

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.

The opinions of those who can’t speak are often treated as if they don’t exist.

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.  

When I translate, it’s just me and the text, and I work quickly, intuitively. If I ever try to slow down or analyze what I’m doing, I lose that sense of flow.

There is a sense of hidden English in my novels because of my family circumstances.

Trust creates room for play, which, in my opinion, is vital to the act of translation and to any artistic collaboration, says translator Lizzie Davis.

I always say that the last book I translated is the hardest book I’ve ever translated. But in this case, I think it’s true!

“This was just being at the right place at the right time,” says translator Bruna Dantas Lobato.

This novel is my answer to that fear, to that childhood fear says Pilar Quintana of her Abyss, longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Trust is the lifeblood of successful author-translator collaborations, and by trusting me so unwaveringly, Fernanda has also shown me how to trust myself.

It was fate that I translated this book, says National Book Award semifinalist Anton Hur.

To me, the text doesn't resolve itself even when I write the final sentence.

An anthology like this challenges literary marketing and literary history.

In Switzerland people tend to be reticent, but reticence is—from both literary and theoretical perspectives—the best starting point for sudden passion.

I came here looking for the East Berlin I saw across the Berlin Wall in 1987 as an eighth grader on an exchange program.

On clear days, the Alps and Apennines lift Parma to the heavens.

Gaza is the soil where the tree of my consciousness and enlightenment has grown.

In a world of enforced transparency and readability, Jericho provides lush and deep gardens where no one can find you.

One is hopeful from the moment one enters the city of Ziguinchor.

It’s in everyone’s interest to fund the often-unpaid labor of sample translation.

Gela, my odd Gela, a provincial soul in an overgrown urban body, a clash of ancient and modern.

Literature and, inevitably, theater, have belonged to Siracusa since its Greek colonization.

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.

Palermo moves a lot but hardly budges.

Translation is an extension of my preoccupations as a creative writer.

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.

Violence—slow, fast, indirect, direct—is exercised against the islands and our way of living here.

Gandhi was a very close reader of languages and literatures.

It must be an effect of the light, but Rome can be a maze . . .

The city is ghosted by otherness, living in the shadow of the many world cities that preceded its planning and influenced its conception and development.

As a writer I feel like I am a creator of marginal lives, or, more appropriately, a kind of witness of time passing.

We do not see translations of books that will unsettle the reading community, and provoke them to be different than who they want to be.

We shall see if the hype in the United States reaches the levels Cărtărescu garners in Colombia, where he needed a police cordon to get through his crowd of fans.

The thing that surprises me the most is that parchment paper was invented in Izmir.

Even under a most repressive censorship regime or even in a most watched jail cell, writers and artists will find channels to express themselves.

There is a restlessness in the city that I have grown to love—it’s like a swaying cat’s tail.

It’s about showing how poetry in translation is intertwined with innumerable parts of society, and can create resonances and collaborations that are precious, that last, that matter.

As a writer, the only fidelity you swear is to the text: the text is king and you have to be careful not to frighten it away with your preconceptions and expectations.

Once a book is published, the story no longer belongs to me.

No matter where you are in the city, the time of year or weather, the sky at dusk will stop you in your tracks.

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.

It’s always struck me how many rich people in our countries end up hiring their own private armies: a very Colombian phenomenon.

“There have been times when we have spent hours discussing a single phrase and how to give it the same life and soul in English.”