I came across the fifteenth century Persian mystic poet Jami almost by accident.  A composer friend wrote a piece for piano and soprano based on Jami’s book-length allegorical poem, Salaman and Absal. …

Self-portraiture occupied the French photographer and novelist Edouard Levé throughout his career, but his third novel, Autoportrait, remains his most thorough and sustained attempt in that direction.…

Her hand would travel around the board, creeping up on a piece as she mumbled in a kind of trance: J'adoube, j'adoube, j'adoube . . .

By the middle of July, things were back to normal. Tokyo was hell.

Ramadan's dazzling poem evokes Adonis's famous “Funeral for New York.”

It is as though there is a real world and a world of eerie dreams.

In that room I met practically the entire fauna of the epoch.

Francophone writing in the Mascarene region dates back to the eighteenth century.

The horizon which traces a curved line—not a straight one as in the North—is the metaphor for our position.

Leaving Peshawar to enter Afghanistan brought anxiety. Leaving Afghanistan brought joy and homesickness.

A wonderful, and perhaps underappreciated, way to bring international literature into the classroom is through transforming advanced language classes into translation workshops. While language classes…

I was hired in 2009 to teach translation in Florida Atlantic University’s MFA program—something that had never been offered in the MFA curriculum. To encourage as many students as possible…

Editor's note: This essay was delivered at the panel “Teaching Translation in the Workshop,” organized by Douglas Unger and with presentations by Jason Grunebaum, Becka McKay, Malena Morling,…

The newspapers report daily on collective graves, on bullets raining down in bars, drug rehab centers, city streets, at school gates, and in churches.

In Mexico, people will pay up to $70,000 dollars for a license to hunt and kill a bighorn sheep. Killing a man is much cheaper.

The parakeet is cocaine, the rooster is the marijuana and the nanny goat is an AK-47 assault rifle.

This is the shield we use to protect ourselves: with so many people involved, I’m not going to be the first to act.

He was like a butcher who says, I don’t kill the cattle, I simply cut them up.

Here, the killers protect us: they’re good people, they’re my friends.

This is the image that for some time has been occupying and saturating public debate in Mexico: an undefined, unspeakable heap of corpses.

A prominent Korean literary critic once said of Pyun that her stories presented “a risky path” in Korean literature.

Zheng Xiaolu, editor of a literary magazine, is only twenty-five years old. He was probably twenty-two when he wrote this story.

I understand now that a minute can hold the entire life of a city.

The landscape is like a small snow globe that perfectly captures the thrills and tumults of the society it represents.

I started teaching the Icelandic Sagas just over twenty years ago. I had read some of them as a student, and though they didn’t feature in my research when I did my doctoral thesis, I was glad to…

With this post we launch our new series on teaching in translation. Whether teaching in their areas of specialization or shouldering introductory world literature courses, teachers at all levels face…

I could kill you and throw your corpse in the garbage.

The battle continues and the revolution continues.

Much of what is said and written about Afghanistan in the West today is still tainted by an outside perspective on the situation

After a long period during which, following the example of many other minority literatures, it consolidated its national identity,  Quebec literature has slowly moved away from collective concerns, and opened itself up to the world.

and lovely laughing – oh it / puts the heart in my chest on wings

The barber pulled out a sharpened razor, placed it in his friend's hand, and said, Cut out any piece of my flesh that you like.

Today the six characters will take off their shoes, one by one, and will take their spots on the bed.

The man might not escape the death penalty. And I had become deeply involved with him and with his crime.

There are two mortal sins in film dubbing.

“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.

Throughout his years of exile, Bertolt Brecht carried little with him: his manuscripts, his smoker's paraphernalia, and a black scroll containing a painting of Confucius, which he would hang somewhere…

It is clear that there is a strong link between the strength of a novelistic tradition in a country and the power of the editor.

On the sidewalks lie piles of uncollected garbage in enormous black bags, some of them split open.

One afternoon I counted 1,253 items of clothing.

In his memoir, The World of Yesterday, published the year after his suicide in 1942 at age 60, Stefan Zweig wistfully recalls the sense of security that “made life seem worthwhile” and that…

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

He could have written a book on the art of falling into disgrace.

You don’t always realize the art that goes into a good memoir until you read one that isn’t so good. I came to Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir with high hopes, but had to admit after…

Notwithstanding President Barack Obama’s delightful disclosure that he likes Urdu poetry, few in the West know anything about this language and even less about its otherwise vibrant literature.

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

As usual, the boy missed the fly ball that anyone else would have caught with his eyes closed, and it rolled into a thicket of reeds by the river.

As first lines go, that of Leïla Marouane’s second novel and debut in English, The Abductor (2000, translated by Felicity McNab), is a masterpiece of concision and intrigue: “My father…

Aliide Truu, the warped murderess and tragic victim at the center of Sofi Oksansen’s astoundingly ambitious novel Purge, is an elderly woman when we meet her in the opening chapter. Living alone…

July hung over the village like a sheet of blue metal.

It was night. The ninth night. The most silent, the most oppressive.

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.

Poet and translator Ilya Kaminsky elucidates the dialogues between poets across languages and time in this dazzling essay, first published as the introduction to The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry.

God’s Bits of Wood, first published in 1960 and translated from the French by Francis Price, is not only one of the best novels to have come out of Africa but one of the best political novels of the 20th century.

The Communists disliked comics, but recognized they could be used as propaganda.

In Afghanistan—where, eight years after the toppling of the Taliban by US and allied troops, women are still routinely arrested and jailed for “running away” or for adultery, where current…

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,…

Yesterday on the New Yorker's Book Bench, Elizabeth Clark Wessel served up a condensed version of the Quarterly Conversation's “Translate this Book”, an incredible feature published…