He didn't set out to do this just to prove something, to experiment, or to make some nihilistic statement. As he said many times, writing was for him a radical way of living, and thus he had to find a vital and arresting and, in some ways, anti-literary…

Perhaps I am one of the last who must live out to the end the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe.

Language, like any border crossing, is the point of entry to a civilization and the point of expulsion.

But is truth translatable? Or is truth what is lost in translation?

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio is fascinating in its inconsistency of perspective. Due to the multiple narrators, it reads both like a love letter to Rome, and a scathing indictment of it.

These days, in Colombia's rainy, high-up, perpetually autumnal capital, you could easily forget there is a war in this country.

In this essay, Alexei Bayer writes about his first and second languages, translating into English, and being translated into his native Russian.

Eight years later, he returned to Beirut with pictures and stories about the Amazon region, which he passed along to his children and relatives.

An immigrant background has become a symptom of today's world, a world suffering from ADHD and a persistent pattern of hyperactivity, as well as from impulsiveness and anger.

We carry within us the greatest secret in life.

Here is the photograph. It was taken on the day my father came out of the Diyarbakır Prison.

Writer and editor Drake Stutesman considers Elias Khoury's novel Yalo.

But enough about bygone days. Here we are—in the new, post-Communist era:

Ma Jian, the dissident Chinese author living in London, recently attended a talk by another Chinese author who raised his ire.

Some authors thumb their noses at the difficulties they are creating for the translator, and they are right to do so; their job is to write, the translator's is to translate.

“Each element establishes a layer that gives the story added weight and heft.”—Francine Prose

The many painful and absurd situations we experienced happened in such a short lapse of time that, no, it is not at all surprising.

The details of Gogol's subsequent demise bring us into the realm of his most phantasmagoric stories.

As a reader of Robert Walser for almost 30 years, I’m pleased to host this discussion of the latest addition to the Walser corpus in English: The Assistant. Strange to think that this delightful,…

In no other novel does modern Switzerland show her changing face with such gentle charm. In The Assistant, Robert Walser looks back on his sojourn with the engineer Dubler in Wädenswil in 1903. As a testament…

Robert Walser was not quite thirty in 1907 when he sat down in his Berlin apartment—a fifth-story walkup in a rear building at 141 Wilmersdorfer Straße in the Charlottenburg district—and began to write…

As a writer, I have come to know that writers have the misfortune of being invited to speak on things about which they know absolutely nothing.

Zikiya's Rwanda was a mythical, pre-colonial state with customs his ancestors had brought into the mountains along with their herds, where they'd become hopelessly outdated over the years.

The two of them are quite different in the ways they paint, and their works have distinctly different styles.

“I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity.”…

Yet she pulls me like the moon. The melancholy between her eyebrows makes my heart throb with pain.

Beijing's cab drivers are the best in the world.

A name engraved on stone isn't much, I have to admit, but it is the name of my relatives and the missing proof of their transatlantic dream.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, where thousands of publishers from around the world annually squeeze inside huge exhibition halls to buy and sell foreign rights, a typical booth contains several tiny tables…

Don't tell me you want to return to those days without democracy, the PRI's?

Thus in the IWP we try to connectówriters to other writers, readers, translators, students, and Americans from every walk of life.

José Eduardo Agualusa, 46, is a growing name in world literature. Born in Huambo, Angola, Agualusa has already been embraced across the Portuguese-speaking literary world—especially in Brazil and Portugal,…

Alexander Cuadros reports from Brazil's Festa Literária Internacional de Parati (FLIP).

Brian Eno once famously remarked that the problem with computers is that there isn't enough Africa in them.

Editors’ Note: This month we present the first in a series of dialogues: two translators produce versions of the same text, then discuss their choices and approaches. Here Daniel Hahn and Clifford…

2007 Words Without Borders/Reading the World BOOK CLUBS ARE HEREALL ARE INVITED TO READ, COMMENT, AND PARTICIPATERTW BOOK CLUBS 2007 LINEUP:JANUARY and FEBRUARY James Marcus and Cynthia Haven, Collected…

You will have had no difficulty recognizing the German crib tacked onto Daniil Kharms's neologism in the title of my remarks.

Our first car was a beige Zaporozhets made in the USSR, which had a Beetle-like design.

This forum is for you, our readers interested in translation, practitioners of translation, and others, to ask questions, exchange ideas, and share thoughts on the topic of translation. If you wish to…

A New Talent From China Posits Mind Over Matterby Alexis AlmeidaFor all of you literary thrill-seekers, clamoring to uncover yet another author in whose dizzying cerebral mindplay you will delight, I…

“Like many Arab novelists and poets, he has turned to the essay.”—Ahdaf Soueif

This was how I was inducted into a world where everything has clearly drawn edges.

It was the chosen hour, that marvelous hour in the country of Africa, when the great fiery sun is going to finally disappear, leaving the earth to rest in the blue shadow of the night.

As we approach the end of the year, the editors at Words Without Borders would like to celebrate the wealth and variety of literary translations published in English in 2006. To this end, we approached…

Who is an Israeli writer? Israel's dominant language is Hebrew.

For the Israelis, these hours were needed so that each and every returnee would understand the truth they wanted understood: you are coming to place yourself under our heel.

A contemporary, retroactive review of the cultural identity of the Palestinian Arabs living inside Israel can form a basis for the critical study of the literary culture of this geographic area that is also known as the 1948 Region

Others have been obliged to live the lives of impossible citizenship, since the Arab who lives on the Land of Israel can never be the equal of an Israeli citizen.

If you were told: you're going to die here this evening What would you do in the remaining time?

But the rababa is a naked, homeless instrument, and that is why, like beggars who do not have a rababa, the man used a standard tool for panhandling, a plastic plate.

My friend,'' his voice explodes, Why don't you come have lunch with me?

During their lifetimes, Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño struggled against vanity and all things pretentious, aspirational, ordinary, and obliging.

I'm convinced that some languages, languages we neither speak nor understand, are familiar to the ear.

When it comes to countries that have been locked away—or locked out of—the Western world, Westerners tend to believe that little happens there during the time that they are not paying attention. Like…

Life's routine persisted and more sleeves became wet, then dried, then became wet again, and so on.

Haj Salim is tilling his field, rippling with blades of wheat and barley. What's he doing?

He was not above melodrama. He would cry at westerns and gangster films.

I stepped into the circle and, without thinking, shot . . .

But what could he have done? my acquaintance asked.

The selection I came-up with is not arbitrary, however. It doesn't pretend to be the Best of the Best or anything like that.