After the first night, I was a regular: the men in the front row called me dear brother and saved room for my recording gear and me.

Among the many pronouncements that have shaped our understanding of literary translation, perhaps none is more often echoed than John Dryden’s preface to his version of the Aeneid. “I have…

What is Scots? Is it Gaelic? A dialect of English? English with a Gaelic brogue? A hodgepodge of English and Gaelic?

The following is an extract from Diálogos de Salamina: un paseo por el cine y la literatura (Tusquets, 2003), a book of conversations between Javier Cercas, author of Soldiers of Salamis, and David Trueba,…

I followed the zigzagging line, decoding the tracings of the wild goat's life force, and was moved to the depths of my being.

This feeling of shame soon goes away, almost, and new intonations fasten to your tongue (as a tin can attaches to a cat's tail)

“It’s a scandal.” My companion, a distinguished translator of British literature into Greek, sighed and shook his head as we walked one night last summer through the tangle of streets…

I was born in Basra many times, in all of the stories that I heard about it-in the stories which were told around me when I was a child, in the images I formed of it during my first trips there with my…

For Gombrowicz, culture itself, with its insistence on acceptable norms, is plenty totalitarian as it is, thank you very much.

Near God in two senses: the altitude and the peril.

In a land where there's no need to abandon one's home in order to lose the roof over one's head, everyone is on the road.

Xul said of himself: “I am maestro of a writing no one reads yet” and “I am world champion of a game no one knows.” But Jorge Luis Borges, who was influenced by him, said: “Xul…

Out of that incurable sorrow was born the strange melody called the tango.

“Literary fanaticism, in any of its forms, whether from the point of view of master or disciple, has always been incompatible with the intelligence and free spirit of Saer.”—José Saramago

Crossing the Serbian Republic’s BorderMost of the Republika Srpska border is made of garbage—it seems the whole town of Stolac brings its trash here. I meet three oncoming cars in fifty kilometers.…

Medieval literary culture is in general terms—even without the problem of the Arabic connection—susceptible to historical invisibility in many of its incarnations.

He was a miserable student who failed high school Urdu but went on to become the leading Urdu short story writer of his time.

And we are now as different as could be, unrecognizable like siblings separated at birth.

Perhaps the most salient feature of North Korean literature in contrast to its southern counterpart is its eternal optimism.

In the wake of Sept. 11, the ta'ziyeh themes—of martyrdom, doomed battle against impossible odds, and the slaughter of innocents—might be expected to offer some insight into the alien psyche of Islam.

The head belonged to one of the richest landowners in the region. The next day an army squad came into the square to replace that head with one belonging to a bearded guerrilla.

Why are so many of us going back? More precisely, why are so many going back to make films?