Words Without Borders introduces Manal Al-Sheikh and Mazen Maarouf, two poets living in exile in Scandinavia.

I admit it: I’m sneaky when it comes to international literature. I try to sneak translated texts and even just the awareness of language and translation into all of my classes. And why not? Literature…

As I write, ten protesters have been killed and several hundred jailed.

Translation is and should be a specialized occupation, but that doesn’t mean its natural audience should consist entirely of specialists.

As a single parent of a teenager, I am constantly on the lookout for ways to earn extra money without doing less literary translation work, which I love and which provides about half of my income. I am…

We were forced by the state itself to take sides.

They locked him up for being a Kurd.

If there’s an accident here, a hard hat won’t help.

Armies always leave a mess behind.

To write an Oulipian text is both to draw a picture and to solve a puzzle.

Hear Haydn’s cry at the court of the Prince, and his symphony.

I have long suspected that the public, exoteric text of Remembrance of Things Past is a fake.

On every banknote that passed through my hands I wrote one verse.

Smirking, the abbess palpates the prelate’s brow.

Arabic is a language of literary culture in Khartoum and other urban centers but a language of profound violence elsewhere in the country.

Genocide works because, inside of you, genocide never ends.

There is no single story of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda.

Neruda’s odes are neither didactic nor artificial.

Laabaan is a ceremony organized by women for women.

To date, I have collected fifty-four titles supposedly written by me.

Retail customers rarely consider provenance an issue worthy of scrutiny before buying.

There is in these poems a beautiful trace of Rilke.

How should a writer respond to a country as full of variety and stories as Brazil?

Iran’s literature has survived, and its survival has a secret.

Authors are translators and translators are authors.

The queer world is shaking.

Blind to one another, two empires face off across a vast expanse

As long as the image of the enemy is being concocted out of gays, I must make all my public statements exclusively as a gay man.

Sri Lanka is blessed with a rich repository of narratives and narrative styles in the written and oral traditions.

What do we do? Do we kidnap children?

Why aren’t more women getting into print in English, particularly when one bears in mind that the proportions are reversed when the gender of the translator is in question?

The mere use of everyday language is a subversive act in the North Korean literary context.

After that day, I had no mother.

He came to accept that art had no value unless it was used as a tool of propaganda.

With rations cut off, people began to starve.

The earth is dark, the sky is dark, and the people’s hearts are dark.

Magdy El Shafee, author of Egypt’s first graphic novel, Metro, was arrested by security forces on Friday in downtown Cairo. According to fellow author Muhammad Aladdin, El Shafee was detained near…

The prolonged experience of war still dominates Iraqi articulations of self and place.

They know that if they enter the city, we’ll eat them alive.

I have forged papers saying I am an aid worker.

Comics are a medium founded on constraints. Even more than prose, comics are subject to rules of sequence and format that to some degree determine the content of each work. Take the common newspaper…

Everything went well until we got to Corfu.

What is it like to be Syrian today?

A poet in Belarus is, as Pushkin said, more than a poet.

I keep saying that Haiti is neither a postcard nor a nightmare.

We already know there are no words for saying some things.

The temblor of January 10, 2010, has become part of Haiti’s literary landscape.

Astonishing as it may seem, we haven’t published any crime novels from Scandinavia.

When it comes to adultery, however, sometimes you have to turn a blind eye.

About half a century after Monroe visited Korea, Lady Gaga came to call.

For a long time in this country, the term “individual” has carried connotations of dangerousness and even criminality.

We are no longer poets; we have become witnesses of history.

I had heard that Kou-er’s mom had eaten her youngest son.

I knew that Zhang’s weapon must be a bicycle chain wrapped in rubber.

The Cultural Revolution created two extremes for China.

“Cities of Salt” was no more about oil than “The Godfather” was about olive oil.

For the last thirty years, good geology has led to bad politics.

After a while you reach a dazed state, a stupor in the face of nothing in particular.

I come from a country with close to ninety languages.

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. …