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The Past in the Present: Writing from Georgia

Image: Alex Berdysheff, “Consonance” (cropped), oil on canvas, 110 X 120 cm, 2013. By arrangement with the artist.

Nonfiction by Gvantsa Jobava

Exporting Georgian Literature

Georgian writers have always had a powerful influence on the nation’s consciousness, and this is as true now as it was in the past.

Translated from Georgian by Philip Price

Fiction by Teona Dolenjashvili

Meskhi vs. Meskhi

He has never looked less like a potential father.

Translated from Georgian by Philip Price

bilingual

Poetry by Lela Samniashvili

Military Drills

Who can escape his own charisma

Translated from Georgian by Mac Dunlop and Natalia Bukia-Peters

bilingual

Poetry by Lela Samniashvili

A Run in My Stocking

I know there is the curse of god and the curse of being human

Translated from Georgian by Mac Dunlop and Natalia Bukia-Peters

bilingual

Nonfiction by Gela Charkviani

Shevardnadze and Me: The Beginning

All I had to do was wait for the right circumstances.

Translated from Georgian by Philip Price

bilingual

feature

A Year without John Ashbery: An International Tribute

Nonfiction by Eric M. B. Becker

Alms for the Versemaker: An International Appreciation of John Ashbery

One year after the passing of John Ashbery, three poets and translators pay tribute to the great American poet.

Poetry by Fady Joudah

The Poem as Epiphyte

Hope in the right place, you said, is hope misplaced

Nonfiction by Hiroaki Sato

Remembering John Ashbery

Ashbery fetched me a drink. I got drunk fast. And what did I prattle on about? The art of translation!

Nonfiction by Roberto Echavarren

The Poetics of John Ashbery: Reflections from the Poet’s Uruguayan Translator

John Ashbery wrote to be read rather than heard.

Translated from Spanish by Charlotte Whittle

WWB Daily

September 21st, 2018

The Translator Relay: Laura Esther Wolfson

by Jessie Chaffee

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator each month. This month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question.…read more

September 19th, 2018

The City and the Writer: In Split with Damir Šodan

by Nathalie Handal

If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo…read more

September 17th, 2018

The Watchlist: September 2018

by Tobias Carroll

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about.   From Coffee House Press | After the…read more

September 13th, 2018

JLF at New York: An Interview with Sanjoy K. Roy

by Jessie Chaffee

On September 20, JLF at New York will bring together acclaimed authors and thinkers at the Asia Society in New York City. We spoke with Sanjoy K. Roy, managing director of Teamwork Arts and…read more

September 12th, 2018

WWB Partners with Poets.org to Bring International Poetry to More Readers

by Words Without Borders

WWB is thrilled to announce a content partnership with the Academy of American Poets, who will be sharing poems in translation originally published in Words Without Borders…read more

September 12th, 2018

First Read—From “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead”

by Olga Tokarczuk

The following excerpt is from Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and out now with Fitzcarraldo Editions.  In her…read more


Book Reviews

“Do You Hear in the Mountains…,” by Maïssa Bey, Probes the Untold Pasts of Algerian History

Reviewed by Jocelyn Frelier

In this charged work of autofiction, Bey explores her ties with the Algerian War for Independence, during which her father was killed.

Intimate Experience Feels At Once Palpable and Remote in Jin Eun-Young’s “We, Day by Day”

Reviewed by Peter Campion

"We, Day By Day" is Jin Eun-Young’s first full collection published in English. Early on, she encountered Korean poetry of the 1980s and its spirit of political protest and carried the conviction and intensity of those verses into more mysterious, interior realms.

Gunnhild Øyehaug Flirts with Hollywood While Considering the Essence of Life in “Wait, Blink”

Reviewed by Ane Farsethås

In her novel "Wait, Blink", Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug devises a whimsical, yet earnest probe into the human condition, filled with a dizzy range of topics. From golf books to “the essence of life”, from Tarantino to Dante, passing though fictions about the dream life of president George W. Bush and the childhood of literary theorist Paul de Man, it’s all equally worth a moment of curious observation.

A Quietly Radical Tale of the Rise and Fall of Communist Russia in Eugene Vodolazkin’s “The Aviator”

Reviewed by Sam George Jackson

Born in 1900, Innokenty Petrovich Platonov wakes up one day to find himself in a modern hospital, in 1999, with the body of a young man and memories that barely reach the 1930s. As he strives to figure out what happened to him, personal memories and historical investigation combine to create a harrowing narrative of Russia's history in the XX century, from the makings of revolution to the collapse of the Communist regime. "The Aviator" is a quietly radical novel, which challenges contemporary official narratives about Russia's past.

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