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Presented here for the first time in English, the cult writer Charles Chahwan—"Lebanon's answer to Charles Bukowski"—tells a tale of rival militiamen euphoric with violence.   Under the gentle afternoon sunlight, Serge’s body appeared limp and more slouched than usual as he rested against the back seat of the shared taxi, a Morris Princess. He was the sole passenger in the service as it made its way down the coastal highway, as if other potential...

breakfast in house at the top of a hill. on the island of hydra. i spotted her. she was sitting down. her legs crossed. i saw the blonde hairs. she wasn’t wearing underwear. she must have been 50. i was 25. i’d met her daughter in paris. we’d shared dreams. revolutionary ideas with our bodies. moving the earth’s axis. i was her daughter’s friend. *** i stayed with the two of them in that white house for three days. with the breakfasts where i could glimpse...

Organized by English PEN, the International Translation Day celebration at the Free Word Centre occurred on September 28, 2018.   International Translation Day was celebrated this year at the Free Word Centre in London with an evening event on September 28. While this format was much reduced from the full day of parallel sessions conducted in previous years at the British Library, the event sold out quickly and the atmosphere was fabulously buzzy as literary translators came...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about.   From Dorothy, a publishing project | The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana | Fiction |128 pages | ISBN 9780997366679 | US$16.00 What the publisher says: “A fairy tale run amok, The Taiga Syndrome follows an unnamed ex-detective as she searches...

The literary world has a growing tradition of books about failing to write. This has a lot to do with the rise of auto-fiction: how long can an author write about herself, really, without bringing up writer’s block or how much she hates her work? Mostly, the only person getting disappointed in these novel-failure novels is the writer. Maybe there’s a contract about to be broken, or an opportunity getting squandered, like the Fulbright in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the...

We spoke with Janet DeNeefe, founder and director of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. Now in its fifteenth year, the festival will occur October 24–28 in Ubud, Bali. Check back on WWB Daily for festival coverage.   Words Without Borders (WWB): You created the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival fifteen years ago. Can you speak a bit about the inspiration for the festival? Janet DeNeefe (JD): We created the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival as a healing project...

The following is excerpted from Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, translated from the German by Damion Searls and forthcoming with New York Review Books. Set between August 1967 and August 1968, each chapter represents a day in the life of Gesine Cresspahl, a thirty-four-year-old German émigré to Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In addition to recounting her daily life in New York, Gesine shares stories with her...

At PEN America’s Lit Crawl Brooklyn 2018, Words Without Borders and SLICE Literary partnered to present a multilingual exquisite corpse, a story authored by four international writers—Glaydah Namukasa, Ibtisam Azem, Amir Ahmadi Arian, and Silvana Paternostro—and translated by Dr. Merit Kabugo, Sinan Antoon, Amir Ahmadi Arian, and Mary Ann Newman.  In the exquisite corpse tradition, one writer penned the first segment of the story (in this...

JLF at New York occured on September 20, 2018. The festival brought together acclaimed authors and thinkers at the Asia Society in New York City.   On September 20, the 2018 JLF at New York began, as all good festivals should, with percussion and strings, with arm-flapping, hand-clapping, and the stirring vocals of Zila Khan. The legendary Indian Sufi singer sat cross-legged on a carpet at center stage with a shawl to cover her bare feet from sight, and as her voice...

Words Without Borders partnered with SLICE to produce an International Exquisite Corpse story, written by four writer/translator teams from around the world. Below is the resulting story (in both the English translation and the original languages), which was published in issue 23 of Slice Magazine.   I can’t think of a better way to celebrate this issue’s theme, Flight, than with a multilingual Exquisite Corpse. This isn’t some kind of morbid tale, despite...

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 Calvino, Invisible Cities   Can you describe the mood of Beirut as you feel/see it? Beirut is a city on tenterhooks; it is perpetually both “forever after” and “nevermore.” It is predictable and surprising, cliché and original, young and old, stable and...

A popular image of Mongolia is that of clear blue skies, wide open steppe, and nomads on horseback. Conversely, Mongolia has recently garnered international attention as a site of rapid urbanization and high air pollution. These images, though both true to some degree, are incomplete. The reality for many people in the country is less starkly divided. People move through and across rural and urban spaces frequently throughout their lives, engaging in both settled and nomadic modes of...

Dalit literature has emerged as an integral part of a larger political movement that offers substantive and detailed protest against the entrenched system of untouchability, or the socially institutionalized system of caste-based hierarchy and discrimination, in contemporary India. It traces its modern history to the early 1970s with the foundation of a literary-activist collective called the Dalit Panthers, whose members wrote primarily in Marathi—the language of Maharashtra, the...

A frustrated wife and mother finds life in a fishbowl instructive in this story translated from the Mongolian.   I've been in here for exactly one year. My once fair and delicate skin, the envy of all the other ladies, has hardened into scales mottled with red and pink splotches. A year, exactly one year. People have thought that I have been a fish for exactly one year. Regardless of what other people say, what really matters to me is that three hundred and sixty-five...

After years of abuse at the hands of their higher-caste neighbors, a Dalit community takes action and finds sweet revenge.   Definitions of Hindi words may be found in the glossary.   A haze of shock and terror swam before the eyes of everyone in the village. Women began to shriek. A look of outrage welled up in some pairs of eyes. Jaws clenched in anger. Even those whose elderly eyes had gone dark felt something untoward had happened. The village erupted in...

Erdene Seng's short story reveals the fate of one stubborn member of a community in transition.   Our people began to move from our homeland at the beginning of spring. Old man Dash would remember that day for the rest of his life. Dash sat by the pile of firewood near his ger. He watched as, almost like a spring mirage, a mass of animals and carts moved haphazardly along the near side of the southern mountain, with horsemen galloping in all directions. Dash saw this and...

In "Vengeance," Norov Dalkhaa weaves a Mongolian Buddhist folk legend that dogs have the reincarnated souls of humans into an urban parable of sex, jealousy, and violence.   Listen to Norov Dalkhaa read "Vengeance" in the original Mongolian.     The black dog's large brown eyes drew Chuluun's attention. They didn't seem to be dog's eyes at all. The dog stared at Demchig, not even moving when Chuluun waved his hands and feet at it. Uzmee looked as fragile...

In this short story, a taunted shopkeeper's son finds his scorned background is his entree to a corporate career.    Although his name wasn’t Gujji to begin with, he was Gujji now. Before he was even aware of it, it was as if his ears had absorbed this slur on his identity. First given to him in school, the name had already cooked through by the time he was a boy in the alleys of the neighborhood, much like the sausages boiled and hung from his...

Even though it is a private institution, Arya Balika Vidyalaya receives funding from the government. The school, therefore, is obliged to adhere to government regulations. One dictates that all the reserved posts in the school must be filled through the appointment of reserved category candidates. Regardless, for the last two years, the reserved post for a T.G.T. (Trained Graduate Teacher) for science has remained empty. The new semester is supposed to begin in April. The school principal...

Activist Kausalya Baisantry recalls the ambivalence that greeted her Dalit family's attempts to modernize their life in pre-Independence India.   Translator’s Note: Italics indicate words the author transliterated from English into Hindi. Parenthetical comments are the author’s.  Definitions of Hindi words may be found in the glossary.   When my parents finally, after six girls, saw my brother come into this world, their happiness could not be contained....

Um mmm mm ma oh oh oh . . . oh Mama . . . oh Mama . . . oh Mama . . . I woke with a start when I heard the noise. “Oh my god . . . oh my god . . .,” the sound of a woman crying, or maybe being beaten, was floating in the air. There was a fair amount of light in the room, but nonetheless I turned on the side table lamp. Just at that moment I turned it on there was a final Aah! and then complete silence. It was my second day in Greece. I was staying on...

For International Translation Day, we’ve compiled fifteen essays, interviews, and conversations from the last fifteen years of Words Without Borders on the art and craft of translation, with topics ranging from translators as sci-fi heroes to the undeniable ubiquity of a phrase.   “[Translation] expands and deepens our world, our consciousness, in countless, indescribable ways.” —Edith Grossman discusses the vital importance of translation in an...

The Greek poet C.P. Cavafy is a writer who elicits ambiguous reactions. He seemed to follow a conventional path in his writing in formal terms, while at the same time confronting moral taboos with his erotic themes, often tinged with suggestions of homosexuality. Conventional as they might sound at first for a reader more attuned to avant-garde experiments, the intense poignancy of his poems places him among the ranks of the extraordinary. In What’s Left of the Night, a novel by...

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator each month. The current month’s translator chooses the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question.   Featured Translators Laura Esther Wolfson Chet Wiener Samuel Rochery Simon Brown Steve Savage Daniel Canty Oana Avasilichioaei Erín Moure Katrina Dodson Kira Josefsson María José Giménez Corine Tachtiris Jennifer Croft Emma Ramadan Robyn...

In Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde’s What We Owe, translated from the Swedish by Elizabeth Jane Clark Wessel and forthcoming with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a fifty-year-old Iranian refugee living in Sweden revisits the choices of her past after discovering she has only six months to live.   The day I was born, I was a disappointment. I was the sixth girl in a family with no sons. I was not what my parents had hoped for. But I wasn’t the biggest disappointment. When Noora...