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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...

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 San José as you feel/see it? In San José the winter and summer are so similar that they never cease arriving. The rain is the soundtrack all year long. It’s a small city, where the chaotic traffic makes it seem like...

AT SEA From the bottom of the closer ocean I scrape  the sea into a plastic bottle let   its unknown conlang speak              above me when I go                              under— here in this one place a rise accessed by braving  a sudden deep...

Poet and writer Malinda Seneviratne, one of the most widely read journalists in Sri Lanka, offers a poem for his country, accompanied by translations into Tamil and Sinhala.   The heartbeat of my country Crashes as wave against rock Bursts into spray and song, It roars down monsoon-swollen rivers, Drips one reluctant drop at a time From the leaves of a bo tree. My country’s heartbeat Resonates as drumbeat and dance step, Rolls off...

Tamara Tenenbaum, winner of Argentina’s inaugural Premio Ficciones, reflects on María Gainza’s just-released Optic Nerve (tr. Thomas Bunstead, Catapult Books, 2019) in the context of the writer’s relationship to class and the legacy of the Argentine women writers who preceded her.   In 2015, a study put together by the consulting firm TNS Gallup[1] found that eighty-eight percent of people in Argentina thought of themselves as being middle...

T.O. Bobe’s Curl, translated by Sean Cotter and forthcoming with Wakefield Press, features Mr. Gică, the world’s greatest barber, and the colorful cast of characters who frequent his shop, including his ever-lurking antagonist, Dorel Vasilescu. Composed of   poems, mock-critical commentaries with footnotes, dreams, and diary entries, Curl is a patchwork portrait of universal loneliness.   Mr. Gică Overview Mr. Gică is the world’s greatest...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about. From Soho Press | Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac, translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey | Fiction | 216 pages | ISBN 9781616959234 | US$26.00 What the publisher says: “Argentinian literary star Pola Oloixarac’s wildly ambitious second novel investigates humanity’s quest for knowledge and control, hurtling from...

We spoke with Esther Kim, marketing and publicity manager of Tilted Axis, about the press’s recently released chapbook series, Translating Feminisms, which features translated poetry by women writers from across Asia alongside essays exploring how, where, and by whom feminist writing and female bodies are translated.   Words Without Borders (WWB): What was the catalyst for the Translating Feminisms chapbook series? Tilted Axis (TA): As the story goes: our publisher Deborah...

The title story of Sang Young Park’s debut collection, Tears of an Unknown Artist, or Zaytun Pasta (Munhakdongne, 2018), is serialized in Words Without Borders in Anton Hur’s translation.   Sang Young Park, now in his early thirties, was born in Daegu, a city in southeastern Korea, where redevelopment has rendered his childhood neighborhood completely unrecognizable. He attended college and graduate school in Seoul, where he earned degrees in French,...

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 Taipei as you feel/see it? It has a sense of permanence, even busyness, that I think is formed as much by the geography as by the nature of Chinese culture, which is distinctly different here than it is in China. Taiwan is an island,...

Marcela Trujillo’s “FamilienKern” is the cover art for the April 2019 issue: Behind Closed Doors: Chilean Stories of Domestic Life. I painted “FamilienKern” in 2008 when I returned to Santiago from Hamburg with my husband and my one-year-old daughter, Lulu. I had unexpectedly ended up living in Hamburg two years earlier. After seven years in New York City, I had decided to make my first trip to Europe to reconnect with old friends before returning...

Part-time New York, NY Words Without Borders seeks applicants for its editorial fellowship. The WWB Editorial Fellowship program is designed for individuals looking to build a career around the publication and promotion of international literature. The editorial fellow will gain hands-on experience with all aspects of the publication of a digital literary magazine—from issue planning to online promotion. The fellow will become familiar with the special considerations and skills...

Emma Ramadan, whose recent translations include Who Left the Light On? and The Boy (co-translated with Tom Roberge), spoke with five top translators—of Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, and Dutch—about their experiences bringing children’s books from around the world into English.   In recent years, more and more children’s imprints have cropped up within US publishers of translated literature. To name a few, Elsewhere Editions...

The paradox doesn’t escape me: I was born and bred in Mozambique, known as the homeland of poets, and yet for a long time I didn’t consider myself up to the task of truly appreciating poetry in all its depth. This belief was first challenged in early 2017 with the launch of an independent press, Cavalo do Mar, which has published eighteen titles thus far, including the work of the three poets here, whose works haunted me and set me on this ambitious quest of translating...

In these two poems, time bends and life begins to circle.   A Life Diverse A minute goes by a second stares a third smiles but in the corner the minute hovers in wait for me like the eye of a horse trailing the cart. The future dies in reverse, the slug tells me It’s not anxiety or else I’d throw out expectation this gadget without hour hands that shouldn’t rust here inside: I want to be budding memory. But my hands are empty a presage of things astray I try...

I  For the longest time, Chile was said to be a “land of poets.” And truly, we have an extraordinary lyric tradition that has varied in style and purpose throughout the centuries. Written poetry is a foundational genre in Chile that emerged with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors: among them was the poet Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, who wrote one of the most beautiful books of his time in praise of the newly “discovered” Chile and its...

In this third installment of Sang Young Park's novella, two friends steal a microphone and discover their own insignificance. Read the first installment of the series here, and the second installment here. Oh flopped over the table. Flecks of black hair-loss-concealer powder fell upon the empty sashimi dishes. At least I won in terms of hair and alcohol. Not that it made me any happier. Oh, still prostrate on the table, mumbled about how he had to get to the Environmental Film...

In the poems below, Hélder Faife gives free reign to the frolic of children's imaginations, but it's not all child's play.   De(s)igns With every stroke of her pencil   the little girl unfurls dreams and traces childhood’s uncertain roadmaps.  A twisted loom, lines on a page mending sorrows which she weaves into life’s purity. In a scarring script she tattoos the wavering future on the bare skinned wall. Punctuation Without...

In this meditation on death, the poet tries to climb outside of language.   I stepped back from my death it was strange and inhuman to me * and now my eyes are knives slicing the night to                                                          split the mist rising inside like the tears of a poem shedding its sadness over the warm...

In this short lyric piece by Alejandro Zambra, a bed sheet is a blank canvas and a record of family history.   It was before my dad set the house on fire. Fifteen or twenty days before.  There was a closet full of sheets, almost all of them white with red thread at the seams, Italian red. And one light blue set that was mine, patterned with blue letters or treble clefs.  My mother, from the window, her back to me, facing a white sheet; fifteen or twenty days before, back,...

In this short story, Alia Trabucco Zerán spins a tale of class, connection, and human cruelty in Chile.    Neither good nor bad. Neither nice nor unpleasant. Neither short nor long. It was life, period. The cloth wipes the grime. The broom gathers the trash. The water wets the soap. As I already said, the señora, the lady of the house, treated me well. If you ask her, she’ll say she considered me part of the family. Exactly which part I still don’t...

Boyhood friends meet again after years apart, sparking a trip through the narrator’s memory that leads to a forgotten—and harrowing—episode.    Listen to Eduardo Plaza read "Hyenas" in the original Spanish.   1 Miguel Rodewald and I were good friends. We knew each other because his family, who lived in Temuco, used to spend their summers in Coquimbo. When they were kids his father used to rent a house a few blocks from ours, in El Llano. We’d...

Catalina Mena's manifesto confronts the dilemmas facing women forced to choose between private household duties and public endeavors. Listen to Catalina Mena read "The Head of Household Manifesto" in the original Spanish. And if the Head of Household were to draft her manifesto, it would be in the absence of a form that can hold her. And because this same absence left her adrift. Stamped like a Chilean census form. A form that called the Head of Household a national hero. But that...

A girl of seventeen agrees to marry a gringo on their first date. Nothing in this impulsive start to their marriage hints at the coming misfortunes that will tear them from each other and themselves.    Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart. Hosea, 4:11   He said: I know you. You used to live in Ch, near the big port—isn’t your name Carla? I told him he was right except for the name, recognizing the same roughness in his accent as those...

Climbing into bed with her raconteuse grandmother, a young woman anxiously expects another of the old lady’s stories of a bygone Santiago. Instead, she discovers a physical deformity that provokes a reflection on the stories our scars tell of us.     My grandmother had no belly button. I found that out one night when I went into her room without knocking. It was late, I’d woken up from a bad dream and, to feel safe, I walked down the hall, thinking I’d get into...