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Words without Borders · Poems in Translation Contest: "Trial Run, " by Yau Ching, tr. Chenxin Jiang Listen above to Chenxin Jiang read her translation of Yau Ching's "Trial Run"                        as a door-nail            and gone          to the world            air           broke drop nothing is...

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. For September's installment, Kristin Dykstra passed the baton to Don Mee Choi, who translates between Korean and English. What is your connection to the language(s) you translate from and/or the place(s) where the books...

These days, there could be fierce competition over who could write the book on “how to be a fascist”—if we could agree on what a fascist is. Michela Murgia’s lapidary definition, depicted in a Forrest Gump caricature on the cover of the original Italian edition, is “fascist is as fascist does.” While historians have found fascism notoriously difficult to define, and there exist numerous volumes analyzing its historical roots, the myriad forms of its...

Bryan Mendoza’s translation of Julio Pazos Barrera's "Pegasus Autopsy" was one of four winners of WWB’s 2020 Poems in Translation contest, presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets. The winning selections will be published in POETS.org's Poem-a-Day series and in Words Without Borders every Saturday this September, which is National Translation Month, and into the first week of October. Bryan Mendoza will be...

In this essay, Silvana Paternostro reflects on her time in Tokyo and the role of women in Japanese society.   When friends ask me about Tokyo, my answer takes them by surprise: I walked, mostly. I visited sites and had culinary experiences. I bathed in hot springs in the mountains of Nagano, where wild monkeys do the same. I stood close to a monk sounding the six o’clock bell by the five-story pagoda in the ancient city of Nara. But what I treasure most when I think of the four...

"Pegasus Autopsy" is one of four winning poems selected by David Tomas Martinez for the 2020 Words Without Borders—Academy of American Poets Poems in Translation Contest.   Words without Borders · Poem-in-Translation Contest: "Pegasus Autopsy, " by Julio Pazos Barrera Listen above to Bryan Mendoza read his translation of Julio Pazos Barrera's "Pegasus Autopsy"   It’s a spacious chamber. Well lit. A light that refracts the distant...

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 London as you feel/see it? London is really the only city that lies deep within my mind, that’s as much a dreamscape as a cityscape. I’ve been visiting London for fifty years. And have lived there—once for a whole year. But...

They still sing to us, the ancient poets do. Despite our ever-increasing distance from those first songs, the music remains; it can still be heard, if one is properly attuned for its reception. Part of the ongoing persistence of the classical tradition has to do with each generation’s need for their own version of that music. For every age that coalesces into a clearly defined aesthetic ideology—whether it’s labeled Romantic, Modernist or Postmodernist—we receive an...

Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên’s self-translation of “Learning Late Letters” was one of four winners of WWB’s 2020 Poems in Translation contest, presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets. The winning selections will be published in POETS.org's Poem-a-Day series and in Words Without Borders every Saturday this September, which is National Translation Month, and into the first week of October. Join WWB...

Carlos Fonseca's Natural History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) is a singularly difficult book to describe. It’s always hard to sum up an entire novel in a few words, but this one poses special difficulty. It has multiple, layered, sprawling stories, and the book is more about the journey than the destination. It’s a philosophical novel of ideas, a story about art and theory in which language is of primary importance. It’s about mimeticism and identity,...

  This year, we partnered with the Academy of American Poets to bring you the second edition of the Poems-in-Translation Contest. We received 935 poems from 448 poets from 87 countries translated from 58 languages. The four winning poems will be published in Words Without Borders and the Academy of American Poets’s “Poem-a-Day” throughout September and into October. Published alongside the poems will be the original language texts...

"Learning Late Letters" is one of four winning poems selected by David Tomas Martinez for the 2020 Words Without Borders—Academy of Americans Poets Poems in Translation Contest.   Words Without Borders · Poems in Translation Contest: "Learning Late Letters," written and translated by Nguyen Hoang Quyen Click above to listen to poet Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên read the English translation of "Learning Late Letters"   The dead don't...

September is World Kid Lit Month—a celebration of translated literature for young people. We invited World Kid Lit advocate and children’s book translator Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp to tell us about plans for the month and how we can get involved.   WWB: What is World Kid Lit Month? Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (RAK): September is the time to find out about global literature for young people by following and sharing recommendations across social media using the hashtag...

The title of this issue is "Who Writes Peru: Asian Peruvian Writers.” A more precise subtitle, however, would have been "Nikkei and Tusán Peruvian Writers,” because “Asian Peruvian” as an organizing principle simply doesn’t make much sense in the home contexts of these seven writers. The term trips off my (North) American tongue because I am used to identifying myself as “Asian American.” In the US, the political movements of the 1960s...

In this short story by Peruvian author Augusto Higa Oshiro, a selfless man gives himself entirely to his work. I One sunny May afternoon, a little man arrived in the city, and not just the city, but an office on the third floor of the Ministry of Education, in search of an official, a distant relation of his family, who would help him and get him work, was what he’d been told back home. Attired in his best clothes—a white shirt, clean pants, patent leather shoes, and a...

In two poems, Julia Wong Kcomt reflects on what it means to be a Peruvian with Tusán (Chinese) heritage.​ The Red Rooster To Wata, in memoriam Peru dies. Like garlic bulbs this whim of blouses cut so masterfully. The iron windows. Baroque. Relentless. Paint staining my ovaries. Sushi is now the language of the people and my mighty noodles wait in a forgotten pot. Papá told me to detest the Japanese like everyone says to hate Chileans. But with so much love, I find...

Peruvian writer Julio Villanueva Chang profiles Lima’s oldest life drawing model in this short essay. Rodolfo Muñoz del Río has spent the better part of his life in the nude. Butt-naked. For the past half-century, students at Lima’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes have gazed upon him not as a human being, but as a configuration of shadows and proportions: a drawing condemned to sit still for seven to twelve hours a day. A sixty-six-year-old drawing whose...

In this poem, Peruvian writer Doris Moromisato contemplates love and longing in a seaside neighborhood of Lima. Here I say again that I don’t love you while city mist loosens the sky dampens my geraniums. Grounded like a gull on the terrace I recall the sermon at Benares and agree: suffering lives in me. During the festival of San Pedro the fishermen sling their offerings to the sea my eyes fill with rowboats and the sprawl of petals taken by the tide shows me how small vastness...

A Chinese immigrant to Peru refuses to give up tradition in this short story by Siu Kam Wen. When Lou1 Chen, loan shark and owner of a fleet of eighteen urban minibuses, managed to amass his first fifteen million, he had a luxurious mansion built in Monterrico and moved there with his Peruvian wife, their two sons, and his elderly mother. The two-story house measured 2,300 square feet and included a spacious front yard and a backyard with a pool. Two imposing German shepherds guarded the...

Peruvian writer Sui-Yun meditates on sin and sensual pleasure in four short poems. To Eve, my eternal mother To erase my sins I have licked the tip of evil I know Eve did the same our longings ended up sucking at the shafts of trees extracting drop by drop the sap of the apple branch To turn away from evil I’ve crammed my jars full of somber recollections calling to the unknown silks radiating from my body To turn away from evil I’ve added every letter of your body to my...

Cristy, the narrator of Tilsa Otta’s novel The Golden Children of Sexual Alchemy, experiences otherworldly orgasms with her partner: not only do they make her see God, they also give her visions of the future. Her curiosity about this “gift,” its purpose, and how it might properly be deployed prompt her to research the world of erotic spirituality. Here she offers notes from her fieldwork.  Frozen with One Foot in the Air After leaving Cosmos, I make...

In the midst of a pandemic defined by isolation, our second Poems in Translation Contest brought together 935 poems from 448 poets and 87 countries, translated from 58 languages. We are thrilled to announce, alongside our partners at the Academy of American Poets, this year’s winners, selected by Pushcart prizewinner David Tomas Martinez. The four winning poems will be published in Poem-a-Day and in Words Without Borders every Saturday this September, which is National Translation...

Damián Cabrera is a Paraguayan writer, researcher, teacher, cultural manager, and curator. He is the author of the lyric novels Xirú (2012) and Xé (2019). He lives between Asunción and Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. An excerpt from Xirú was published in Words without Borders’ July/August 2020 issue. This multilingual lyric novel is set in Ciudad del Este—a Paraguayan city in the Triple Frontier shared with Argentina and...

After the successful English-language publication of her debut novel The Wind That Lays Waste, Argentinian author Selva Almada returns with Dead Girls, a journalistic novel centered on the unsolved murders of three young Argentinian women in the 1980s. Translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott, Dead Girls is out this week with Charco Press. In the excerpt below, a family remembers the various femicides that have taken place in their region in recent decades,...

Today on WWB Daily, Gitanjali Patel and Jessie Spivey of Shadow Heroes, an organization that runs creative translation workshops for students, take on the myth of the "good" translation. Deconstructing the harmful and exclusionary assumptions behind the phrase, they propose an alternative approach to translation. What is a “good” translation? “Good,” the most common word of praise in the English language, stakes a claim to universality. Yet, framed as an...