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Happy International Women's Day! In celebration of this special day, we've selected seven outstanding issues of women's writing in translation from the WWB archives. Featuring work from Sudan, Hungary, Taiwan, Tunisia, China, and more, these issues offer a glimpse of the range and diversity of contemporary women's writing from around the globe. 1. Coming Into Focus: Sudanese Women Writers Image: Yasmeen Abdullah, “The Butterfly Effect.” By...

From 1998 until January 2021, Professor Thomas C. Spear edited Île en île, an extensive virtual archive of literature from French-speaking islands and their diasporas. Although there will no longer be updates or new material, the entire Île en île archive remains accessible online. Today on WWB Daily, Professor Spear speaks with us about the evolution of Île en île over more than two decades and recommends some of his favorite authors in the archive,...

Heather Cleary's translation of American Delirium, the first novel by Argentine author Betina González to appear in English, was recently published by Henry Holt. In the essay below, Cleary describes how a playlist she compiled for fun developed into a crucial tool in the translation of American Delirium. I used to love making mixtapes. Sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by piles of cassettes and compact discs, weaving a message from...

The unnamed narrator of “Paris Périphérie,” a wisp of a story in Elvira Navarro’s new collection of short fiction, Rabbit Island, has an innate sense of direction. Even in an unfamiliar neighborhood in the bustling capital city of a foreign country, a hunch usually points her in the desired direction. As we meet her, she’s deeply conflicted about an important relationship, and long walks seem to clarify her thoughts.  One day, while searching for a...

No doubt a few Galicians will think it in very bad taste to inaugurate this issue with a likeness to their higher profile southern neighbors, but because there may be a great many glad for the comparison, I can hardly imagine a better point of entry to the little-known trove that is Galician literature. Indeed, ever since the independence of Portugal in 1143 from the Spanish Kingdom of León, and the subsequent split of their common vulgar tongue, debate has raged over just where (and...

The work of German photographer Karl Blossfeldt and his relationship to plants is reimagined in this poem by 2019 Poems in Translation Contest winner Alba Cid from her collection Atlas. Light is choral and comes from another world: we ripple Alba Cid And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone. Edgar Allen Poe   1. A catalog for Karl Blossfeldt. 2. A creation that can only be seen head-on, one which celebrates the detail: fingers plucking petals and sepals to discover...

Memories of family unfold in fragments in this excerpt from Susana Sanches Arins' novel And They Say.   [under]construction stories are always being constructed. the words work like hands, setting brick after brick in its place. a wall that protects us. birthday my father was born in 1949, the year after the war had come to an end. my mother came into the world in 1952 and the Maquis still roamed the hills. the war seemed far away, but it was there. and it is still there....

Faced with the imminent death of her mother, Emma Pedreira's narrator reflects on how little they know one another. Mamá will die tomorrow. Or maybe the day after tomorrow, I’m not sure, but I don’t want to stop to think about it. What I do know is that I’ll get a call and there’ll be a quiet voice, used to these types of things, and in such a schematic way that it’ll sound like a note jotted down on a Post-it: Your mother is dead. In accordance...

A mother-daughter conversation and a child's search for her origins lead from the grandiose to the dreary in this poem by Luisa Castro.   My mother works in a cannery. One day my mother said to me: love is a canned sardine. Do you know how canned food is prepared? One day my mother said to me: love is a work of art in a can. My dear, Do you know where you come from? You come from a mussel nursery— canned. Behind the cannery, where the shells rot along with the fish...

In this fantastical story of a man and his horse by Álvaro Cunqueiro, it becomes increasingly unclear who holds the reins.    One lovely summer afternoon Alberte Merlo gave his horse a little fresh grass, then sat himself down on his chopping block to read the newspaper. The horse, chewing, leaned over his master’s shoulder, and in the voice of a man, inquired: “What’s new in the world today?” So began many long months of conversation between...

An unexpected encounter on a train turns into a deeper discussion about love and desire in this poem by Antón Lopo. We bumped into each other on the train. Antonio, returning from A Coruña: me, heading to Vigo. We greet with air kisses         —smooch, smooch— and he soon asks after Oscar. I lie to him,                     “haven’t seen him in a...

Causality and chance collide in this poem by Samuel Solleiro.   So, there are a lot of things you can’t see, like evil or vitamins. Other things you can: love, which is like bearing a giant heart emoji on your back. It’s just so embarrassing. What does it matter if we believe in it or not, it rules our lives one way or the other, and we’re more or less ok with it. Later, when it gets dark, I’ll get back to thinking that the days seem to drag on, or that they...

Two maladroit lovers search for the meaning in childhood games, their parlay capturing the awkward transition from youth to intellectual and emotional adulthood, in this comical excerpt from Xurxo Borrazás’s novel I Is. That night, in one second, the alarms ring out like crickets in heat, simultaneously. The sheets take on the shape of the bodies beneath them, and on wrists, in towers, on tables and walls, time is told in a single direction. Their bodies lie slack, submerged...

Bekim Sejranović's From Nowhere to Nowhere, a novel about a young man displaced by the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, is out tomorrow from Sandorf Passage in Will Firth's translation. In the excerpt below, the protagonist recalls receiving an unexpected gift from a neighbor who has recently returned from Germany. It was fall back then, and Suzana’s dad, Uncle Slavko, had finally come home from Germany. He worked there, in Frankfurt, while Suzana, her mom,...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about. February's selection includes books translated from Arabic, Russian, French, Swedish, and Japanese.   From Other Press | In the Company of Men by Véronique Tadjo, translated from the French by the author and John Cullen | Fiction | 160 pages | ISBN 9781635420951 | US$14.99 What the publisher says: “In a series of moving...

Sabrina Jaszi's translation of Alisa Ganieva's "Munkar and Nakir" appears in the February 2021 issue of Words Without Borders. Preparing to translate “Munkar and Nakir,” I reread the stories of Flannery O’Connor, whose darkly comic and grotesque portrayals of the American South are described as “Southern Gothic.” First published in the regional journal Dagestan, Alisa Ganieva’s “Munkar and Nakir” could be said to...

Davit Gabunia's cinematic debut novel, Falling Apart, from which this excerpt comes, recalls Rear Window in its dark exploration of voyeurism, and broke ground it its treatment of a male sexual liaison. Gabunia found fame aged twenty-two as the Georgian translator of Harry Potter, and later Shakespeare and Ibsen.   The people in the photo look like blue and black blotches. I can’t pick out Tina. Just last night she was lying in bed, the...

Tamta Melashvili's 2015 novel, Eastwards, from which this excerpt comes, is the story of a young woman, Irina, in present-day Georgia, who is simultaneously suffering from depression, a vanished lover, and a taboo medical condition, vaginismus. She is researching Elene Dariani, a mystical poet believed to have had a secret affair with the famous Georgian poet Paolo Iashvili. Cofounder in 1915 of the Blue Horn Symbolists, Iashvili committed suicide in 1937 during Stalin’s...

Born in Jerusalem, Najwan Darwish published his first poetry collection in 2000. He has since become one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets, and one of the most powerful poetic voices to emerge from Palestine in the modern era. His first book to appear in English was Nothing More to Lose (NYRB Poets, 2014), which was listed by NPR as one of the best books of the year. Now, with the publication of his second major collection in English, Exhausted on the Cross, Najwan has become the...

György Dragomán's The Bone Fire, a Gothic novel about an orphan who's adopted by her mysterious grandmother, is out this week with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In the excerpt below, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, a day of household chores takes an unexpected turn. It’s Saturday; I’m heading home from the market with Grandmother. We’re standing in front of our gate. I wait for Grandmother to take out her key and open it. She takes out the key,...

Lasha Bugadze's A Small Country, which won the Saba, IliaUni, and Writers’ House Litera prizes in Georgia––all for novel of the year in 2018––is based on the real scandal surrounding the publication of the author's 2001 short story “The First Russian.” The story outraged some MPs and clergy with its satirical allusions to the wedding night of Georgia’s revered medieval Queen Tamar, whose first husband was a Russian...

In their introduction to Words Without Borders’ “#Russophonia: New Writing in Russian” issue, Hilah Kohen and Josephine von Zitzewitz highlight several significant issues that “preoccupy Russian society and Russophone communities around the world. The first is the war in Eastern Ukraine.” Words Without Borders’ “Women Write War” issue of April 2016 featured the writing of two Ukrainian poets about this war, Lyudmyla Khersonska and Lyuba...

In her quarterly column, Maya Jaggi, our Critic at Large, provides a brief history of Georgian letters, whose influences look east and west. Jaggi has curated Georgia’s Fantastic Tavern: Where Europe Meets Asia, an online festival of Georgian writers inspired by the café culture of Georgia’s first democratic republic of 1918–21, taking place online from February 25 to 28.  In a little park with soaring fir trees behind the old parliament...

Archil Kikodze's The Southern Mammoth, originally published in Georgian in 2017, takes place in a single day in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, as a filmmaker leaves his apartment to make way for a friend with a date, to wander freely through his city and his memories.    Armed with long poles, the policemen are busy at the Ortachala 1 hydro station. It seems they are the only ones on this sunny wintry morning who have something to do. They push as hard as they can,...

Airea D. Matthews to Judge Winning Poems to Be Published in Poem-a-Day and WWB   We’re pleased to announce the 2021 WWB Poems in Translation Contest spotlighting groundbreaking work by poets and translators around the world. The contest is open to submissions of contemporary international poetry translated from other languages into English. Four winning poems will be co-published in Words Without Borders and Poem-a-Day, the popular daily poetry series produced by the Academy...