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Ayça Türkoğlu’s translation of Deniz Tarsus’s “The Canary” appears in the October 2017 issue: What Unites Us: Turkish Short Stories​. Taken from Deniz Tarsus’s collection İt Gözü, “The Canary” presents an intimate portrait of a Turkish mining village doomed to endure one disaster after another. I was drawn to the story by Tarsus’s representations of Anatolian people, the quiet familial interactions, and...

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. For October’s installment, Oana Avasilichioaei passed the baton to Daniel Canty. What is your connection to the language(s) you translate from and/or the place(s) where the books you translate are written? I was born in Lachine, on Montréal’s West (I like...

In The Construction of the Tower of Babel, the Spanish writer tackles Bruegel, the Bible, and the necessity of treason. It is the special prerogative of the essay to wander: to explore, through trial and error, sifting its material to reach an unexpected conclusion or perhaps, unexpectedly, to not reach one. It is thus both a joy and a frustration when an essay truly lives up to its name, for the best essays constantly wrong-foot their readers, teasing with feints in every direction and...

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 Geneva as you feel/see it? With a foreign population of over 40%, Geneva proudly lives up to its multicultural, cosmopolitan reputation. It’s pleasant to live in; an elegant and smallish city that sometimes makes me think of...

Every month, emeritus Words Without Borders reviews editor M. Bartley Seigel reaches out into the wide world from his home on the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to share a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation he’s excited about, books he hopes you’ll agree are worth all our good attentions:   From White Pine Press, Purifications of the Sign of Retaliation by Myriam Fraga, translated from the...

At PEN America’s Lit Crawl Brooklyn 2017, Words Without Borders and Slice Literary partnered to present a multilingual exquisite corpse, a story authored by four international writers—Na Zhong, Lucrecia Zappi, Georgi Gospodinov, and Claudia Salazar Jiménez—and translated by Na Zhong, Eric M. B. Becker, Angela Rodel, and Elizabeth Bryer.  In the exquisite corpse tradition, one writer penned the first segment of the story (in...

The following story appears in Old Demons, New Deities, a collection of twenty-one short stories from Tibet, edited by Tenzin Dickie and forthcoming from OR Books. The Flight of the Wind Horse From very early times, among the many unique customs of Tibet, one of the most conspicuous and ubiquitous was the flying of prayer flags, or what the Tibetans called lungta. Lungta literally meant “wind horse” in English. The lungta symbolized either individual or...

Tickets are now on sale for WWB’s fourth annual Globe Trot, happening on November 1st at Tribeca Three Sixty! This annual celebration welcomes young publishing professionals, translators, and some of international literature’s hippest ambassadors for an evening of cocktails, music, dancing, and raffle prizes following the Words Without Borders Gala. Hosts Hala Alyan Alex Gilvarry Jaroslav Kalfar Katrine Øgaard Jensen Kanishk Tharoor Jenny Zhang Music DJ Herbert...

The 2017 Nobel Prize in literature goes to British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” Best known for his novel The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro is the author of eight books, most recently 2015’s The Buried Giant.  

Award-winning writer Burhan Sönmez has authored three novels, most recently Istanbul Istanbul (trans. Ümit Hussein, OR books, May 2016). His writing has appeared in international media, including the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, and La Repubblica. Sönmez received the 2017 Vaclav Havel Library Foundation’s “Disturbing the Peace” Award for his courageous dissent in Turkey. Before turning to writing, Sönmez worked as a human rights lawyer in Istanbul....

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’s spirit remains intact in defiance of very dispiriting times. The increasingly chasmic divide between rich and poor is shameful. Then there is the fact that London voted emphatically to remain in...

Listen to Please Enter Destination, produced by Play for Voices.     CHARACTERS HELENA: A young woman trying to find her place in the world—a place that, perhaps, doesn’t even exist. She is very straightforward and may seem nagging at times; in fact, though, she is a woman fighting against the decline of the world she lives in. HONZA: A morally weak, rather narrow-minded young man. He accepts the world as it is, without question. GPS...

Providing a look back into colonial Vietnam, this excerpt from Kim Thuy's coming-of-age novel Vi tells of the moment when a young girl's slender fingers had the power to change the course of a family's history.    When I was eight years old the house was plunged into silence. Under the extra fan fixed to the ivory wall of the dining room, a large bright red sheet of rigid cardboard held a block of three hundred and sixty-five sheets of paper. On each was marked the...

Inspired by the life story of the Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune, Chinese-born writer Ying Chen reimagines an unnamed Western doctor's encounter with a local child soldier and with himself.   The boat heaved, swept up in the night wind. His bed was narrow and hard. He held himself at the edge of sleep, afraid of falling in the dark. Despite this, he dreamed. He saw his great-grandfather on a similar journey, navigating the ocean on a frozen black night like this one,...

In this story, Sergio Kokis' ancient mariner recounts a series of mysterious disappearances at an isolated lighthouse. Situations of extreme isolation may cause such anguish and fear in certain fragile people that their minds exhibit an intensity bordering on true madness. What’s strangest is that these sensitive individuals may never before have shown the slightest symptom of insanity. But the simple fact of finding themselves far from their usual surroundings or social...

In this excerpt from Pan Bouyoucas' novel Cock-a-doodle-do, the lead detective of a crime novel series airs his grievances against his creator.    The sun beat down on him as the wail of a thousand cicadas filled the air. In his haste, he had forgotten both his sunglasses and his hat. The sky's light and its bright reflection off the surface of the island hit him square in the eyes, causing sweat to stream down his forehead, temples, torso, and back, drenching his shirt....

On an early evening in the spring of 2014, I had just settled my two young children into bed when I heard a commotion outside my apartment in Bebek, a neighborhood in Istanbul. I went to the window, and below me I could see a protest gathering in the park, which abutted the Egyptian consulate. Megaphones, whistles, forceful speeches, the noise escalated as more and more people gathered to voice their solidarity with members of the Muslim Brotherhood who had recently been imprisoned in...

When I asked novelist Kim Thuy—a native of Vietnam and a longtime Quebecer—why she writes in French instead of Vietnamese or English, she told me this story: Thuy and her family were boat people who came to Quebec when she was ten years old. They ended up on the first bus of Vietnamese immigrants sent to the small town of Granby, in the Eastern Townships. Her family had spent the previous four months in a Malaysian refugee camp, where water was scarce and mosquito bites, lice,...

Yalçin Tosun's chubby, despairing Turkish teenagers find solace in visits to the zoo. But an unexpected change to their routine abruptly alters their lives and their relationship.   Cutting last period was my idea. But getting on a crowded city bus and going to the zoo on this hot May day was Ali’s. He wanted to see the old chimpanzee at the zoo, whom he’d felt an affinity with for some time. Whenever he couldn’t take his workaholic father and...

The plain sprawls, flat under the sky. Darkness settles over it; a gulping, tarry swamp. In the distance, a small fire. It licks and lights the air. It leaps as the women gather around, throwing dry brush onto the flames. Old Hatice Ana arches her eyebrows and her face grows taut. It makes her look nearly fifteen years younger. Her skin gathers at her forehead and neck. Some of her teeth are missing and her face sags. “My Hasan died here, in the mine,” she says. “Your...

In this story by Behçet Çelik, a man risks his life to cross a city under siege and help his friend.    Author's Note: I have some doubts about sharing information about the social background of my stories with readers. It seems that this approach conditions or restricts the reader. This story was published in a literary magazine in Turkey this past year, and one young reader told me that when they read the story, they thought it took place in the 1970s (in...

Hellbent on avenging his brother's death, a preteen Turkish nationalist plots to kill his upstairs neighbor. My brother became a martyr for this country when he was twenty years old. He went and stepped on a landmine in Çukurca so that all of you could stroll down the well-lit, wide city boulevards. I was seven then. On the day of the funeral they put a handsome commando uniform on me, one with a blue beret. They said the terrorists would win if I cried, so I held it...

Bring joy and good tidings to the people, do not repulse them, Pave the way and do not make the road unduly arduous. —The Prophet Muhammad   My grandmother held a place in my heart that was all her own. We had a special, secret language. My memory of her is fragmented and it is only now, as the pieces shift into place, that I see they form a whole. They come swarming into my brain, flitting through me. She was my Kadriye Nene, my raven. Of course, by the time I came to know her,...

In Sine Ergün's playful short story, a young man discovers a secret that will be his undoing when a simple trip to the bathroom has unforeseen consequences.   I remember finding it odd that three people would choose to live together. We were at an age where everyone had a place of their own. They seemed like normal people. It was only with time that I realized that they weren’t normal at all. Selen had none of the characteristics you expect in an average woman. She was...

Beyond the Rice Fields, a sprawling work by the Malagasy writer known as Naivo (his full name is Naivoharisoa Patrick Ramamonjisoa), is the first novel from Madagascar ever to be translated into English. The book was originally written in French, like most literary works in the African nation of 24 million inhabitants, where authors hoping to find a wider audience resort to the European language instead of the native Malagasy. It is a vast and ambitious book, bristling with information...