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Ariana Arnes Marta Orriols has been compared to Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. Selected to represent Catalonia at the London Book Fair this year, she is the author of a collection of stories and two novels, one of which has been translated into English: Learning to Talk to Plants, which was published by Pushkin Press in Mara Faye Lethem’s translation in 2020. Translator Samantha Schnee met with her in London to discuss translation between languages and between media, as her novel...

One of the three women of focus in María Gainza’s latest novel is Enriqueta Macedo, a sort of Anna Wintour figure towering over the art valuations department of Ciudad Bank in Argentina. Of course, when I refer to Anna Wintour here, I am picturing the ice queen of Vogue (angular bob, Chanel sunglasses), but I have filled in everything with the fictional Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep, in the film adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada. Priestly was a much more...

In February of 2016, I welcomed a group of students at Princeton University to a seminar dedicated to literary translation. I was eager to teach the course, but even more eager to learn from it myself. For it was precisely during that period that I was about to face my first formal translation project: the novel Lacci, written by Domenico Starnone and published in 2014, which I had read in Italian and loved. The translation of Lacci was part of an ongoing phase of metamorphosis in my life....

Kseniya Fuchs I was just like hundreds of others: simple, without any particular desires, without an excess of ambition, I just was. I loved when everything was clean, when it was loud, when the kettle whistled and the aroma of cheap Nescafé Classic and Slava’s Bond Red cigarettes filled the air; I loved when people visited me—lots of people, so many that there wasn’t enough space for everyone; I loved when the neighbor children ran over because I always kept...

We’d extend our hands assessing their edges’ cracked skin. It’s a scene visible behind a part of me retreating, light sustains all things paper and digital; you sustain yourself delivered to the door where emerging onto the ice you open me.          This second scene leaves me creature among mankind, you man among the creatures degrading— balcony, copper pipe, tangle of clouds, a silhouette that speaks.          In...

the lights of the Donbas flare up like a hastily wrapped robe amid the drafts of deportation they called that an “evacuation” abandoning them in the border region poisonous sources of propaganda, bright as wolfsbane, look, they bought up another Luhansk Telegram channel jailed the people running it just yesterday you sent some stuff criticizing the government of the “republics.” what’s next for           human history? words in scare...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about. This month's selection includes books translated from Ukrainian, Indonesian, Persian, Japanese, and Spanish.   From Astra Publishing House | Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chornobyl by Markiyan Kamysh, translated from the Ukranian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Hanna Leliv | Nonfiction | 160...

Tuhin Das   Tuhin Das is an exiled poet from Bangladesh who is now a writer in residence at the City of Asylum in Pittsburgh. His new book, Exile Poems, is forthcoming from Bridge and Tunnel Books in Arunava Sinha's translation. About this poem, Das writes, "Sampsonia Way is often hushed, being at a distance from the main street, West North Avenue. Of course, it’s not a bad thing to have found a quiet place to write. My exile is not just for my body but also for...

“For me true writing is that: not an elegant, studied gesture but a convulsive act.” Elena Ferrante has regularly used violent imagery to describe her writing process, so this sort of visceral language in her craft book, In the Margins, is not entirely unexpected. Her 2016 collection Frantumaglia contains decades of her letters and interviews in which she asserts again and again that turbulence is fundamental to her process, and the book’s title echoes the theme:...

Miguel Syjuco   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 Manila as you feel/see it? Mega Manila is a million moods. In this city there are cities—in those sixteen cities, more cities, twenty-one point eight million cities walled high and crowned with broken...

Kyung-sook Shin. Photo copyright © Jun yeon Kim. Violets, a new novel by New York Times–bestselling author Kyung-sook Shin, is out this week from the Feminist Press in Anton Hur's translation. In the excerpt below, the protagonist, San, looks back on a formative event from her childhood.   A day in May. Her mother’s hand grips a pair of scissors. Like some wind-up toy, her grandmother repeats herself over and over again: Her son left and...

At the time of Sergio Chejfec’s death last Saturday, I had recently completed a translation of his 2015 book on writing and technology, "Forgotten Manuscript." The original version of the work, titled Últimas noticias de la escritura, already enjoys a cult status in the Spanish-speaking world, and Sergio and I had high hopes that its appearance in English would meet with a similar reception among Anglophone writers and readers. "Forgotten Manuscript" is a...

  When sailing on such a cold and bleak winter’s night along these shores, you get the impression that nothing in the world could be more insignificant and meaningless than such a small village under such high mountains. How do people live in such a place? And how do they die? A smartly-dressed passenger on a ship heading to Reykjavik wonders this aloud as eleven-year-old Salka and her mother Sigurlína disembark at the small fishing village of...

From left to right: Salwa Shakhshir, Miranda Beshara, and Mohamed Nabulsi. Sharjah was the guest of honor at both this year’s London and Bologna book fairs. In the last decade, Sharjah has particularly invested in children’s literature. The Emirate is home to Kalimat, one of the biggest publishers of Arabic children’s literature, and the annual Sharjah Book Fair is home to one of the most prominent prizes for Arabic literature for young readers, the Etisalat...

Father May Be an Elephant and Mother a Small Basket, But..., a new collection of short stories by Dalit feminist writer Gogu Shyamala, is out now from Tilted Axis Press. In the story below, translated from Telugu by P. Pavana, an aging woman finds her traditional way of life under threat.  "This year the grain harvest has been good. There are five bags more than in previous years. This was possible only with the blessings of Eedamma,” Ellamma said as she gazed at...

Danyil Zadorozhnyi considers the threat and reality of wartime displacement in this poem whose title speaks to W. H. Auden's "September 1, 1939." “trees—that’s what I lack most of all,” she says “you have so few of them here in Lviv Donetsk, though, was a green city greenery all around” but I didn’t know that I was young, never spent much time there, never valued people or the county until after it happened “second time I’ve lost...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about. This month's selection includes books translated from Arabic, Chinese, Danish, French, and Japanese.   From Other Press | Policing the City by Didier Fassin and Frédéric Debomy, translated from the French by Rachel Gomme | Nonfiction/Graphic Novel | 112 pages | ISBN 9781635422504 | US$25.99 What the publisher...

A drop of water takes flight into the kitchen sink in this work of microfiction by Sergi Pàmies.   At birth, the droplet has yet to learn that within two seconds she’ll smash into the kitchen sink. Hopeful, she sluices through the pipe’s final bend and peeks her head out the mouth of the tap. The glare of fluorescent lights dazzles her. She feels like that passenger on a train who, after staring at length into a long tunnel, finally emerges into the open...

Olga Tokarczuk’s Books of Jacob, in a virtuosic translation by Jennifer Croft, begins in 1752 in Rohatyn, a rural town located in what is now Western Ukraine. Rohatyn, like much of East Central Europe, has belonged to different countries over the last thousand years. The Rohatyn of Books of Jacob is a modest Polish town of two churches, a monastery, two synagogues, and five Orthodox churches, and is home to Father Benedykt Chmielowski, a priest with an insatiable desire...

Nisha Susan Nisha Susan is the award-winning author of The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook, a short story collection about female friendship, social media, and marriage. She is also a translator and the co-founder of one of India's most renowned feminist zines, The Ladies Finger. Most recently, she translated KR Meera’s Qabar from Malayalam into English. One of Malayalam literature’s best-selling novelists, Meera started her career as the first woman hired by the...

A woman's grief resurfaces during a drunken train ride home at dawn in this short story by Marta Orriols.   “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you, Paula?” “A little fresh air will do me good.” She refuses the offer, for the umpteenth time, with a lackluster wave as she staggers off feigning an impossible sobriety. The high heels are no help. It’s almost six in the morning and the June sky is breaking pink; she wants to run but the...

Aleksey Porvin's poem considers war and propaganda amid the invasion of Ukraine. In our hospital childhood, we’d have pillow fights, and sometimes twist a patchwork blanket into the shape of a giant club to whack an opponent upside the head or parry blows from another blanket rolled up into a telescopic baton with no lens we could press our eyes to as we strained to distinguish the body heat of our hospital’s sleepy star, fixing all our attention on the nubile lines...

In Kyiv, Ukrainian poet Olga Bragina speaks of loss and the impossibility of escape.   there’s no getting out of here since it’s too close to shoot war after peace to grope for your body among those like us expelled from all universities of historical truth tempered in the ashes of meanings here take this heart as proof that life doesn’t pass just like that there’s no getting out of here because children draw autumn fruit on the whitewashed walls awesome...

Beatles cover band the Shampoo reveal a side of the Naples neighborhood of Fuorigrotta that you won't find in the books of Elena Ferrante.   Cover for The Shampoo's album In Naples. In a parallel universe straight out of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the Beatles come, not from Liverpool, but from Napoli, and specifically the tough, working-class neighborhood of Fuorigrotta. Here, Day Tripper (Got a good reason / For taking the easy way out) is no longer Day Tripper,...

In this excerpt from Eva Baltasar's novel, the narrator unwillingly goes along with her partner's plans for assisted reproduction. And it happens. The thing that has no bearing on my life or on the kilometers-long perimeter of life that was meant to protect me from those permanent, timeless laws, the kind that defy all probability. It comes to the house like a Jonah. Unexpected and unfortunate. A sickness that had only ever affected other people. I want a baby, Samsa says,...