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I found a white bean: where did I plant it? In the middle of a garden on a white sandy hill. Strong and tall, the beanstalk grew all the way to the sky; up the stalk, branch by branch, I climbed until I reached the sky. There I saw a son of God tally bees by the basket; from the stingers of his bees I forged a pointed sword, with my pointed sword I slew the devil's mother. My brown coat was stained, spattered with her blood: I asked Mara1, "Where shall I wash the coat clean?" "Wash it...

I had a brindled cow, sheltered in the byre. What became of the brindled cow? I traded her for money. What became of the money? The river swept it away. What became of the river? Black bulls lapped it up. What became of the black bulls? They vanished down a long road. What became of the road? It was overgrown by madder. What became of the madder? Maidens picked the yellow flowers. What became of the maidens? They rode away with young men. What became of the men? They built manors beyond...

Adomnan writes that Saint Columba of Iona, still known as Columbkill, Columbkill the Wolf, of the tribe of the O'Neill of the North through his grandfather, Niall of the Nine Hostages, was a brutal man when he was young. He had a fierce love of God, war, and small, precious objects. A man of the sword, he spent his youth in a bronze cradle. He served under Diarmait and under God: Diarmait, king of Tara, who relied on his sword during his raids in the sea of Ireland, for the pillaging...

In the Annals of the Four Masters it is told how Suibhne, king of Kildare, had a taste for the things of this world. He was a simple man. His happiness and pleasures were simple. He was heavy and coarse, with unruly blond hair that resembled moss on a stone -- intellectually and spiritually he lacked finesse. He fought, he ate, he laughed, and in other respects resembled the brown ox from Cualngé, which mates with fifty heifers a day. Fin Barr, the abbot, closely watched this...

Mehrabad Airport, Tehran. Air France, flight 726 I hate this life of constant wandering, these eternal comings and goings, these middle of the night flights, dragging along my suitcase, going through Customs and the final torture, the humiliating body search. "Take off your shoes, open your handbag, let's see inside of your pockets, your mouth, your ears, your nostrils, your heart and mind and soul." I am exhausted. I feel homesick—can you believe it? Already homesick. And yet...

For Juan Carlos Hidalgo and Carlos Calderón 1. Alfonso "the Fool" Madrigal played his first match in Pachuca during the summer of 1966. He went in as a substitute during the second half, wearing the blue and white jersey he'd play with for the rest of his career. He hailed from Tepito and his game was true to his neighborhood's stereotype: clever, easygoing, and flashy. He was apt to score unbelievable goals whenever he could keep his balance on the field, something that...

Poetry peers over the shoulders of science. --Antonio Machado The astronomer of that kingdom had been honored with the difficult charge of figuring out the meaning of Ursa Major. The king, who had been humiliated by his failed military campaigns against neighboring lands, was determined to claim a scientific victory which would restore the injured pride of his countrymen. His troops had been indisputably trounced, and his knights had been shamed, but what glorious revenge awaited them...

When the winds sweep away winter's dreaming, March dresses up in flowers and grass and, on long wings, ushers in the spring. Then, without ever knowing why, trees raise their naked arms to the King of the Sky. As a reward they are bedizened with a profusion of buds that burst from an excess of love, transforming themselves into the Queen's Ladies who raise slender and graceful arms under their corner of the sky, resting their dreams and thoughts in green leaves. Just as wind...

On sunny mornings the walls are white wine, the columns are ginger ale, the towers are immense bottles of beer, the high steeples drip amber. Down in the naves you feel the freshness of orange-water and the main altar is a wave of bee honey, and the saints in the chapels have the coolness of that tea they give to the sick. But in the afternoons, in the twilight hour, the walls turn into thick blood, the colonnade moves on legs of red wine, the towers are that false liquid of red-hot...

My teacher was standing at the entrance to the schoolyard, watching me as I walked away. Now finally I can hide the front part of me from him, and I unbutton my white smock collar, holding the ends together so it won't fall off. I am sure blood will soon be gushing from my nose. The candy-store man has gone back into his cave-like shop. Caramel candy sticks wrapped in a cloth napkin lie piled like pieces of wood in the shop window. I'd love to stop and look at them for a long...

The story of the Juan Latino's portraitist, Esteban Luz, who enters this story when Don Juan of Austria visits Granada during the Alpujarras War (1568-70), otherwise known as the Civil War. Near the city of Grenada, in a village whose name has been forgotten--it was one of those Moorish villages wiped out during the war--a boy with an astonishing gift was born. He became a painter, an excellent one; he executed portraits that were both more faithful and inspired than any of his...

On the souls of those who live life free under the skies—with the blades of grass, at the edge of the forest, on hills bedizened with bright flowers of the field—it is written that they must know many hidden mysteries. The eyes of the Roma know exactly when the earth's heart begins to stir deep down at spring's root, reviving the shoots of grass and the buds of trees until the green sap bursts with love before the Sun's eyes. How many things my grandmother Lulika...

Suite Francaise feels epic for a number of reasons. First, because of the scope of the fear it documents-that of French civilians on the eve of and during German occupation. Second, because it artfully balances the anguish (and verisimilitude) of any unsparing portrayal of war with the pretty, carefully wrought language of a good nineteenth-century novel. Most important, however, Suite Française feels significant because of the circumstances in which it was conceived, written, and...

In Andrè Brouillet's famous painting of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot's lecture on female hysteria, a woman is draped over Charcot's assistant's arm. She is placid and completely sensual in the cold room; her dress has fallen from her shoulders and a nurse reaches out to help her as she swoons. This woman is Blanche Wittman, the favorite hysteria patient of Charcot, the head of the women's psychiatric hospital. Brouillet's painting was the only existing...

You are pallid, you are losing blood and life. You stop a cab. The driver peers into his rearview mirror. You are not there. You leave a sword on the back seat in lieu of the fare. You become a trickle of holy water, a yellow aircraft, a toy train. You remove the mask, your pallid dream. You serve breakfast to Kung Jiang with his long, aged fingers. You write love letters in Minoan script and leave them on the kitchen table.  

Vladimir (for some reason) made me happy. We went to the circus together and watched the sunrise. At night I would rest my cheek on his chest and dream of snow. He would read me fairy tales and make me relish the bare essentials. One day I came back and he wasn't there. (Or perhaps pieces of my skin were missing.) Vladimir flayed my feelings (stole my life) and ran to catch the last train to Russia. For the next poem in this sequence, click here.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE:"Una grossa frittura" is a very recent story by Leonardo Gori, and it is about to be published as part of an anthology entitled Giallo Uovo (Mondolibri, April 2006). It is a very different type of crime story that includes a dash of humor and has an almost Dickensian flavor: a change of pace from the typical noir. The story is unusual for several reasons. Its setting is Florence in the year 1880, a city that one of the characters says lends itself well to "dark...

As he was hastily and wearily glancing through the window at Gare du Nord, Michel felt as if he recalled Christophe's face at least twice a minute. Christophe's face was big and long, slow and thoughtful; but above all it was pale, pale as if Brussels had suddenly leaned inside through the window and spread all the fog from its bosom along his features. They were sitting in Christophe's flat somewhere in the vicinity of the Southern railway station. Christophe's mouth was...

Nachtigall, Liebe, Herz, you can read Heine without the help of a dictionary," he said. And he enjoyed the possibilities German allowed of making up words, as Goethe's Nebelglanz, "the glimmer of the fog." He would let the words resound in the room: "Füllest wieder Busch und Thal still mit Nebelglanz *Š." He praised the transparency of the language, and he reproached Heidegger for having invented what he called "an incomprehensible dialect of German." He loved...

Ever since I can remember, I've loved to watch people who pass by me on the street. I inherited this habit from an aunt who suffered serious injuries in a car accident when I was four years old, and was never able to walk again. Due to her condition, she didn't have much else to do besides sit in her wheelchair and read a book or observe the people who passed by her front porch. I picked up this practice of hers. And so I began to spend my days watching the people who were walking...

"Read that," said Studer, thrusting a telegram under his friend Madelin's nose. It was dark outside the Palais de Justice, the Seine gurgled as it lapped against the quai and the nearest street-lamp was a few yards away. "Greetings from young Jakobli to old Jakob Hedy." The commissaire read out the words haltingly once he was under the flickering gaslight. Although Madelin had been attached to the Sûreté in Strasbourg some years before, and therefore was not entirely...

The ties between Arab youth and the law bring to mind, in many ways, a nineteenth-century novel. For a long time I was fragile, yet in the pervasive delinquency around me, I seemed driven by some borrowed force. Invariably, the ghetto child's first act of revolt is to commit an offence. Poverty, that traditional proletarian sickness, dictates every action. Therein lie the roots of begging, of thieving. I recall being hungry the way a grown man is hungry in the streets of this country. I...

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: La remontee des cendres (The Rising of the Ashes) is the title of a small text, written in French by the Paris-based Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun. It was published by Editions du Seuil in 1991, in a bilingual edition with the Arabic translation rendered by Iraqi poet Kadhim Jihad. The book is composed of two poems. The first, dated February-April 1991, bears the title of the book, "The Rising of the Ashes," and addresses the devastation of the Gulf War on...

Abdelilah Hamdouchi's The Last Wager takes place in modern-day Casablanca. Othman is an unemployed thirty-two-year-old Moroccan married to a wealthy seventy-three-year-old French woman, Sofia, who owns a restaurant in an affluent part of town. Just before this scene, Othman has a rendezvous with his beautiful young mistress, who tells him she has run out of patience waiting for his marriage to end. Here, Detective Alwaar is called to a crime scene in the middle of the night. When he...

Chapter IV: The Dog -1- There's the clatter of the ancient truck lumbering through the hazy Beirut morning, the sea, and the mingled smell of salt and fish. Sky, gray clouds and waves. Engine clacking, its wheels pitching the ruts, the truck rumbles along. Zayn Alloul is sitting next to the driver up front. Mohammad al-Kharoobi and Saleh Ahmad are suspended on two small fenders at the back-end of the vehicle. The aroma of Virginia blend tobacco suffuses the front cabin: the...