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Iocasta: What is an exile's life? Is it great misery? Polyneices: The greatest; worse in reality than in report. Iocasta: Worse in what way? What chiefly galls an exile's heart? Polyneices: The worst is this: right of free speech does not exist. Iocasta: That's a slave's life—to be forbidden to speak one's mind. (Euripides, The Phoenician Women; author's translation) Writers in exile often face the question of why they left their countries, and whether this...

The kid who sells roasted chestnuts at the end of the Ponte Garibaldi gets down to work. He sits in a groove in the parapet of the bridge with a small stove between his legs, looking no one in the face, as if his relationship to the rest of humanity were at an end, or as if he had been reduced to only a hand, not the physical hand of a small boy or an elderly lady, but an abstract hand, a mechanism for accepting payment and delivering merchandise in a rigidly calculated and predetermined...

Set in an Iraqi village during the Iran-Iraq war, Scattered Crumbs critiques a totalitarian dictatorship through the stories of an impoverished peasant family. A father (Hajji Ijayel), a fierce supporter of Saddam Hussein--here called only the Leader--clashes with his artist son, who loves his homeland but finds himself literally unable to paint the Leader's portrait for his father's wall. The novel evokes the deterioration both of the country and of the individual characters...

Why do we fear words when they have been rose-palmed hands, fragrant, passing gently over our cheeks, and glasses of heartening wine sipped, one summer, by thirsty lips? Why do we fear words when among them are words like unseen bells, whose echo announces in our troubled lives the coming of a period of enchanted dawn, drenched in love, and life? So why do we fear words? We took pleasure in silence. We became still, fearing the secret might part our lips. We...

The wind gasps with the midday heat, like a nightmare in the late afternoon And on the masts, it continues to fold, to spread for departure The gulf is crowded with them--laborers roaming the seas Barefoot, half-naked And on the sand, by the gulf A stranger sat--a baffled vision wanders the gulf Destroying the pillars of light with the rising wail Higher than the torrents roaring foam, than the clamor A...

Set in the border triangle of Iran, Irak, and Turkey, Im Grenzland [At the Borderline] is the story of an Iraqi Kurd who makes his living as a smuggler. Having bought a map of landmines from a former soldier, the smuggler negotiates a path through the war-torn border region to bring items that have become luxuries (due to embargo) back into his country. On each trip he unearths land mines on his way out of the country and buries them on his way back. He reads the empty landscape like a...

Throughout medieval Europe Arabic had a far more powerful impact on the transformation and shaping of culture than most narratives of our history reveal. This was true not only in Spain, where Arabic was the lingua franca of educated people of all three religions for many centuries, but far beyond. The new and often revolutionary cultures of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe were often provoked or shaped by an Arabic culture that traveled throughout Europe in many guises, in...

I remember as-Sayyab screaming into the Gulf in vain: Iraq, Iraq. Nothing but Iraq. And nothing but an echo replies I remember as-Sayyab, in that Sumerian space A woman triumphed over the sterility of mist She bequeathed to us earth and exile . . . For poetry is born in Iraq, So be Iraqi to become a poet, my friend. I remember as-Sayyab . . . He didn't find life as he imagined it Between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and He didn't think of the herbs of immortality Like...

He never considered himself an exiled politician. He abandoned his country out of a strange impulse that was forged in three stages. The first was when he was approached by four successive beggars on the Avenue. The second was when a minister said the word Peace on television and his right eyelid immediately started to tremble. The third was when he entered his neighborhood church and saw that a Christ (not the most divine one, crowded with candles, but another, crestfallen, on a side...

Dreams don't come to us without being provoked externally, which is what happened to me yesterday when I woke up at five in the morning, precisely the hour I had intended to get up. I found myself on someone's trail and soon I saw Kassem and said something as I approached him, even though I was astonished that I would be able to talk to him while he was no longer among the living; then I realized that it wasn't Kassem but my faithful servant Sha'aban and that I wanted him to...

This interview appeared in slightly different form in Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, edited and translated by Ammiel Alcalay (San Francisco: City Lights, 1996). Ammiel Alcalay: Starting with education, practically and in a wider sense, how were you formed as a writer? Shimon Ballas: One has to go very far back, to early childhood. I was always attracted to writing. I connected it to stories told at home and I used to try and write them down for myself. I was always a little...

In this 1995 story, Bun-nyo is an elderly superintendent at a reservoir in the countryside. She devotes much of her time and effort to taking care of a flourishing flower garden that she has planted in honor of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, who visited the reservoir once in her younger days. The story begins as she hears the devastating news of Kim's death. "Grandma, Grandma, get up." Bun-nyo heard voices, choking with tears, and felt small, desperate hands shaking her shoulders....

Two or three years after Partition, the governments of Pakistan and India decided to exchange lunatics in the same way that they had exchanged civilian prisoners. In other words, Muslim lunatics in Indian madhouses would be sent to Pakistan, while Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani madhouses would be handed over to India. I can't say whether this decision made sense or not. In any event, a date for the lunatic exchange was fixed after high level conferences on both sides of the...

The narrator, a manager at a factory in the city, is sent on an urgent business trip to his wife's hometown. As the hapless narrator sets out on his journey, his wife pressures him to visit his in-laws while he is there, to take care of various family matters including playing matchmaker to her younger sister. *** It makes me shudder just to look back on that day's journey. I had been walking for about half an hour when the fickle mountainside weather suddenly brought on rain....

I first encountered Saadat Hasan Manto by playing one of his characters. In 1994, I was doing fieldwork for an ethnographic thesis on social life in the Pakistani city of Lahore, where Manto lived, worked, and socialized from 1948 until his death in 1955. A local theatre company was mounting an adaptation of Manto's story "New Law" ("Nea Qanun"), and they needed somebody to play the British soldier. First published in 1937, "New Law" tells the story of Ustad Mangu, a Lahori tonga...

31 Laxmi Mansions Hall Road, Lahore 15 March 1954 Dear Uncle, Greetings, I write this after a long break. The fact is that I was ill. According to our poetic tradition, the treatment for illness lies in what is called the elixir of joy served by a slender temptress straight out of the quatrains of Omar Khayyam from a long-necked crystal jug. However, I think that is all poetry. Not to speak of comely cupbearers, one can't even find an ugly servant boy with a mustache to play...

This story, written in 1960, is narrated by a middle-aged party committee chairman in the countryside who encounters a young woman on the train, on his way back from an important regional meeting. The narrator is quite taken by the maiden's vivacity and youthful beauty, and becomes interested in the tin pail that she has carried aboard the train, full of baby carp that she is transporting to her fish farm. The following excerpt begins right after the young woman, who got off the train...

"What a slimeball!" She pressed the glass against her cheek again. "And you go along with him. All this time you've been so stubborn. Then somebody like him comes along and . . . I just don't get it!" Robert spread his fingers. He wasn't sure he would even feel the wart if it didn't rub against his middle finger. At first it had felt like a scab, now it was more like a crumb of toast. "Four weeks at the most," he said, and glanced up briefly. She was still leaning...

This is a story about something that took place over ten years ago, during the 13th World Youth Festival. It is now Juche Year 88 (1999).1 Outside our window slogans on the street, visible everywhere, bear witness to the hardships we've suffered over the last ten years and the upheavals of today: "Let's make this year shine with a great transformation in building a strong and prosperous country!" "Let's continue the arduous march vigorously onward to paradise!" But why am I...

After spending seven years in the U.S., I recently moved back to Seoul, the capitalist capital in the southern half of my divided country. When I arrived, both sides were preparing for the fiftieth anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean War on July 27, 1953. People in the South barely took notice of the silver-haired U.S. veterans who had returned to marvel at sleek skyscrapers and cell phones in everyone's hands, focusing their attention instead to which politicians were...

Over the past year he had earned a lot of money, so he rented a house by the sea where they would spend their vacation. It was a big two-story house with a garden in the back where they could have an afternoon bite and admire the sunset. His wife and two children were overjoyed when they saw the old mansion and he felt proud of himself: life was hard but there were moments when happiness was almost at hand. While the kids darted through the bedrooms in search of secret places, invisible...

The new year is dawning. The thought that we are entering the last year of the current century arouses a different feeling within me than usual. My heart is overwhelmed with emotion and my thoughts come ever more frequently. Not many years ago the twenty-first century seemed as remote as the ends of space... but now we have reached its cusp. —Ri Chun-gil † Despite having its own indigenous system for dates based on the birth of Kim Il Sung, as North Korea approached the new...

For the last week it's been quiet in this side wing of what used to be a fashionable Jewish apartment block in Lehniner Strasse. We're the last two inhabitants, she and I. A wing full of gloomy Berlin rooms, shaped like squares with one corner chopped off, rooms with three outside walls, practically impossible to heat and the toilet's on the half-landing . . . It is highly improbable that this rundown building would simply be forgotten while all the others are gradually being...

Many a one has sunk in the abyss of horrid silence, and you among them, slender ghost whom I evoked with tools that are improbable, a little pile of grammars and of dictionaries, or now, with more urgency and authority, in humble, regular, harmonious verse. You appeared to me beyond the page, out for a walk beneath the fortress walls, with every shadow lengthening in the dusk, receiving kisses from the breeze, which set your silk skirt trembling, a little bunch of violets in your hand,...

Last summer in New York, two Iranian theatre events cracked open a small window on a dramatically alien world. Each made its impact without benefit of a text that could be comprehended by the audience; and each in a very different way was emblematic of the chasm to be bridged in transposing theatre successfully from one culture to another. Atilla Pessyani's Mute Dream succeeded on its own terms by avoiding language altogether. On a set caged by wire net, a muffled and shrouded...