September, 2020 Hiding in Plain Sight: Carlos Fonseca and Megan McDowell on Translating “Natural History” (WWB Daily) By Megan McDowell | September 14, 2020 Carlos Fonseca's Natural History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) is a singularly difficult book to describe. It’s always hard to sum up an entire novel in a few words, but this one poses special difficulty. It has multiple, layered, sprawling stories, and the book is more about the journey than the destination. It’s a philosophical novel of ideas, a story about art and theory in which language is of primary importance. It’s about mimeticism and identity,... The Winners of the 2020 Words Without Borders—Academy of American Poets Poems in Translation Contest (Magazine) By The Editors of Words Without Borders | September 12, 2020 This year, we partnered with the Academy of American Poets to bring you the second edition of the Poems-in-Translation Contest. We received 935 poems from 448 poets from 87 countries translated from 58 languages. The four winning poems will be published in Words Without Borders and the Academy of American Poets’s “Poem-a-Day” throughout September and into October. Published alongside the poems will be the original language texts... Learning Late Letters (Magazine) By Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên | September 12, 2020 "Learning Late Letters" is one of four winning poems selected by David Tomas Martinez for the 2020 Words Without Borders—Academy of Americans Poets Poems in Translation Contest. Words Without Borders · Poems in Translation Contest: "Learning Late Letters," written and translated by Nguyen Hoang Quyen Click above to listen to poet Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên read the English translation of "Learning Late Letters" The dead don't... Shining a Light on Children’s Books in Translation: Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp on World Kid Lit Month (WWB Daily) By Words Without Borders | September 11, 2020 September is World Kid Lit Month—a celebration of translated literature for young people. We invited World Kid Lit advocate and children’s book translator Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp to tell us about plans for the month and how we can get involved. WWB: What is World Kid Lit Month? Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (RAK): September is the time to find out about global literature for young people by following and sharing recommendations across social media using the hashtag... A Slice of Writing by Nikkei and Tusán Peruvian Writers (Magazine) By Jennifer Shyue | September 10, 2020 The title of this issue is "Who Writes Peru: Asian Peruvian Writers.” A more precise subtitle, however, would have been "Nikkei and Tusán Peruvian Writers,” because “Asian Peruvian” as an organizing principle simply doesn’t make much sense in the home contexts of these seven writers. The term trips off my (North) American tongue because I am used to identifying myself as “Asian American.” In the US, the political movements of the 1960s... Simple Heart (Magazine) By Augusto Higa Oshiro | September 10, 2020 In this short story by Peruvian author Augusto Higa Oshiro, a selfless man gives himself entirely to his work. I One sunny May afternoon, a little man arrived in the city, and not just the city, but an office on the third floor of the Ministry of Education, in search of an official, a distant relation of his family, who would help him and get him work, was what he’d been told back home. Attired in his best clothes—a white shirt, clean pants, patent leather shoes, and a... The Red Rooster and Inevitable Saint (Magazine) By Julia Wong Kcomt | September 10, 2020 In two poems, Julia Wong Kcomt reflects on what it means to be a Peruvian with Tusán (Chinese) heritage. The Red Rooster To Wata, in memoriam Peru dies. Like garlic bulbs this whim of blouses cut so masterfully. The iron windows. Baroque. Relentless. Paint staining my ovaries. Sushi is now the language of the people and my mighty noodles wait in a forgotten pot. Papá told me to detest the Japanese like everyone says to hate Chileans. But with so much love, I find... Life Is a Pose (Magazine) By Julio Villanueva Chang | September 10, 2020 Peruvian writer Julio Villanueva Chang profiles Lima’s oldest life drawing model in this short essay. Rodolfo Muñoz del Río has spent the better part of his life in the nude. Butt-naked. For the past half-century, students at Lima’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes have gazed upon him not as a human being, but as a configuration of shadows and proportions: a drawing condemned to sit still for seven to twelve hours a day. A sixty-six-year-old drawing whose... Here in Chorrillos (Magazine) By Doris Moromisato | September 10, 2020 In this poem, Peruvian writer Doris Moromisato contemplates love and longing in a seaside neighborhood of Lima. Here I say again that I don’t love you while city mist loosens the sky dampens my geraniums. Grounded like a gull on the terrace I recall the sermon at Benares and agree: suffering lives in me. During the festival of San Pedro the fishermen sling their offerings to the sea my eyes fill with rowboats and the sprawl of petals taken by the tide shows me how small vastness... The Final Stretch (Magazine) By Siu Kam Wen | September 10, 2020 A Chinese immigrant to Peru refuses to give up tradition in this short story by Siu Kam Wen. When Lou1 Chen, loan shark and owner of a fleet of eighteen urban minibuses, managed to amass his first fifteen million, he had a luxurious mansion built in Monterrico and moved there with his Peruvian wife, their two sons, and his elderly mother. The two-story house measured 2,300 square feet and included a spacious front yard and a backyard with a pool. Two imposing German shepherds guarded the... Four Short Poems (Magazine) By Sui-Yun | September 10, 2020 Peruvian writer Sui-Yun meditates on sin and sensual pleasure in four short poems. To Eve, my eternal mother To erase my sins I have licked the tip of evil I know Eve did the same our longings ended up sucking at the shafts of trees extracting drop by drop the sap of the apple branch To turn away from evil I’ve crammed my jars full of somber recollections calling to the unknown silks radiating from my body To turn away from evil I’ve added every letter of your body to my... The Golden Children of Sexual Alchemy (Magazine) By Tilsa Otta | September 10, 2020 Cristy, the narrator of Tilsa Otta’s novel The Golden Children of Sexual Alchemy, experiences otherworldly orgasms with her partner: not only do they make her see God, they also give her visions of the future. Her curiosity about this “gift,” its purpose, and how it might properly be deployed prompt her to research the world of erotic spirituality. Here she offers notes from her fieldwork. Frozen with One Foot in the Air After leaving Cosmos, I make... Announcing the Winners of the 2020 Poems in Translation Contest (WWB Daily) By The Editors of Words Without Borders | September 9, 2020 In the midst of a pandemic defined by isolation, our second Poems in Translation Contest brought together 935 poems from 448 poets and 87 countries, translated from 58 languages. We are thrilled to announce, alongside our partners at the Academy of American Poets, this year’s winners, selected by Pushcart prizewinner David Tomas Martinez. The four winning poems will be published in Poem-a-Day and in Words Without Borders every Saturday this September, which is National Translation... Damián Cabrera on Hybrid Languages, Dust, and the Invention of Paraguay (WWB Daily) By Elisa Taber | September 8, 2020 Damián Cabrera is a Paraguayan writer, researcher, teacher, cultural manager, and curator. He is the author of the lyric novels Xirú (2012) and Xé (2019). He lives between Asunción and Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. An excerpt from Xirú was published in Words without Borders’ July/August 2020 issue. This multilingual lyric novel is set in Ciudad del Este—a Paraguayan city in the Triple Frontier shared with Argentina and... Bodies (WWB Daily) By Selva Almada | September 3, 2020 After the successful English-language publication of her debut novel The Wind That Lays Waste, Argentinian author Selva Almada returns with Dead Girls, a journalistic novel centered on the unsolved murders of three young Argentinian women in the 1980s. Translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott, Dead Girls is out this week with Charco Press. In the excerpt below, a family remembers the various femicides that have taken place in their region in recent decades,... Against the “Good” Translation: The Power of Disobedience (WWB Daily) By Gitanjali Patel Jessie Spivey | September 1, 2020 Today on WWB Daily, Gitanjali Patel and Jessie Spivey of Shadow Heroes, an organization that runs creative translation workshops for students, take on the myth of the "good" translation. Deconstructing the harmful and exclusionary assumptions behind the phrase, they propose an alternative approach to translation. What is a “good” translation? “Good,” the most common word of praise in the English language, stakes a claim to universality. Yet, framed as an... August, 2020 A Subjective History of Lebanon (Graphic Lit) By Mazen Kerbaj | August 31, 2020 The sight of armed civilians in the streets of Beirut sets me smoking again. Discovering Murakami (WWB Daily) By David Karashima | August 27, 2020 In his Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami, David Karashima synthesizes research, correspondence, and interviews with dozens of individuals—including Murakami himself—to examine how countless behind-the-scenes choices over the course of many years worked to build an internationally celebrated author’s persona and oeuvre. In these two excerpts, Murakami’s translators Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin recall their first contacts with the... The Watchlist: August 2020 (WWB Daily) By Tobias Carroll | August 25, 2020 Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about. From Seven Stories Press | Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine | Fiction | 96 pages | ISBN 9781609809584 | US$15.95 What the publisher says: “Intricately woven masterpieces of craft, mournful for their human cries in defiance of our sometimes less than human... Fancy a Trip through (Other People’s) Misery? Yun Ko-Eun’s “The Disaster Tourist” Has You Covered (Book Reviews) By Reviewed by Lily Meyer | August 24, 2020 This is the third installment in WWB's new series Close-Up: An Experiment in Reviewing Translation, in which Lily Meyer and Mona Kareem review translated books with a focus on the translation itself. Read more about the series in this interview with Meyer and Kareem, or have a look at the previous installments in the series: Meyer's review of Cockfight by María Fernanda Ampuero, and Kareem's review of Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. The... A Message to Our Friends on the Moon: The Pandemic of 2020 (Magazine) By Milton Hatoum | August 21, 2020 In this short piece, Milton Hatoum writes a letter from the future chronicling the COVID-19 pandemic in Jair Bolsonaro's Brazil. I was twelve years old in April of the year 2020. At that time, drones did not yet deliver our food, nor was such a varied menu of pastilles on offer, each of which now holds the flavors, spices, and proteins one once found in a plate of food, and which leave us with the impression that we are eating as well as we ever have. Though it might be puzzling to... The City and the Writer: In New York City with Bob Holman (WWB Daily) By Nathalie Handal | August 20, 2020 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 New York City as you feel/see it? The mood is moody. Usually there is no time to be moody, only the slap and the dash and the drill and the dig, you dig? But in a Pandemic (deflected by the government) and Revolution (or is it), this... 9 Translated Books by Black Women Writers to Read This #WITMonth (WWB Daily) By Words Without Borders | August 18, 2020 This #WITMonth, we're spotlighting books by some of our favorite Black women writers in translation. From Haiti and Cabo Verde, Italy and Equatorial Guinea, the books below span continents and historical eras as they explore themes as diverse as queerness, memory, race, and immigration. We hope that this selection, which is by no means exhaustive, will enrich your reading list this Women in Translation Month and beyond. 1. Memory at Bay by Évelyne... Birds in Formation (WWB Daily) By Nguyen Ngoc Tu | August 6, 2020 Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath, translated and edited by Quan Manh Ha and Joseph Babcock, is out this week from Columbia University Press. In the story below, "Birds in Formation" by popular Vietnamese writer Nguyen Ngoc Tu, two cousins find their relationship upended by the discovery of their parents' roles in the Vietnam War. It was a day in October, around noon, and we had both skipped our midday nap, like... The City and the Writer: In Salerno with Giorgio Sica (WWB Daily) By Nathalie Handal | August 4, 2020 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 Salerno as you feel/see it? The mood of my hometown is quite weird. Like many little cities of southern Italy, Salerno is stuck in a kind of medieval heritage, which is not just architectural, but mostly a way of living. We never got... Page 3 of 224 pages < 1 2 3 4 5 > Last ›
