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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 Split as you feel or see it? These days Split is a bustling Adriatic hot spot with cruise ships arriving almost daily, so it’s constantly overflowing with tourists, regardless of the season. Thanks to year-round great weather,...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about.   From Coffee House Press | After the Winter by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey | Fiction | 242 pages | ISBN 9781566895255 | US$16.95 What the publisher says: “Claudio’s apartment faces a wall. Rising from bed, he sets his feet on the floor at the same time, to ground himself. Cecilia sits...

“That was his war. Yes, it was a real war. His father, too, had had his war. And he had gone to it singing ‘The Marseillaise.’ Like him. And before him, his father’s father, and thus numerous generations caught in the often tragic snares of history.” These are the ruminations of Maïssa Bey’s unnamed female protagonist in her novella Do You Hear in the Mountains… as she rides a train somewhere in southern France. Originally published in 2002,...

On September 20, JLF at New York will bring together acclaimed authors and thinkers at the Asia Society in New York City. We spoke with Sanjoy K. Roy, managing director of Teamwork Arts and festival producer, about the history of JLF at New York, its relationship to the annual ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival, and what festivalgoers can expect. Check back on WWB Daily for festival coverage and follow the festival on social media with #JLFatNY. If you’re interested in attending JLF at...

WWB is thrilled to announce a content partnership with the Academy of American Poets, who will be sharing poems in translation originally published in Words Without Borders on Poets.org. An initial sampler of poems includes works by Amarjit Chandan, Navtej Bharati, Yao Feng, Agnes Lam, Nhã Thuyên, and Ajmer Rode.  WWB executive director Karen M. Phillips said, “We’re delighted and honored that poets featured...

The following excerpt is from Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and out now with Fitzcarraldo Editions.  In her mid-sixties, Janina Duszejko, the novel’s narrator, lives alone in a remote cottage in the depths of the Polish countryside. She still teaches English part-time to the children in the nearest town, but the local community regards her as eccentric, if not mad, especially when she insists that the...

Punjabi poet Ajmer Rode spoke with Sonnet Mondal about his inspiration, the influence of location on his work, and Indian poetry today. On Wednesday, September 12, at the Astoria Bookshop in New York, Words Without Borders will be hosting an evening with Ajmer Rode. The poet will be in conversation with journalist and literary critic Rafia Zakaria.   Sonnet Mondal (SM): You often relate philosophically to everday objects. Do you feel they have a language of their own or...

Amitav Ghosh, Dunya Mikhail, Katie Kitamura, Andre Dubus III, Ann Goldstein, Edith Grossman, Esther Allen, and Martin Puchner are among the stellar writers and translators who will mingle with guests and host tables at WWB’s annual celebration of international literature, which will occur on October 30, 2018, at Tribeca Three Sixty° in New York. Chad W. Post, director of Open Letter Books, will be honored with the 2018 Ottaway Award, presented to him by Deep Vellum...

The Brooklyn Book Festival is coming up on Sunday, September 16, with a wonderful lineup of literary luminaries. The festival is preceded by a week of exciting Bookend Events, including Words Without Borders’s celebration of Punjabi poetry on Wednesday, September 12, with poet and playwright Ajmer Rode in conversation with journalist and literary critic Rafia Zakaria.  Below is our itinerary of not-to-be-missed events featuring...

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 Zagreb as you feel/see it? Zagreb is a melting pot of Continental and Mediterranean moods. Spring is light and promising. Summer is dreamlike with empty city streets open to the south toward the coast. Autumn is soothing with colorful,...

We are pleased to announce that Chad W. Post, director of Open Letter Books and managing editor of Three Percent, will receive the 2018 Words Without Borders Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature. “Through his vital work with Open Letter, the Translation Database, his Three Percent blog, and founding of the Best Translated Book Award, Chad Post has done more than perhaps any other individual to identify and begin to fill the void for translated literature in...

When representatives from Georgian publishing houses first visited the Frankfurt Book Fair at the end of the 1990s, they could only dream that in 2018, some twenty years later, Georgia would enjoy the status of guest of honor. Nevertheless, to our surprise and delight, the dream has become reality, and now, as if seeing the light at the end of a long tunnel, Georgian writers and publishers find themselves face to face with the most important project in their history, the main event of...

Poet Hiroaki Sato, whom Gary Snyder has called "perhaps the finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English," reminisces about his collaborations with Ashbery. Photo Credit: Seiji Kakizaki. John Ashbery and Hiroaki Sato in September 1991, on the occasion of the publication of Sato's translation of A Wave into Japanese.   Toward the end of 1973, I was about to move from my apartment on the Upper East Side to one in Chelsea when I...

On September 3, 2017, the world lost John Ashbery, the pivotal American poet whom the New York Times hailed as "a tradition unto himself." On this, the first anniversary of his death, Words Without Borders pays tribute to this giant of American letters with work from three poets and translators working across varied languages and literary traditions. Fady Joudah contributes "The Poem as Epiphyte," a poem in conversation with Ashbery's poetics; poet Hiroaki Sato...

Fady Joudah offers a poem in conversation with John Ashbery's work on the first anniversary of Ashbery's passing. All this talk through a tunnel  of kid gloves and landmines went underground. You were catching my limbs in sequels and spoofs, commemoration my organs with friends lost, whose names like patients’ names. Our clumped desire stirs and how when unwound, as with DNA, it sweetly wounds us. Hope in the right place, you said, is hope misplaced or no hope...

Uruguayan poet Roberto Echavarren, a personal friend of Ashbery and translator of his work into Spanish, considers Ashbery's poetics and his legacy vis-à-vis other poets in the US and internationally.   The Voice, the Voices Unlike the Beat Poets (Allen Ginsberg in particular), poets of the New York School like James Schuyler and John Ashbery wrote to be read rather than heard. Frank O’Hara was a possible exception, and Schuyler also occasionally declaimed in public...

The human embryo has a special status because of its potential for development to a stage at which everyone would accord it the status of a human person. —The Warnock Committee (U.K.), Report on Human Fertilisation and Embryology, 1984   Children born by artificial insemination will also be problematic, for their lives have developed as a result of the destruction of numerous embryos. —Patriarch Ilia II of Georgia, Christmas Epistle, January 2014   Listen to...

Lela Samniashvili reflects on the terrible costs of war Listen to Lela Samniashvili read her poem "Military Drill" in the original Georgian.   Three years ago, during the war, our house was burgled. When I returned everything was upside down, Our possessions had probably borne those alien fingers with hatred. They stole my gold ring and several bottles of wine. They were probably in a hurry—only the drawers had been emptied.  They took nothing from the shelves. And yet I...

Georgian poet Lela Samniashvili on the "fatal defect" of time, and the past in the present Listen to poet Lela Samniashvili read "A Run in My Stocking" in the original Georgian If I leave, you will always be tortured with the feeling of guilt that you could not leave me. But from where I look at it, “always” seems so short, just like the past, or the future. The future— What do we know about it? There are precisely as many types of futures  as we want and even...

Georgian writer Gela Charkviani describes his early days as an aide to then-President Eduard Shevardnadze.   Listen to Gela Charkviani read "Shevardnadze and Me" in the original Georgian   My relationship with Eduard Shevardnadze developed slowly and painfully, and our first business meeting ended in complete failure. An overseas delegation was due to arrive in Georgia, and I had brought for his approval a plan for the visit, which had been prepared at the Ministry of Foreign...

Listen to Irakli Kakabaze read his poem "The Children of Beslan (To My Children)" in the original Georgian   Georgian poet Irakli Kakabade remembers the victims and the survivors of the Beslan School Siege Today is the First of September and As natural, As the sun’s setting and rising, The flowers’ budding and wilting,  The healing of open wounds, And death.  This isn’t a school bell ringing,  It’s the bells of a church. The mothers...

Irakli Kakabadze uploaded a number of short poems to various social media sites over the course of several years under the pseudonym Iaki Kabe, fooling many into believing they were the work of an unknown Japanese poet translated into Georgian. His poetry became so popular on the Internet that when a selection was published in book form, the book topped national bestseller lists.   Irakli Kakabadze reads "Seventeen Poems by Iake Kabe" in the original Georgian...

Naira Gelashvili eavesdrops on the beginning of a star-crossed affair Listen to author Naira Gelashvili read this story in the original Georgian.   I entered the tower. I didn’t stop in the front room, but took her to the second room. Here, long wooden benches stood on the right and left, and along the middle wall—a wooden bench, covered in bedding. A window was cut out of the fourth wall.     I was enveloped by a good mood, which I think came...

In the end, one sentence awaits us all—death  Joseph Brodsky   Because we are all murderers, he told himself. We are all on both sides, if we are any good, and no good will come of any of it. Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream   God inscribed my grief  On my sword I killed the man I’d sworn to be a brother to I used a sword on my brother They are chasing me to murder me They put a trap for me on the road Folk song   Listen to author Beka...

In this new bimonthly series, “Best of the B-Sides,” critic and bookseller Lori Feathers recommends a new work in translation along with a number of backlist (“B-Side”) titles that you might have missed. The books selected might explore a similar theme, or include various titles from an author’s body of work. With this series we hope to draw readers to timeless works in translation.   Art reflects our desire to understand. We turn to it when the...