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Saskia Vogel, guest editor of WWB’s March 2019 issue of Swedish-language writing, spoke with Linnea Axelsson about her August Prize-winning epic poem, Ædnan, which appears in the issue in Vogel’s translation. “Ædnan” is an old Northern Sami word for “land,” “earth,” and “ground.” The largest of the Sami languages with an estimated 15,000 to 25,000 speakers, it is spoken in the northern parts of Norway, Finland, and...

If you ask most translators, they’ll tell you it’s a tired phrase, traduttore, traditore. This play on words from the Italian—meaning, “translator, traitor”—has been in use since the sixteenth century to warn readers of the betrayal inherent in a translator’s task—betrayal of the original text, of the source language, of the author, and of the readers themselves. But certain betrayals—say, a sleight of hand, an optical...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about.   From the Feminist Press | Mars by Asja Bakić, translated from the Croatian by Jennifer Zoble | Fiction | 168 pages | ISBN 9781936932481 | US$16.95 What the publisher says: “Mars showcases a series of unique and twisted universes, where every character is tasked with making sense of their strange reality. One woman...

Toni Pollard’s translation of Clara Ng’s “Meteors” appears in the March 2019 feature, Writing from Indonesia.   Clara Ng’s “Meteors” is a deceptively simple tale of a sweet relationship between an alien and an earthling. Set in a distant galaxy, it plays with the dimensions of space and time. However, reading it in Indonesian likely provides a different experience than reading its English translation. This difference is due to another...

In Camouflage, excerpted below, Galician poet Lupe Gómez explores her mother and her mother tongue, and her land and its changes. The collection is out today with Circumference Books, with English translations by Erín Moure.   I arrived full of scars, creases, and mendings. Not breathing.
 You worried yourself sick.
 You carried me outside into the yard and made me into a toy corpse.
 You carried me on a magical elephant to Betanzos. The animal ran...

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 San Juan as you feel/see it? I have read a lot about resilience: how Puerto Ricans fared in the post-hurricane recovery while the island’s debt was being restructured. San Juan and the debt crisis, San Juan after the storm: these...

Alison Watts reflects on her personal experience with the March 11, 2011 disaster in Japan; the literary journey of Japanese writer Durian Sukegawa, whose work Watts translates, in the wake of the disaster; and the power of artists to reflect and shape collective...

For International Women’s Day, we’re celebrating women and organizations from around the globe who advocate for greater gender parity in the literary world. Through publishing and activism, they have been doing the work to tip the scales and #BalanceforBetter.   Women in Translation Month/Meytal Radzinski In August 2014, Meytal Radzinski founded Women in Translation Month on her blog, Biblibio, inspiring a movement to increase dialogue and discussion about women...

In October 2015, Indonesia made its appearance as the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair—the first country from Southeast Asia to be so honored.  Words Without Borders celebrated with our August 2015 issue, which offered work by nine poets and fiction writers. Now, three and half years later, Indonesia heads to London to appear in the same role at the London Book Fair, and we’re marking the occasion by presenting four authors, two of whom will participate in the...

The poet reflects on death and rebirth.    Make me more simple. Extinguish the greater part of my life.   If to burn is my destiny, permit me to turn to ash the dry leaves at the feet  of trees so that they might one day become a greater forest.   Tell the sad stories to the sky: the orchid dying before it blooms; the fruit dropping before bearing seeds; the bird who, lost in smoke, lost its nest as well—so as to make her cry, for her to...

In this Indonesian short story, one baby’s fate is entwined with that of the nation.   For the first time in his long career as a biographer, Abraham Yusra felt that he was being put to the test. Someone special had asked him to write the biography of a baby and he felt that he couldn’t refuse. But what could he say about a baby that had just come into this turning world? What would the child know of life? How would one begin the narrative? Abraham Yusra looked out the...

In this Indonesian science fiction tale, love is intergalactic.   There were big eyes everywhere in the darkness. Darkness that seemed to go on forever. Then every one of the eyes opened, dispelling the dark. It was 11 p.m. at a distance of 25.3 light-years. The coordinate was fifty-seven degrees south of the constellation of Taurus. Tiansun stood idly facing in the direction of the enormous star, El Nath. His hands shuffled a broom back and forth, sweeping up the very fine dust...

Indonesian poet and cultural critic Nirwan Dewanto explores metaphors of geography and geology.    Geography is what our eyes can catch as far as vision takes them—to the surface of the earth disappearing beyond the horizon. We try to touch that surface, to own it, but in the end, what is high and what is low admits defeat to the sheer breadth of that expanse. Such relief is important only to state that horizontal motion is far more important. Rivers move from the mountains...

In this second installment of Sang Young Park's novella, a failed filmmaker finds himself onstage with his archrival. Read the first installment here.   When we opened our eyes, we were lying in a single bed. Wangsha was the one to let go first and turn to me. This isn’t what I wanted. He seemed conflicted. Then, he spoke firmly. I’m not that kind of person. What kind of person is that? The kind that does it with men. He hadn’t wanted to...

This issue started with a question that sharpened to a point in the autumn of 2017, when a neo-Nazi organization was given a permit for a protest that would begin outside the annual Göteborg Book Fair. Leading up to this moment was the Book Fair’s controversial decision to yet again allow Nya Tider (New Times), a far-right extremist publication, to exhibit on the convention center floor. Debates raged for months and months in Sweden, as well as in Finland, the 2017...

Linnéa Axelsson’s August Prize-winning epic traces Sami history in the twentieth century.   X Vass Valley. Fall 1920 (Aslat the dead) You left me  on the Swede’s farm alone and wrapped in my large kolt - I didn’t stay there - One fall and one winter we cried together Then you joined the herd and left As for me I spread my kolt into wings and flew away blood drained  from my body and vanished - I couldn’t stay Where I had fallen...

Swedish poet Mara Lee encounters a menacing pack of men on a deserted beach.    Skåne August 6, 1986 I left my bike in the usual spot, by the farthest electrical box, before the dead-end street turned into the woods. Yellowing needles fringed the bending planks leading through the pine grove and down to the sea. You could hardly breathe for the heat rising from the ground. Down on the beach someone had pitched a tent. A Swedish flag was swaying outside it. Four pairs...

The leader of a resistance movement chooses death in outer space over prison torture.   It could have been any year at all—once again—chestnut trees flamed like lanterns over the gates to the wharf in springtime and settling along the beach was a haze that broke in and lifted up the water colored pink to spray the sky. The city lay stretched out flat and weary and like other summers it let itself be driven to a way of breathing other than its own; the roar of the...

In this excerpt, a group of musicians debate the glamorization of violence and drug-dealing in rap music.   We should go, said the guitarist after a while. I don’t know how much time had passed, but it was enough for the full realization to hit us that there was nothing we could do, nothing at all. We saw the paramedics come and deal with the body, someone else was looking after the driver, and several times I was about to open my mouth and say something about how I’d met...

In this essay, Mathias Rosenlund reflects on the intersection of poverty, mental health, and masculinity.    I fear the day I find myself bending under everything about which I am writing. Under the weight of depression. Under the yoke of poverty. Under hopelessness. *** I have on occasion—when I’ve been called up and asked, but not often enough to earn a decent side income—worked as a helper on a truck. I don’t have a driver’s license so I...

Adrian Perera reflects on the stereotyped expectations faced by immigrant poets.    Interview. Time: 15:42 The journalist says she gets it. “I have a friend from Africa. I want you to know, I get it.” I crawl inside myself,  past my sweaty pits and hear myself say  I’m not accusing her of anything.     32. What’s in a name? she asks, with her blonde hair, ponytail, and blue-eyed gaze, her memories of summer cottages,...

With Sara Nelson I saw him on the subway. He was sitting across the aisle, a man my age, West African, dressed in clothes that reminded me of glossy paper—they were made of a stiff, waxed fabric so white it was incandescent in the vibrating darkness of the subway car. He was talking to the friend sitting next to him, his cap pulled low over his brow. He just came from the mosque, he said. He went there every so often to help with vacuuming and stuff.  It was a few years into...

Spoken Word poet Nino Mick skewers the absurdity of bureaucracy in matters of gender and identity.    First visit.   I'm here because I want to be left alone   Gender Survey:   In order to proceed, I need access to your body i.e. brain your life i.e. sex life your medical history your stories   Second visit.     Have I completed a gender survey so I can cope with being a poet or am I a poet in order to cope with the gender survey so...

The man stood for hours before the tiny stone, gazing at nothing, much less the aforementioned stone. Finally, his lips opened like a clam, and out came a baritone voice. Atop the rows of acácias, the bilobilanas ceased their singing, their wings fluttering on fear, and in the yards, guinea fowl pecked away beneath the shelter of centuries-old trees. At the gate of one abode—on the brink of collapse, like all old things—a cat, undone by the trembling earth, abandoned the...

Lina Wolff’s novel The Polyglot Lovers, translated by Saskia Vogel, is a warning to those who write by hand, and to those who write villains. The book won the 2016 August Prize, one of Sweden's main literary accolades, and received a PEN Translates Award from English PEN. Its plot hinges around a manuscript by Max Lamas, an aging novelist and old-school literary sexist who believes he’s written the perfect multilingual book. Unfortunately, his sole manuscript...