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WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every other month. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. For January’s installment, Ellen Cassedy passed the baton to Helen Mintz, who translates from Yiddish.   What is your connection to the language you translate from and/or the place(s) where the books you translate are written? The dominant...

Susannah Greenblatt toured the recent Pioneer Works exhibition PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince with writer-in-residence Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. They discussed the artworks featured in the show, Jelly-Schapiro’s writing about the Caribbean, and the ways in which art and writing evoke, map, and translate place.   Today, Pioneer Works is a city unto itself. It is the final day of the Brooklyn cultural center’s fall exhibition, PÒTOPRENS: The...

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? New York City is a living being (of course), containing multitudes. When the city is in a good mood, everything is shining and sequined—strangers are beautiful! We live so close to each other that...

Algerian Francophone literature is, one could say, a child of the twentieth century. It has its origins both in the struggle for independence—gained in 1962—and in Algerians’ determination to recount their own collective history and individual histories with the tools and resources of the French educational system, with its literature, past, and poetry, imposed on Algeria when it was a colony of France. Algerian-French literature remains lively today, post-independence,...

With its postholiday malaise and gloomy chill, January (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) calls for an infusion of lightness, a bit of relief from the relentless grayness of this time of year. Although many readers associate international literature with the most serious of topics—what I refer to as the “long dark weeping night of Eastern Europe” stereotype—there is ample comic material in our archives, and we’ve called on a few examples for this issue....

From behind the high walls of the Kremlin, a Tartar dreams of Sindbad and magnificent cities he'll never visit.    This particular Tartar doesn’t have four dromedaries for traveling That’s what he usually says                              Not without a touch of irony —it’s annoying to repeat...

In this ode to the late Assia Djebar, Habib Tengour remembers Algeria through her voice.  Listen to Habib Tengour read "Celebration of the Absent One" in the original French. For Eliane, Mireille, and Regina                                   We dreamed of a phlegmatic life for you                                  ...

In this poem, the speaker leads us across a landscape of grieving deserts and volcanic desire.  Listen to Samira Negrouche read "In the Shadow of Grenada" in the original French.   Shadow you  in a desire for darkness Night will close its voices to you night will take pleasure in the dew                                            of its...

In this meditation on time, memory, and the usefulness of expectations, nothing is what it seems.   Listen to Samira Negrouche read "Minus One" in the original French.   The outflow of your drifting— up until now you’ve slid along the road I would like in a faraway language to tell you what I don’t understand  ** Nothing pulls you back from doubt any longer from obsession  from seeding  your body is amnesia   plural...

The poet eulogizes the revolutionary fighter and guerilla leader of Algeria's National Liberation Front, Ali la Pointe.   Pour Ali la Pointe   Here where each day calls out to our suffering Here where each step chains our desire for hope Here where everything cries out misfortune violence famine Here where blood is confirmed silently and grief gains ground He died. Died buried under a pile of rubble While he trampled hatred down with his proud blood So that the roots...

In this excerpt from La nuit du dedans, the poet reflects on the secret corners of his home.    X Who will tell the sun about my land my harried medlar tree my springtime without nervures  my helpful hand Who will recount my rootless garden  and my door open to all comers my night of faraway sounds my wheat that absorbs the hours  Who will cure me of my sequestration  and sweet secret —my monochrome dream my space gone gray at the temples ...

As the year draws to a close, our staff, contributors, and board members share their favorite works-in-translation of 2018 and the titles they’re looking forward to in 2019.   Elisa Wouk Almino Contributing Writer Ana Cristina Cesar’s At Your Feet (Parlor Press) introduced a tremendous voice in Brazilian literature to an English-reading audience. Ana Cristina Cesar, or Ana C. as she is known in Brazil, published her poetry in the 1970s and early...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about.   From Archipelago Books | The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Jordan Stump | Nonfiction | 146 pages | ISBN 9781939810045 | US$16.00 What the publisher says: “The Barefoot Woman is Scholastique Mukasonga’s loving, funny, devastating tribute to her mother, Stefania, a tireless...

In the past, I often felt lost buying books for the kids of friends and families. Goodnight, Moon may be inexhaustibly good, but everyone already has it; same with The Phantom Tollbooth; same with most all of the (sadly few) books I remember from my own childhood. But once I had my own kid, I started not only reading children’s books anew but wishing I could talk all my friends into reading them, too, so that somebody could speak with me about these stories that read like...

18ème arrondissement To Nuno Júdice The sculptors of Montmartre must have studied anatomy (in depth) to chisel such beauty into their sacred figures. Or else wandered around (from brothel to brothel) until there was no doubt (down to the last detail) of such chaste anatomy. It is not believed that nuns had ever willingly posed (naked like this) so that thighs and breasts might be born from hands of sculptors with such precision. The reader will surely agree with me that...

The following excerpt is from Jana Beňová’s Away! Away!, translated by Janet Livingstone and out tomorrow from Two Dollar Radio. With Beňová’s signature effervescent prose, the story follows Rosa, who ditches her husband and takes off on the road, where she encounters the owner of a puppet theater intent on conquering the world through his production of “The Snow Queen.” In this section, Rosa reflects on her...

John Minford reflects on his experience with Taoism and as a translator of Taoist texts, including Lao Tzu’s the Tao Te Ching, out this week with Viking.   When the Oxford police arrested me in 1970, they thought that the battered copies of the Tao Te Ching on the back seat of my old Citroen 2CV were Maoist revolutionary pamphlets. It had, after all, been only a short while since the 1968 Maoist-inspired “events” of Paris. Decades later, I have had the...

Tobias Carroll explores Pablo Martín Sánchez’s recently released The Anarchist Who Shared My Name (tr. Jeffrey Diteman, Deep Vellum Publishing) within the context of the Oulipo collective and contemporary creative nonfiction.   The experience of reading Pablo Martín Sánchez’s newly translated book, The Anarchist Who Shared My Name, is a fascinating immersion into historical documentation and imagined history. In a prologue, Martín...

Akram Aylisli’s Farewell, Aylis: A Non-Traditional Novel in Three Works was recently published by Academic Studies Press. Katherine E. Young, who translated the novel from the Russian, explores the origins of Farewell, Aylis; the social and political context of and response to Aylisli’s work; and his experience, as a writer who has faced persecution for the last six years, of being a stranger in the land he calls “home.” You can read an...

References and Further Reading  Alves, Miriam.Mulher Mat(r)iz. Belo Horizonte: Nandyala, 2011. Alves, Miriam. Entrevista. Duke, Dawn (Org.). A escritora afro-brasileira: ativismo e arte literária. Belo Horizonte: Nandyala, 2016.  Barretto, Lima. Obras Completas. Barbosa, Francisco de Assis (Org.). São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1956. Cruz e Sousa, João da, 1861-1898. Obra Completa. Organização de Andrade Murici. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguiar, 1995....

In this excerpt from Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station, forthcoming in 2019 from Tilted Axis Press, a homeless man remembers a parental failure.     There’s that sound again. That sound— I hear it. But I don’t know if it’s in my ears or in my mind. I don’t know if it’s inside me or outside. I don’t know when it was, or who it was either. Is that important? Was it important? Who was it? *** I used to think life was like...

Sam Bett deconstructs the myth of an ethnically homogenous Japan and illuminates its rich, if underrepresented, diversity.   An image has been circulating of a bold red circle paired with a dizzying caption: “Did You Know? Japan's flag is also a pie chart of how much Japan is Japan.” This incidental graph has one value, comprising 100% of its total, as indicated by the redundant data caption: “Japan is Japan.” While humorous for its discovery of...

Rainbow Bird tells the story of Katsuya, a young Okinawan man longing to escape his life in the criminal underworld of the island where he grew up. Set in 1995 shortly after three U.S. servicemen stationed in Okinawa kidnapped and raped a twelve-year-old girl, the story unfolds against a backdrop of protests and mass demonstrations. Katsuya’s job is to force women to prostitute themselves while he photographs the transaction, then blackmails the clients. When his newest girl,...

When a lawyer and his interpreter visit a Hazara woman in a Japanese prison, they discover there are questions she can't—or won't—answer.   Mr. Tanaka filled in two copies of the visitors’ application form and passed them to the man on the other side of the small reception window. A few minutes later, a heavy iron door opened in front of us, and a tall, sturdy policeman appeared. He was almost too well built to be Japanese, his muscles bursting out...

Little more than a month removed from the election of Jair Bolsonaro—who, in addition to being homophobic and misogynist, has adopted openly racist positions—Words Without Borders brings you this issue of Afro-Brazilian writing.  To assert that Bolsonaro is these things is not reducible merely to a political argument: he has repeatedly made derogatory references about minority groups, including insults about residents of quilombos, the maroon communities...