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It may be cliché to say that a book transports you to another world, but in a period hemmed in by lockdowns and travel restrictions, Marina Jarre’s memoir Distant Fathers (I padri lontani) stands out, among other reasons, simply for covering so much geographical, linguistic, and temporal ground. Jarre was born in Latvia in 1925 to an Italian mother and a Latvian Jewish father. After her parents’ divorce in 1935, she and her younger sister Sisi were sent to live with...

In the 1990s, writer and Korean reunification activist Hwang Sok-yong spent five years in prison for visiting North Korea in violation of South Korea's National Security Act. In his memoir The Prisoner, out this week from Verso Books in Anton Hur and Sora Kim-Russell's translation, Hwang interweaves the story of his imprisonment with memories of his childhood in North Korea and his coming of age during South Korea's military dictatorship. In the excerpt below, Hwang...

Leïla Slimani is an international literary star, a poster-woman of French multiculturalism and a leading voice on human rights. Born in 1981 to a surgeon mother and economist father in Rabat, she moved to Paris aged seventeen to study political science at the prestigious Sciences Po and in 2008 began reporting for the magazine Jeune Afrique. After her first novel went unpublished, she completed a creative writing course and produced her debut, Adèle (Dans le jardin de...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about. This month's selection includes books translated from Korean, Mongolian, Finnish, Spanish, Japanese, and Uzbek.   From Honford Star | Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur | Fiction | 256 pages | ISBN 9781916277182 | US$14.35 What the publisher says: “Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of...

Linguistic threads. IV lines and blood cells. Oppressive silencing. There is a viscerality that emerges when sitting with Rahma Nur’s poem “Fili Linguistici.” In describing her experience as a member of a diaspora living in Italy—the loss of language, the persistent reminder of being other and outsider—Nur juggles the passive and active contestations of how language marks the body and how it shapes one’s experience with loss. Despite being a poem...

Afro-Italian poet Rahma Nur describes her experience as a member of a diaspora living in Italy, noting how language marks the body and how it shapes one's sense of loss. Words Without Borders · Rahma Nur Reads "Fili Linguistici" ("Linguistic Threads")   As you make headway between the land where you were born and the ground that took you in a thread stretches to connect them like an IV. It feeds you words and sentences prepositions and long periods you can’t parse...

Afro-Italian poet Rahma Nur describes her experience as a member of a diaspora living in Italy, noting how language marks the body and how it shapes one's sense of loss. Words Without Borders · Rahma Nur Reads "Fili Linguistici" ("Linguistic Threads")   In the step that you take Between the land that watched over your birth And the soil that received you There's a thread that connects them Like an IV. It feeds you words and phrases Clauses and long sentences You...

Afro-Italian poet Rahma Nur describes her experience as a member of a diaspora living in Italy, noting how language marks the body and how it shapes one's sense of loss. Words Without Borders · Rahma Nur Reads "Fili Linguistici" ("Linguistic Threads")   In that step you take between the land that witnessed your birth and the soil that welcomed you there is a thread that ties them together. An IV line. It nourishes you with words and prepositional phrases and long...

One of the surprising pleasures of the early pandemic was the development of my friendship with the Cabo Verdean writer Jorge Carlos Fonseca. In addition to being one of Lusophone Africa’s most boundary-pushing poets and novelists, Fonseca today serves as his nation’s president, a role he has held since 2011, having been reelected to a second term in 2017 with over 74% of the vote. Introduced by São Toméan poet Conceição Lima, we began our...

During the January 2021 pro-Navalny demonstrations that swept Russia, hundreds of protestors were rounded up, brutalized, and jailed. Some of them ended up in the Sakharovo Detention Center for Foreign Nationals, located roughly fifty miles outside Moscow. Among those arrested was Nikita Girin, a young journalist from Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper specializing in investigative journalism. For Ali Feruz, this particular arrest was deeply personal. Born Khudoberdi Nurmatov in 1987, Feruz grew...

Education Fellowship Part-time Remote Words Without Borders seeks applicants for its education fellowship. The new education fellowship program is designed to provide in-depth experience to individuals interested in a career in world literature—whether as scholars, educators, or curriculum developers. Working within WWB’s award-winning online education program, WWB Campus, the fellow will gain hands-on experience with the research and development of curricular resources,...

Decades after being exiled by the colonial forces occupying her homeland, a woman returns to Palestine to repair her childhood home––and to confront a past filled with heartbreak and bloodshed. Her name is Nidal and, now in old age, she has spent her life running from the memories of the armed confrontations that roiled the region during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Many of Nidal’s memories have to do with Rabie, a boy she fell in love with at the start of the armed...

Born in a small town in northern Indiana in 1971, Sofia Samatar is the author of the forthcoming memoir The White Mosque (Catapult Books, 2022). Her first novel, A Stranger in Olondria, for which she received the World Fantasy Award, tells the story of Jevick, an itinerant language student beset by visions of an angel whose commands he must learn to face. Sofia’s work is highly original in the world of English-language fantasy––and not only because her influences include...

What is national literature and how is it defined? Often, when one thinks of a particular nation or language, they imagine a specific phenotype tied to a historical narrative. A cursory Google search of contemporary Italian women writers spits out lists of writers one should read, including Elena Ferrante, Giulia Caminito, Viola di Grado, and Donatella Di Pietrantonio, to name a few. These women, whose works have transcended linguistic and cultural borders through translation, are also who...

Somali-Italian writer Igiaba Scego recalls her childhood experiences in the Italian educational system in this memoir. Although I’m Somali-Italian, I was born and raised in Italy, and I’ve spent very little time in Somalia, mostly during the summers and then once for about a year and a half. I went to the Italian consulate’s school there. I had no idea what Somalia would be like at first. It might as well have been Mars or any other unfamiliar planet populated with...

The Malian immigrant Soumaila Sacko was murdered by the gunshots of a white supremacist in Calabria, Italy, on June 2, 2018. This piece was originally performed at a conference in Palermo days after Sacko's murder. Italy's prime minister at the time, Matteo Salvini, affiliated with the Lega Nord, was known for enacting far-right policies related to residency and citizenship, including restricting Italian borders and strengthening corrupt political relations with Libya to control the...

In fiction inspired by true events, a Black teen in Rome learns some startling information about an attempted bombing in the London Tube.   As I was sitting in my usual catatonic state in front of the screen, a story on the news caught my attention. They were talking about a suicide bomber who’d attempted to set off a bomb in the London Underground. He’d made it himself, using a hair product with hydrogen peroxide and whole wheat flour specifically for roti, a round...

Writer Marie Moïse describes her search for her roots and traces her family’s history of cross-Atlantic displacement. I spent my youth seeking to recover my roots, which were severed by migration from one shore of the Atlantic to the other—from Haiti to Italy. I investigated, interrogated, and sought to understand. From the time of my birth, I have suffered a strange nostalgia for the pain of a journey I have never taken. It seems like my family’s psyches were...

Originally published in 2017, Black Box, journalist Shiori Ito's memoir about her experience of sexual assault and her struggle to bring her attacker to justice, prompted a reckoning over gender-based violence in Japan and jump-started the country's #MeToo movement. Starting tomorrow, Allison Markin Powell's English translation of Black Box will be available from the Feminist Press at CUNY. In the excerpt below, Ito receives an update from Mr. A, the...

Hung-Chi Chen's “Addict and Betrayer” is the cover art of WWB's June 2021 issue: The Queer Issue XII. Many of my works explore desire, observing the unique attributes of the male body from the perspective of my own identity and the gay male gaze, with particular emphasis on individual experiences of intimacy and the representation of queer bodies within gay male culture and wider society.   粉紅色漆皮沙發...

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. For July's installment, Adam Morris passed the baton to Karen Sherwood Sotelino, who translates from Portuguese into English.   What is your connection to the language(s) you translate from and/or the place(s) where the books...

In the wake of the anti-extradition protests in 2019 and the implementation of the National Security Law in June 2020, Hong Kong—and, consequently, its literature—has increasingly been in the spotlight. In this conversation, writer and editor Louise Law Lok-Man and literary translator Jennifer Feeley discuss a range of topics related to Sinophone Hong Kong literature, including the construction of a vibrant local literary scene amid the territory’s transition from British...

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 Baghdad as you feel/see it? I don’t live (t)here, but it lives in me still. Melancholic. There are many Baghdad(s), all versions of an ideal(ized) Baghdad that seems to have existed in an inaccessible past, whether modern or...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about. This month's selection includes translated books from Haiti, Mexico, Egypt, Spain, and Poland.   From Open Letter Books | Foucault in Warsaw by Remigiusz Ryziński, translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye | Nonfiction | 220 pages | ISBN 9781948830362 | US$15.95 What the publisher says: “Nominated for the Nike...

In the wake of 2020's racist violence, and subsequent organizing by the Black Lives Matter movement and others to combat white supremacy, literary magazines and publishers everywhere have, to differing degrees, made efforts to publish more writers of color. Within the translation community, a corresponding issue arises: Who is chosen to translate, and what assumptions and structures support and drive those decisions? What roles do race and privilege play? And how can we assure...