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This is a story about something that took place over ten years ago, during the 13th World Youth Festival. It is now Juche Year 88 (1999).1 Outside our window slogans on the street, visible everywhere, bear witness to the hardships we've suffered over the last ten years and the upheavals of today: "Let's make this year shine with a great transformation in building a strong and prosperous country!" "Let's continue the arduous march vigorously onward to paradise!" But why am I...

After spending seven years in the U.S., I recently moved back to Seoul, the capitalist capital in the southern half of my divided country. When I arrived, both sides were preparing for the fiftieth anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean War on July 27, 1953. People in the South barely took notice of the silver-haired U.S. veterans who had returned to marvel at sleek skyscrapers and cell phones in everyone's hands, focusing their attention instead to which politicians were...

Over the past year he had earned a lot of money, so he rented a house by the sea where they would spend their vacation. It was a big two-story house with a garden in the back where they could have an afternoon bite and admire the sunset. His wife and two children were overjoyed when they saw the old mansion and he felt proud of himself: life was hard but there were moments when happiness was almost at hand. While the kids darted through the bedrooms in search of secret places, invisible...

The new year is dawning. The thought that we are entering the last year of the current century arouses a different feeling within me than usual. My heart is overwhelmed with emotion and my thoughts come ever more frequently. Not many years ago the twenty-first century seemed as remote as the ends of space... but now we have reached its cusp. —Ri Chun-gil † Despite having its own indigenous system for dates based on the birth of Kim Il Sung, as North Korea approached the new...

For the last week it's been quiet in this side wing of what used to be a fashionable Jewish apartment block in Lehniner Strasse. We're the last two inhabitants, she and I. A wing full of gloomy Berlin rooms, shaped like squares with one corner chopped off, rooms with three outside walls, practically impossible to heat and the toilet's on the half-landing . . . It is highly improbable that this rundown building would simply be forgotten while all the others are gradually being...

Many a one has sunk in the abyss of horrid silence, and you among them, slender ghost whom I evoked with tools that are improbable, a little pile of grammars and of dictionaries, or now, with more urgency and authority, in humble, regular, harmonious verse. You appeared to me beyond the page, out for a walk beneath the fortress walls, with every shadow lengthening in the dusk, receiving kisses from the breeze, which set your silk skirt trembling, a little bunch of violets in your hand,...

Last summer in New York, two Iranian theatre events cracked open a small window on a dramatically alien world. Each made its impact without benefit of a text that could be comprehended by the audience; and each in a very different way was emblematic of the chasm to be bridged in transposing theatre successfully from one culture to another. Atilla Pessyani's Mute Dream succeeded on its own terms by avoiding language altogether. On a set caged by wire net, a muffled and shrouded...

On the death of the poet Forugh Farrokhzad Searching for you on foothills of mountains, on thresholds of oceans and meadows, I cry. Searching for you in windy passes I cry at the crossroads of seasons in the weathered wood of a broken window frame that contains a cloud-stained sky. Looking for your portrait in this empty book— how long how long will pages keep turning? To embrace the flow of wind, and love who is sister to death— eternity has shared with you this secret....

I think my heart has never been like this so warm and red. I feel even in the worst moments of this fatal night several thousand sun-springs in my heart surge up from deep certainty. I feel in every nook and cranny of these salt flats of despair several thousand wonderfully wet forests suddenly spring from the earth. * Oh certainty gone astray, oh runaway fish in the ponds of slippery mirror within mirror! I am a clear lagoon; now through the enchantment...

In The Moon and the Leopard, author Bijan Mofid developed a hint from a folk tale into a verse drama about the tragic love of the Leopard King for the Moon, first glimpsed as a reflection in a mountain spring. The Moon responds in kind, descending to earth-though she remains always just out of reach-to engage the Leopard in a poetic dialogue expressing their impossible and doomed love. By stopping in her course, the Moon stops time, leaving the world in an endless, freezing night. The...

Men The market was greedy for hope. In the war-torn bazaar there was cheating and there was the hangman's rope. Sindbad (to a passerby) Do you know where I can find Nofal the merchant? 1st Man I don't know anything. Sindbad (to another passerby) Have you heard any news of my friend? 2nd Man I don't know anything. Sindbad (to another) Brother, have you seen Nofal the merchant? 3rd Man The name is familiar. Sindbad He's a good man. 3rd Man Maybe he was a good...

To my grandmother, and all other grandmothers whom we never treasured as much as they deserved--B. Dayani On that sunny autumn Thursday afternoon, between the hours of two and seven, three unusual incidents took place. From three to five, my friends and I went to Mahtab Cinema to see Hitchcock's Psycho. At six-thirty, Agha Baji came to our house to visit my grandmother. Fifteen seconds later, the tile floor in the bathroom collapsed and I almost fell through into the stone pit...

Hadjar bore seven children. Aga Akbar was the youngest, and he was born deaf and mute. She knew it even in the first month. She saw that he didn't react. But she didn't want to believe it. She never left him alone, and no one else was allowed to stay with him for long. For six months she kept that up. Everyone knew the child was deaf, but no one was allowed to speak of it. Until, finally, Kazem Khan, Hadjar's eldest brother, felt it was time to get involved. Kazem Khan...

This interview was originally published August 12, 1995, in NRC Handelsblad. A unique phenomenon in Dutch literature: Kader Abdolah, a political refugee from Iran who writes little gems of stories—in Dutch. It took him only five years to master the language. How did he do it? And what keeps him going? Kader Abdolah talks about his "terrible youth" in Iran, the struggle against the Shah and Khomeini, and about the exile's dilemma. "The Dutch language is overflowing the banks of...

Golmohamad turns and makes for the cab. The driver nods and mumbles politely as he turns the key in the ignition. He's wearing a light gray suit and looks like a young Leonid Brezhnew. As they drive down Hafez Avenue, Golmohamad is struck by the fact that in Tehran, you're rarely more than twenty feet away from a pizzeria serving cheeseburgers in a setting of purple bathroom tiles, fake black marble, and pink neon, with syrupy Iranian soft-rock in the background. The driver...

The smell of breakfast and cigarettes permeated the street around the teahouse. On his way in, Bahman recognized the errand boy from the public bath who was coming out with a tray of breakfast. "Hello, Mr. Bahman." "Hello. It seems you're open?" "It was finally our turn to get heating oil last night. We were tanking up during the bombing." "Save a place for me. I'm coming." "There's no need. No one knows we're open yet." The snowbound heights of the Alborz...

The movie theater I found myself in was called Freedom; it stood on the corner of two main boulevards that, like the majority of streets in Tehran, are named after martyrs of the revolution: Martyr Beheshti, Martyr Eslamboli. Several hundred people could have easily fit in that space, but at most only twenty were there. Three soldiers sat a few rows ahead of me, munching on bags of salted melon seeds, cracking jokes every time the film we all were supposed to be watching failed to deliver...

In the summer of 1947 the flight to Athens, Greece, from New York's Idlewild Airport-my first flight anywhere-involved many hours of idleness both in the air and on sometimes remote runways along that postwar route. But I was on my way back to the Greece of my childhood after an eight-year absence, and I remember few moments of boredom during those long hours crossing the Atlantic, whether the scene outside the window was cloud forms and tundra vistas in the no man's land of high...

As the mountain crested its slope steepened. I was already sweating. A church appeared at the top of the crest. I thought I should rest there a bit before deciding when to descend. The war had just ended. The church was deserted. The altar, tables, and chairs had long been removed. Only the holy statue remained—Christ’s face, covered with dust, revealed an extraordinary quality of steadfast perseverance. Half the keys of an old piano still made a kind of grating sound. If...

If this is life-how low! and I, how shamed, if I don't hang my lifetime's lamp high on the dusty pine of this dead-end lane. If this is life-how pure! and I, how stained, if I don't plant my faith like a mountain, eternal memorial, to grace this ephemeral earth.

In the steppes of southern Russia, there once was a city whose inhabitants spoke only French in the summer and English in the fall.    Our first official German document, which we got at police headquarters on the Alexanderplatz in 1990, was an East German residence permit. We didn't get any closer to our old dream: the right to travel freely. Right on the first page of the document it said: On departure from the German Democratic Republic, this permit must be...

Toming Jun Liu interviewed MuXin in July 1993 in MuXin's home in a suburb of New York. The complete interview was published in Chinese in Lianhe bao (United Times, Taipei, January 23, 1994). Toming Jun Liu's English translation was published in the North Dakota Quarterly (Spring 1997: pp. 19-28) and has been shortened and rearranged here. Toming Jun Liu: You came to the United States from China in 1982 and have since been living in the New York area. Between 1983 and now, you have...