Gonçalo M. Tavares tracks the COVID-19 pandemic in this stream-of-consciousness prose poem. NASA cancels lunar research. Matteo eats a forkful of pasta beside the window that looks over Vittorio De Sica street. Sica was the director of The Bicycle Thief. In Lombardy a woman is shouting for someone called Paolo. A sick man in a Lombardy hospital sees the faces of his wife and brother on an iPad held well up in the air by the white gloves of the doctor. The Marriott hotel is...

In the seventeen years Words Without Borders has been publishing, this is only the second issue dedicated specifically and exclusively to writing for children, and the first since November 2004. I can well understand the delay—children are not WWB’s main constituency of readers, after all. But I’ve been keen to work with them on this issue for a while, not only because children’s writing has been even more neglected for translation in the Anglophone world than its...

As the world battles the COVID-19 virus, Words Without Borders is commissioning new work from contributors all over the world to offer humanistic perspectives on and literary responses to the crisis. We published the first piece, from Italian writer Silvia Ranfagni, on Monday, March 16, when the extent of the wreckage this coronavirus would leave in its wake was just becoming clear. Check back often for new selections of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to...

Arabic literary traditions are rich with women telling their own stories, from Andalusian Wallada bint al-Mustakfi’s fakhr poetry—allegedly embroidered on her clothes—through the epistolary practice of Nahda writers like Mayy Ziyadeh to the autobiographies of feminist pioneers Huda al-Shaarawi and Nawal al-Saadawi, as well as the memoirs of established literary authors such as Radwa Ashour and Samar Yazbek. In this feature, we bring you a small selection of...

Content warning: this piece contains descriptions of female circumcision that may be upsetting. Writer Ishraga Mustafa recounts her experience of genital mutilation in this excerpt from her autobiography. Things didn’t stay as the toy boats of my childhood would have wished; unrestrained and free, I used to play with the boys in the street . . . the skies would open and pour down, and we would amuse ourselves to the hilt. The taming began the day I heard them, the women,...

In this excerpt from her autobiography, novelist Sahar Khalifeh describes how she and two of her friends became the first middle-aged university students in Palestine. Birzeit University offered me a place, and I grew wings, feeling that the world was finally opening up to me. I forgot about my novel completely and cast it aside. It felt too small, too frail, to be a real source of support, one that could restore the balance I had lost because of my ignorance, my dependence on...

Writer Rasha Abbas spans countries and decades in these interconnected musings on the relationship between food and political upheaval. “He who kills the ovenbird or breaks his house draws the storm upon himself.”1 —Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, translated by Cedric Belfrage   Damascus, 1949—Announcement #4 “We were obliged to temporarily cede the reins of power.” The first Syrian revolutionary coup d’état was announced by...

In this memoir/biography hybrid, writer and filmmaker Nadia Kamel describes her mother’s experience as a member of an Egyptian communist cell in the 1940s. As the French communists left the country, they handed me over to an Egyptian cell. The guy in charge of this Egyptian cell—and by extension, me—was someone called Abdelssetar Ettawila. He was a member of the organization’s central committee, not by election and not because he’d earned it, but by rising...

This issue of WWB is concerned with exploring new approaches to Urdu feminist writing. The field of Urdu writing generally, and Urdu feminist writing particularly, is so woefully unknown in English that our most urgent task is to bring attention to extremely important but underrecognized writers. There is simply so much to read and translate that has not been looked at that a certain thematic incoherence is inevitable and perhaps even generative. What is revealed in this collection is true...

In this short essay, writer Hijab Imtiaz considers the many ways to begin a new year. “With the advent of the new year / Old desires come back to life / The soul, worshipper of the Imagination, retires into solitude”  —Omar Khayyam January 1 Today, the afternoon—today, the afternoon of the first of January, I opened the door of my house and stepped outside, intending to go to the cemetery, when in front of me, amid the bellowing of the bells of St....

Urdu modernist poet Miraji celebrates Sappho and blends his lyric voice with hers in the essay excerpted below. Translator's Note: Miraji (1912–49), the preeminent Urdu modernist lyric poet, who often wrote in women’s voices, was also an avid translator/transcreator and poignant, nuanced essayist. Many of those essays tussled with issues that would be seen now as strongly feminist; in them Miraji ventured profoundly political analyses on the nature of composition, on...

Doha is a city in the midst of swift transformation. Between the wind-etched dunes of the Qatari desert and the bright shores of the Arabian Gulf, luxury towers, art museums, shopping malls, top-tier universities, mosques—new, old, and in construction—bloom beside tailors, shawarma vendors, shisha cafes, cafeterias selling intriguing juice blends (the Rolex, the Computer), construction barriers, and morning fish markets. Traffic whirs down streets necklaced with roadwork, debris...

In “Contacts,” Melanie Leclerc’s graphic memoir of her childhood, her famous cinematographer father gives her his Leica and teaches her how to use it. As he takes her through the steps of creating photos, he tells her, “Framing’s the most fun. Because framing means choosing, out of everything it’s possible to see, what’s going to stay. What’s going to tell the story.” In this, our fourteenth annual graphic novel issue, Leclerc and five...

This month, we’re engaging one of the more pressing questions facing the literary sphere. Reading, it is commonly averred, can make us better versions of ourselves. Without ceding that notion, we ask a different version of it: can international literature make us better travelers? Our debate includes contributions from four writers who bring wildly different perspectives: M. Lynx Qualey writes about Arabic literature and translation issues; Tomaso Biancardi is an Italian editor and...

This month, Words Without Borders brings readers a selection of poetry translated from Kurmanji, a Kurdish dialect spoken in Rojava. The autonomous Kurdish region of Syria has been in the news in recent months after the removal of US military units stationed there and Turkey’s subsequent invasion.  Throughout its history, Words Without Borders has advocated for increased access to writing from around the world in English translation. We exist for writers and...

By the time I moved to South Kurdistan in the late summer of 2018, I had been watching the development of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES), commonly known internationally by its Kurdish name, Rojava, for several years. Like many others, I was excited to see how its libertarian socialist government would take shape, and inspired by its publicly declared values of gender equality, environmental sustainability, and pluralism. As a poet and translator, I was eager to...

In a way, every literary work is a travel story. Readers seek to be transported; authors oblige, serving as guides through unfamiliar territory, charting characters’ journeys through setting and plot. Reading in translation offers enhanced vicarious travel, in that the translator has navigated not only a text but a language, reporting back in the form of a new rendition. This month we’ve traveled back in time and through our archives to bring you compelling tales of...

I confess: my guilty pleasure is true crime. It started, appropriately, with In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” about the murder of a Kansas family, which I discovered at the formative age of ten. I read it sitting up in a bed that felt progressively less secure, in my parents’ creaking, groaning old house, just one state over from the gruesome events. I was terrified. I don’t think I ever slept through the night in that house again. I was...

A cheating husband, a jealous wife, and a suspicious bottle of wine turn a celebratory dinner into a tragedy in this excerpt from Shōko Egawa’s “The Sixth Victim.” At the border between Mie and Nara prefectures is an area called Kuzuo. Kuzuo had once been a single village, but it was split in two when Japan’s feudal domains came to an end during the Meiji period. The part of Kuzuo now located in Mie is called Nabari. It’s also known as Iga Kuzuo....

When he runs into an old friend, Spanish writer Miguel Ángel Hernández is forced to revisit the shocking 1995 murder-suicide of his best friend. They went into Rosario’s house, your father says from the next room, killed Rosi and took Nicolás. It’s the first thing you hear. The voice that wakes you up. The sentence you’ll never be able to forget. For a second, you prefer to think that it’s part of a dream, so you stay completely still beneath...