In February of 2016, I welcomed a group of students at Princeton University to a seminar dedicated to literary translation. I was eager to teach the course, but even more eager to learn from it myself. For it was precisely during that period that I was about to face my first formal translation project: the novel Lacci, written by Domenico Starnone and published in 2014, which I had read in Italian and loved. The translation of Lacci was part of an ongoing phase of metamorphosis in my life....

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 Ukrainian, Indonesian, Persian, Japanese, and Spanish.   From Astra Publishing House | Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chornobyl by Markiyan Kamysh, translated from the Ukranian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Hanna Leliv | Nonfiction | 160...

At the time of Sergio Chejfec’s death last Saturday, I had recently completed a translation of his 2015 book on writing and technology, "Forgotten Manuscript." The original version of the work, titled Últimas noticias de la escritura, already enjoys a cult status in the Spanish-speaking world, and Sergio and I had high hopes that its appearance in English would meet with a similar reception among Anglophone writers and readers. "Forgotten Manuscript" is a...

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 Arabic, Chinese, Danish, French, and Japanese.   From Other Press | Policing the City by Didier Fassin and Frédéric Debomy, translated from the French by Rachel Gomme | Nonfiction/Graphic Novel | 112 pages | ISBN 9781635422504 | US$25.99 What the publisher...

Beatles cover band the Shampoo reveal a side of the Naples neighborhood of Fuorigrotta that you won't find in the books of Elena Ferrante.   Cover for The Shampoo's album In Naples. In a parallel universe straight out of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the Beatles come, not from Liverpool, but from Napoli, and specifically the tough, working-class neighborhood of Fuorigrotta. Here, Day Tripper (Got a good reason / For taking the easy way out) is no longer Day Tripper,...

Photo by Jay Mistry on Unsplash It’s awards season at the movies, and accolades are being heaped on the film The Lost Daughter, directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, about a middle-aged academic taking a vacation on a Greek island. The film is based on the eponymous novel by Italian writer Elena Ferrante, author of the wildly successful Neapolitan Quartet, which follows the lives of two friends over the course of nearly fifty years. So far, the film has racked up a number of prestigious...

Born in 1990 in Malla, a town north of Barcelona, Irene Solà is one of the brightest talents in the emerging generation of Catalan writers. Her second novel, Canto jo i la muntanya balla, won the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature, the 2018 Anagrama Prize for the Novel, the Núvol Prize, and the Cálamo Prize. This March, Mara Faye Lethem’s English translation, When I Sing, Mountains Dance, is being published by Graywolf in the US and Granta in the UK. A...

Photo by kirklai on Unsplash It’s ironic that the more connected this world is, the less we seem to know about one another. Take, for example, foreign language education in the United States. Secondary school children are usually offered classes in French or Spanish (and sometimes Mandarin Chinese), but that’s about it. Russian became quite popular for a few years around the mid-twentieth century, but that was due to Cold War rivalries between the US and the Soviet Union....

In the coming months, readers may notice some changes afoot at Words Without Borders. We will publish new work that would have appeared on the WWB Daily in what has traditionally been the space for monthly issues. This temporary modification to our publishing model precedes a broader transformation coming to Words Without Borders later this year, news of which we'll be sharing soon. In the meantime, we look forward to continuing to bring you excellent writing...

Animals appear throughout literature of all languages and reading levels. Often used allegorically or to represent human foibles, they star in fables and myths, drive origin stories, scamper through children’s literature, and play major roles in narratives of all genres. This month we’ve visited the archive to round up stories featuring animals both wild and tame, in tales that range from folklore to contemporary war stories and in settings from cozy domesticity to stark...

Just shy of two years since the city of New York was laid low by the COVID-19 pandemic, the December issue of Words Without Borders brings together work from five writers—all of them working in Spanish—that explores this multifaceted city. That such writing exists should come as a surprise to no one. A long tradition exists of writers from Spain and Latin America who have come and stayed in this city, and documented their experience in the only language they...

Language is more than just a method of communication. It is about the ability to lay down roots, to settle into an identity, to have a place in history, in the present, and in the future. Language is personal, but it is also political. Language is about knowing who you are and where you fit into the social world. People classified as Coloured by the Apartheid regime of South Africa, and now also the Democratic regime of South Africa, have for a long time been without roots, identity, and a...

Juan Gabriel Vásquez gave the inaugural Lancaster International Fiction Lecture on Tuesday, October 12, at 7:30 PM BST as part of Litfest's “Autumn Weekend” (October 7–12).  The year Pablo Escobar was killed was the year I realized I would become a writer. Escobar was, of course, the head of the drug cartel whose war against the Colombian state had shaped my teenage years, beginning with the murder of a minister of justice in 1984—I...

The languages featured in this issue take us back more than five hundred years, when the monsoon winds brought traders from the Arabian Peninsula, China, and India to the Malay Archipelago. Language contact between different Asian communities who sailed across the seas to trade, and the arrival of first the Portuguese and Spanish, and later the Dutch and British, in Asia resulted in the development of hybrid communities, out of which arose new contact languages, often referred to as...

This year, we partnered with the Academy of American Poets to bring you the third edition of the Poems-in-Translation Contest. We received 606 poems from 327 poets and 79 countries, translated from 61 languages. This year’s winners were selected by Pew Fellow and Yale Series of Younger Poets winner Airea D. Matthews. The winning poems will be published in Words Without Borders and in POETS.org’s Poem-a-Day on Saturday, September 25, and Saturday, October 2. Published...

PEN International, with 155 centers in more than 100 countries, celebrates its centennial this year with writers around the world who share a commitment to freedom of expression, to literature and the written word, and to each other. Its younger cousin Words Without Borders, launched in 2003, has translated into English and published over 2700 writers from 140 countries, translated from 126 languages. Both organizations were founded in the wake of cataclysmic global events. PEN...

Wild, worldly, polyglot. Three words that capture the spirit of Malaysia’s cultural landscape. Malaysia is a country where at least four languages predominate—Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil—alongside a plethora of regional dialects, indigenous languages, and creole languages.  This cultural and linguistic plurality has been the historical reality of Malaysia long before it became a nation. The complex diversity of the Malay Peninsula has been evident since at...

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...

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...