A popular image of Mongolia is that of clear blue skies, wide open steppe, and nomads on horseback. Conversely, Mongolia has recently garnered international attention as a site of rapid urbanization and high air pollution. These images, though both true to some degree, are incomplete. The reality for many people in the country is less starkly divided. People move through and across rural and urban spaces frequently throughout their lives, engaging in both settled and nomadic modes of...

Dalit literature has emerged as an integral part of a larger political movement that offers substantive and detailed protest against the entrenched system of untouchability, or the socially institutionalized system of caste-based hierarchy and discrimination, in contemporary India. It traces its modern history to the early 1970s with the foundation of a literary-activist collective called the Dalit Panthers, whose members wrote primarily in Marathi—the language of Maharashtra, the...

Activist Kausalya Baisantry recalls the ambivalence that greeted her Dalit family's attempts to modernize their life in pre-Independence India.   Translator’s Note: Italics indicate words the author transliterated from English into Hindi. Parenthetical comments are the author’s.  Definitions of Hindi words may be found in the glossary.   When my parents finally, after six girls, saw my brother come into this world, their happiness could not be contained....

When representatives from Georgian publishing houses first visited the Frankfurt Book Fair at the end of the 1990s, they could only dream that in 2018, some twenty years later, Georgia would enjoy the status of guest of honor. Nevertheless, to our surprise and delight, the dream has become reality, and now, as if seeing the light at the end of a long tunnel, Georgian writers and publishers find themselves face to face with the most important project in their history, the main event of...

Poet Hiroaki Sato, whom Gary Snyder has called "perhaps the finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English," reminisces about his collaborations with Ashbery. Photo Credit: Seiji Kakizaki. John Ashbery and Hiroaki Sato in September 1991, on the occasion of the publication of Sato's translation of A Wave into Japanese.   Toward the end of 1973, I was about to move from my apartment on the Upper East Side to one in Chelsea when I...

On September 3, 2017, the world lost John Ashbery, the pivotal American poet whom the New York Times hailed as "a tradition unto himself." On this, the first anniversary of his death, Words Without Borders pays tribute to this giant of American letters with work from three poets and translators working across varied languages and literary traditions. Fady Joudah contributes "The Poem as Epiphyte," a poem in conversation with Ashbery's poetics; poet Hiroaki Sato...

Uruguayan poet Roberto Echavarren, a personal friend of Ashbery and translator of his work into Spanish, considers Ashbery's poetics and his legacy vis-à-vis other poets in the US and internationally.   The Voice, the Voices Unlike the Beat Poets (Allen Ginsberg in particular), poets of the New York School like James Schuyler and John Ashbery wrote to be read rather than heard. Frank O’Hara was a possible exception, and Schuyler also occasionally declaimed in public...

Georgian writer Gela Charkviani describes his early days as an aide to then-President Eduard Shevardnadze.   Listen to Gela Charkviani read "Shevardnadze and Me" in the original Georgian   My relationship with Eduard Shevardnadze developed slowly and painfully, and our first business meeting ended in complete failure. An overseas delegation was due to arrive in Georgia, and I had brought for his approval a plan for the visit, which had been prepared at the Ministry of Foreign...

Guest editor Jeremy Tiang kicks off our Macau issue with a look at the contradictions of this tiny yet complex territory and its literature Macau is tiny: an area of forty-five square miles, home to half a million residents. It was a Portuguese colony from the sixteenth century to 1999, before being handed over to China. This territory has long been a crucible of language and culture. It was here that the British missionary Robert Morrison holed up in the early nineteenth century to...

The guest editors for Words Without Borders’s August feature of Panamanian short fiction discuss the project’s genesis and give readers an insider’s look at the country’s literary scene.   Pam Carmell: As often happens, this project got its start at an ALTA conference. In 2015, you read a compelling short story by Panamanian Melanie Taylor Herrera. Coincidentally I was headed to Panama on a hiking and boating trip a few months later.  ...

If Lebanon can be said to be a collection of fragments that cohere uneasily, mirroring each other in unexpected ways, Lebanese literature can be called a kaleidoscope. One turn of the wrist this way or the other, and suddenly an entirely new abundance of writers comes into view, a sweeping array of cultures, politics, wars, exiles, religions—and, of course, languages: French, Arabic, even English. Consider Etel Adnan, now in her nineties, whose 1977 novel Sitt Marie Rose...

Time never forsakes memories. It just preserves them in quieter pastures. While preserving a culture through literature, the familiarity of daily life sometimes gets forgotten. Capitulating to changes around us, we change our creations. We are afraid of perceived mistakes and consequences, since life’s trials and errors present frequent dilemmas along the way. And as we become exhausted in our journey, we tend to become seekers—seeking the very nature of the energy that makes...

A famed diva walks into a Beirut shop and creates an indelible memory for a five-year-old.  Fairuz represented a new kind of Arab star. In making the Rahbani brothers a household name, she offset with their music the predominance of Egyptian song but conducted herself in a fashion far from common to starlets of her standing. Her songwriter, manager, and, later, husband Assi Rahbani had laid down new rules for the game, and these were at polar odds with longstanding custom....

Welcome to our ninth annual Queer issue. As some readers have asked (and as we ask ourselves): Why publish a Queer issue? Queer writers and topics certainly appear in our pages throughout the year, and even the appearance of restriction to one issue suggests marginalization, isolation, or “other”-ing. Yet every issue we publish is predicated on “others”: writers in foreign countries, producing work in non-English languages, with themes and settings largely unfamiliar...

1997 or 9971 what’s it to me —Xi Xi, “Pebble”   Hong Kong’s unique geographical, cultural, and historical positions offer much to inspire the magic realist and surrealist literary imaginations. Since the 1840s, the territory has undergone British colonization, Japanese occupation, and, depending on one’s perspective, a return to the motherland, or, alternatively, a Chinese recolonization. It is part of China, yet the two are separated by...

In this excerpt from his literary nonfiction debut, Remigiusz Ryziński looks back on the French philosopher-provocateur's 1950s stint in Poland, which drew the attention of the secret police.  Urban Legend Michel Foucault came to Warsaw in October 1958. He took a position as the first director of the newly founded French Cultural Center at Warsaw University. It was in Warsaw that he finished his doctoral thesis, later published as A History of...

“An advanced modern reader acts like a detective. In the forest of books, he can follow the clues and discover the enormous treasures underlying them. Those books give him messages: his inner concentrated essence receives the messages and immediately produces new ones. These blended messages lead him to enter a tunnel of the spirit, and in that place he begins a great exploration.” These are the words of Can Xue (from her essay titled “'The Fair-Haired...

Humans are, in essence, not much more than highly developed mammals. We are scientifically classifiable by Linnaeus’s binomial nomenclature, just like the pine tree and the bark beetle. Human intelligence has led our species to marvelous zeniths of technology and an ability to survive in the most punishing habitats imaginable. Yet, just as crucial as respiration and physical endurance are the tasks of reproduction and cooperation. Humans are a social species, but the question of...

He lives in several worlds simultaneously. —Juan José Saer, La Grande   In the opening pages of La Grande, the final, unfinished novel by Juan José Saer, the writer from Santa Fe who lived most of his life—and died—in Paris, Willi Gutiérrez has returned to Argentina after thirty years abroad. His return is shrouded in mystery, and the observation above is both a reference to Gutiérrez’s past—which, rumor has it, constituted a...

In this 2014 essay, Marcelo Cohen reflects back on decades as a translator in Spain and the complex relationship between translation, exile, and identity.   This text takes as its starting point another that I wrote once for a talk on exile and Argentine literature. But don’t think I’m simply trying to make things easier on myself. Remembering Joyce’s famous motto, “silence, exile, and cunning,” I briefly considered as a title for this chronicle: "On the...