This year, we partnered with the Academy of American Poets to bring you the second edition of the Poems-in-Translation Contest. We received 935 poems from 448 poets from 87 countries translated from 58 languages. The four winning poems will be published in Words Without Borders and the Academy of American Poets’s “Poem-a-Day” throughout September and into October. Published alongside the poems will be the original language texts...

The title of this issue is "Who Writes Peru: Asian Peruvian Writers.” A more precise subtitle, however, would have been "Nikkei and Tusán Peruvian Writers,” because “Asian Peruvian” as an organizing principle simply doesn’t make much sense in the home contexts of these seven writers. The term trips off my (North) American tongue because I am used to identifying myself as “Asian American.” In the US, the political movements of the 1960s...

Peruvian writer Julio Villanueva Chang profiles Lima’s oldest life drawing model in this short essay. Rodolfo Muñoz del Río has spent the better part of his life in the nude. Butt-naked. For the past half-century, students at Lima’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes have gazed upon him not as a human being, but as a configuration of shadows and proportions: a drawing condemned to sit still for seven to twelve hours a day. A sixty-six-year-old drawing whose...

This feature of Guaraní poetry is the first installment in the Words Without Borders Indigenous Writing Project. The selection criterion for the feature was simple: I sought lyric texts that made me uncertain. Discomfort and incoherence are signs of different ways of poeticizing or narrativizing the world. Peruvian literary critic Antonio Cornejo Polar said of Peruvian poet César Vallejo’s work, characterized by deviations in spelling, that it is “bad...

In this essay, Poupeh Missaghi details her experience of isolation on a solitary Persian New Year as the COVID-19 pandemic swept through New York City. A few days after the new Persian year began on March 20, Dad called from Tehran. He was sobbing. “Your grandfather passed away,” he said. The first thing that struck me was his choice of “your grandfather” over “my father.” He spoke very shortly, unlike most times, when he wants to stay online even when...

In humorous and reflective brief notes, Laia Jufresa records daily life in quarantine in Edinburgh. My daughter is a doctor. A dragon doctor. I know this because she tells me every day, all day long, and has been doing so for a month, ever since the nurseries closed. Her conviction wavers only occasionally, when she asks: Mamá, where can I find a real dragon? She says this in Spanish, but puts the words “real dragon” in the English order: adjective, noun. When she...

Pride Month and our annual Queer issue arrive at a time of grief and rage. Already ravaged by the pandemic and the resulting financial devastation, the US erupted in fury over the brutal murder of George Floyd by police, protests which were soon duplicated around the world. As these three crises—health, economic, and racial justice—spur communities to take to the streets and demand action, we are reminded that Pride celebrations themselves grew out of the protests spearheaded by...

In this nonfiction excerpt, Chico Felitti tells the story of two Brazilian makeup artists who became famous for their radically altered appearances. The cemetery in São Bento, Araraquara, has a grave with no name. It’s the second tombstone in the fourth block on the left, if you walk in through the gate by the coconut-water stand. The family of the man buried there can't afford the R$140 (about $30) it takes to have a grave marker installed. But the man whose ashes rest...

In contemplative diary entries, Ricardo Romero records life in a locked-down Buenos Aires. 1. And suddenly, with the prospect of these days where the unreality of our daily lives cracks open to reveal the reality of the details (the parts, the fractions are clear but not the whole: the whole is hardly the story we need, the law of gravity that prevents our world from dispensing of us), suddenly, then, we discover that making a bed, turning on a stove, regulating the temperature of the...

Introduction: Megacity Lockdown Coronavirus has thrived in megacities, determined to make it in the big smoke of the world’s densest urban hubs. It was in industrial Wuhan, now the most infamous megacity of them all, where tightly packed tower-block residents first showed signs of a new lung infection. New York and London, superstar cities, meccas for tourists, are now epicenters not of culture but mortality. The virus spread easily on their densely packed transport networks, their...

Last spring in Mexico City seems an eternity ago. The jacarandas were blooming. Each morning I would rise early, salute the raucous purple blossoms on the tree outside the window, brew coffee, then return to bed and read, while my companion, a large, gangly, deaf white cat named Cirilo kneaded my legs. I read mostly nonfiction by Mexican women who wrote with what I came to describe as an itinerant sensibility—essays with a roving gaze whose authors travel through geographic and...

Mariana Oliver reflects on the intertwined relationship of language and migration in this essay about Turkish writer Emine Özdamar. In my language, tongue means language. The tongue does not have bones: it twists in the direction we twist it in. I sat tongue twisted in the city of Berlin. —Emine Sevgi Özdamar She moved to West Berlin at eighteen to work in one of the factories. Eyes accustomed to the colors of Istanbul; dark, thick hair. Though she wasn’t one for...

Karen Villeda tracks her journey through Eastern Europe in microessays that blend poetry and prose. Micro is the diminutive for something very small or a prefix derived from the Greek μ (mikró), meaning                         “small”:             as in microelectronics, microscope, microcast,             micrococcus,...

Writing from her cramped New York apartment, Jazmina Barrera finds solace in lighthouses, tracing their history and pondering their symbolism in this essay from her collection On Lighthouses. 44° 40’ 36.4” N 124° 4’ 45.9” W Yaquina Head Lighthouse. Brick tower painted white, 28 meters high. Original Fresnel lens, visible at 31 kilometers. Blink pattern: two seconds on, two seconds off, two seconds on, fourteen seconds off.   Yaquina Head We...

Guo Jing, the first woman in China to win a gender discrimination case against a state-owned enterprise, chronicles daily life under the COVID-19 lockdown in Wuhan, China, in this excerpt from her Diary of the Wuhan Lockdown. April 3, 2020 Yesterday, the Wuhan COVID-19 Epidemic Prevention and Control Headquarters issued a notice advising that the city lockdown needs to be continued. Many citizens left messages on the Chinanews social media account requesting government...

In this essay, Kazakh writer Lilya Kalaus predicts what will happen when the COVID-19 quarantine comes to an end.   “Right, then, after the war, six in the evening!” Vodička shouted. "Maybe come at 6:30 instead, in case I’m running late,” answered Švejk. Vodička’s voice came again from far away. “You can’t make it at six?!” “Fine, I’ll be there at six!” came the response from Vodička’s...

Far from the sun of my home running to Africa running to Europe running to America running across the map running across the globe —Corsino Fortes, “Recode d’Umbertona” (Message to Umbertona)1 in Pão & Fonema (Bread & Phoneme), 1974 The Cabo Verde islands have been a historically important piece on the geopolitical chessboard, variously employed as a map reference point, a supply port, and a link between continents and coasts. The Cabo Verdean...

Camões Prize–winner Germano Almeida traces the formation of a new Cabo Verdean identity in this short essay. It was when I was in grade four that I learned that, in addition to being a Cabo Verdean from Boa Vista, I was also a Portuguese from Portugal. It was an extremely gratifying discovery. In the first place because we had just been learning that Portugal possessed numerous immense lands both within and beyond the seas, in Africa and in other parts of the world, and that...

Camões Prize–winner Germano Almeida reflects on his childhood discovery of the world beyond the Cabo Verdean islands in this short essay. In the days of my childhood we used to go and play around the edges of a grave that lay isolated nearly two kilometers from the small town of Sal Rei on the island of Boa Vista, and which we called the “Maria de Patingole” cemetery. We already knew how to read Portuguese relatively well, but this business of “Maria de...

Felipe Restrepo Pombo reflects on his quiet days of COVID-19 quarantine in Bogotá, normally one of the most bustling cities in Latin America. “If I was in hell I would always feel I had a chance of escaping.”  —Francis Bacon, in an interview with David Sylvester A few months ago I was invited to teach a course at a university in Indianapolis. After class I headed for the outskirts of that small American city, where I would be spending the first night...