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...

A woman remains suspiciously calm in the face of her stepdaughter’s violent death in Cezary Łazarewicz’s reimagining of a 1931 murder. Brzuchowice, night of Wednesday to Thursday, December 30–31, 1931 It hurtles out of the darkness, flying straight at him. It’s small and bursts with color. The engineer’s clouded mind tells him it’s a hummingbird. He saw one like it in some book. Maybe in Trzaska, Evert, and Michalski’s encyclopedia? It has...

A Chinese fishing expedition devolves into a mutinous bloodbath in “Massacre in the Pacific,” reporter Du Qiang’s interview with one of the few crew members who made it home alive. The Lurongyu 2682, which belonged to the Rongcheng Aquatic Product Company of Shandong Province, was a squid-jigging vessel measuring thirty to forty meters long and with a 330 kW power engine. In December 2010, it set off to fish for squid off the coast of Chile and Peru, with a crew of...

The year 2021 will mark the five-hundred-year anniversary of Christianity’s arrival in the Philippine Islands, an event associated with the first circumnavigation of the world, led by Ferdinand Magellan. Both historical points launched the mapping and invasion of many parts of the archipelago for more than three hundred years, followed by an American invasion that has furthered the country’s long, tragic history of coming under the rule of one colonial power after another while...

We’ve marked this season in previous years by bringing you ghost stories and tales of mourning. This year, we’re exploring excursions into the otherworldly: that liminal space where lives and afterlives mingle and merge and the quotidian gives rise to the extraordinary. The three pieces here portray characters meeting emissaries from realms beyond our own. A detective cracks a case with not-quite-earthly help; a relentless double trails an increasingly frustrated original;...

Novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and anthologist Jessica Hagedorn burst onto the literary scene with her first novel, Dogeaters (1990), a kaleidoscopic portrait of postcolonial Manila in the late 1950s under the Marcos dictatorship. Hagedorn grew up in Manila and came to the US in her early teens, and her work across genres engages with and reflects Filipino culture through the lens of diaspora, interrogating racism, the immigrant experience, and social and cultural clashes both...

In the winter of 2003, I was on a first-ever visit to Beirut. I’d come from Cairo, where I was living, and was a bit stunned by the cold. So it happened that I found myself in a shop, trying to buy a heavy sweater. I don’t remember what I said to the proprietor, although I’m sure I must’ve spoken in a heavy Egyptian Arabic. In my memory, he raised a finger and pointed at me, laughing: “Adel Emam!” Although I’m approximately the same height as the...

India’s vast and varied story traditions continue to exist orally across languages, cultures, and religions. Folktales featuring village deities and spirits, riddles that reference local flora and fauna, songs of specific marriage customs and rituals sit side by side with the grand narratives of pan-Indian epics and myths. But even the epics are brought down to earth, as it were, when we are told that the god-human heroes and heroines rested a while under the village tree during their...

In an excerpt from his twelfth-century taxonomy of morons, Ibn al-Jawzi proves that idiocy is always a current event. The terms “stupidity” and “nitwittedness” refer to miscalculation in the means and ways to a goal, although with good intentions, as opposed to “insanity,” which refers to a fault in both the means and in the intentions. For the stupid person has good intentions, but the manner he goes about achieving them is rotten, and his plans to...

This year, we partnered with the Academy of American Poets for our first ever poetry in translation contest. We received 717 poems from 282 poets from 87 countries translated from 55 languages. The four winning poems will be published in Words Without Borders and the Academy of American Poets’s “Poem-a-Day” throughout the month of September. Published alongside the poems will be the original language texts and recordings of both the original poems and their...

This Norwegian edition of Words Without Borders has been put together to coincide with Norway being Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2019. And that honor could not have come at a better time for Norway, when there are so many good books being published and more translation rights being sold than ever before. Norwegian literature just seems to go from strength to strength. And what an honor to be asked to make this selection. And what good fortune to be offered a place in the...

Andreas Tjernshaugen details the new industrialized whaling of the nineteenth century and early warnings that the industry might lead to extinction of its quarry. ​  Early one Sunday morning in October 1865, a fisherman called Olof Larsson was hunting small game among the smooth rocks on the coast at Askimsviken outside Gothenburg, Sweden. There he spied something unusual sticking up out of the sea some forty meters from the shoreline. At first he thought it was...

My Norwegian ex-boyfriend always accused me of selective comprehension. If he said something I didn’t want to hear, he claimed, I would forget the vocabulary necessary to translate it. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps that is the chief luxury of socializing in a foreign language: it’s easier to pretend ignorance. We were living together in Oslo, on his turf and in his mother tongue. I’d argue that I was being extra cautious in order to avoid a potentially...

Religious life in China has been the subject of much speculation, misunderstanding, and projection by the West. In the present day, much of what we receive is filtered either through news stories about the officially atheist state or through (usually older) translations of Tang Dynasty poets such as Han Shan, who have come to be known as free-thinking Chan masters wandering through the mountains. Their sound is familiar to us from the Beat Generation of poets, who gave them a particular...

It was one of those double-edged moments when you catch a glimpse of yourself as others see you. Sitting in a crammed Trinity College bar, fifteen years ago now, following a seminar on Branwen ferch Llŷr, a friend was asking about the difference between contemporary and Middle Welsh, how much of a leap was required for me to read this iconic medieval text. As I considered, a voice cut in from the table next to us: “Welsh?” I knew his face but not his name. I’d seen...