In no other novel does modern Switzerland show her changing face with such gentle charm. In The Assistant, Robert Walser looks back on his sojourn with the engineer Dubler in Wädenswil in 1903. As a testament to how closely the novel's contents reflect reality, Abendstern, the villa in the novel, stands to this day; and as if quite committed to the literary realism of the nineteenth century, Walser only slightly changes real places and names. He transforms "Wädenswil" to...

Robert Walser was not quite thirty in 1907 when he sat down in his Berlin apartment—a fifth-story walkup in a rear building at 141 Wilmersdorfer Straße in the Charlottenburg district—and began to write The Assistant. Two years earlier he'd come to the German metropolis to seek his fortune as a writer, following in the footsteps of his brother Karl, a successful illustrator and stage-set designer popular in the city's beau monde. Both of them, as natives of...

"And bake us a four-cornered fish pie," he said, sucking the air through his teeth and inhaling deeply. "In one corner I want you to put the sturgeon cheeks and the gristle cooked soft, in another throw in some buckwheat, and then some mushrooms and onions, and some sweet milt, and the brains, and whatever else, you know the sort of thing. And make sure that on the one side it'sóyou knowóa nice golden brown, but not so much on the other side. And the pastryómake...

As a writer, I have come to know that writers have the misfortune of being invited to speak on things about which they know absolutely nothing. What do I know about this magic string of words: "Hospitality knows no borders." All I know is that millions of innocent people have been killed or died fighting to preserve those things called borders, frontiers, boundaries, some kind of barriers against your friends or enemies, even if they are only potential enemies. Imagine a world without...

The high school was a large red-brick colonial building on a hill covered in scrawny pine trees at the edge of Bukavu. There were better schools in town, but you had to take an entrance exam and Elias realized that would reduce Zikiya's chances. He knew the headmaster and slipped him some money, so Zikiya was admitted without any problem. The boarders slept in bunk beds, wore a blue-and-white uniform, and had three meals a day—it would leave Zikiya with a profound hatred of...

I first got to know Wang Jianan and Cai Xiaoli when I was in England. Wang Jianan can't stop talking, life in his mouth becomes a joke. Cai Xiaoli, on the other hand, hardly speaks at all, and doesn't spend much time contemplating life. She comes from an artist family and the only thing she cares about is her art; in dealing with people, she is totally straightforward. They graduated from the Fine Arts Academy at the same time, got married, and had a child. It is said that when...

"I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity." So says Nabokov with regard to translating Pushkin.1 Skyscrapers indeed! Judging by the translated fiction on the market, most publishers appear to prefer such notes kept at a minimum. One can divide the rarefied world of translation theory roughly into two camps: those who are faithful to...

A dream is not a dream A butterfly not a butterfly In the cloud, a pining spirit A myth in the dream's red chamber It's dawn. Our cruise ship has passed the roaring Qutang Gorge and entered Wushan on the Yangtze. The deck is finally empty after an all-night party of drinking and gambling. I sneak past the sleeping guard to do yoga on the area reserved for the first-class passengers. When I look up from a back bending, she appears before me like an apparition, her slender...

Beijing's cab drivers are the best in the world. They don't accept tips, and if the drive is at all less than direct, they always eat the loss themselves. They start the meter only after the cab has gotten to the main drag and before it pulls to a stop, the meter is already down. The radio is often on in the cab. Most drivers are Beijing locals and they love xiangsheng, a traditional form of two-person stand-up comedy. One never gets tired of the old pieces; not only are they...

In Origins, Amin Maalouf recounts the family history of the generation of his paternal grandfather, Botros Maalouf. Maalouf sets out to discover the truth about why Botros, a poet and educator in Lebanon, traveled across the globe to rescue his younger brother, Gebrayal, who had settled in Havana. Wednesday evening Here I am in Cuba to find Gebrayel; in my diary is his last known address: the Colon Cemetery in Havana. I know I'll recognize his residence among all the others and...

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, where thousands of publishers from around the world annually squeeze inside huge exhibition halls to buy and sell foreign rights, a typical booth contains several tiny tables at which agents and editors cut their deals. Stopping to peruse what books are on offer, you wouldn't have to strain to get wind of potential translations into some language or other. I recently attended the event and overheard a conversation that was startling and not a little...

Figure 1. A politician from the party that now holds the presidential seat, riding the PRI dinosaur, says: "It's about time troops and police enter Oaxaca!" A legendarily short story by Tito Monterroso reads, in its entirety: "Y cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí" ("And when he awoke, the dinosaur was still there"). This expresses my feelings about the PRI perfectly; when I was born, when I first opened my eyes, it was the dinosaur that...

"Only connect," E.M. Forster famously advised novelistsóand this is the governing principle of the International Writing Program, which brings the writers of the world to the University of Iowa for three-month residencies. In retrospect, the IWP, as it is known, was a natural outgrowth of the Writers' Workshop, and yet at the time it seemed, in the words of its co-founder, Paul Engle, "the craziest idea" he had ever heard. The IWP was the brainstorm of the Chinese novelist Nieh...

José Eduardo Agualusa, 46, is a growing name in world literature. Born in Huambo, Angola, Agualusa has already been embraced across the Portuguese-speaking literary world—especially in Brazil and Portugal, where his novel Creole was a best seller and awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature. Now that he has received this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the U.K. for his latest novel, The Book of Chameleons, readers in English, too, may finally begin...

After attending the first Festa Literária Internacional de ParatióFLIPóin Brazil in 2003, Julian Barnes wrote in the Guardian, "What makes a literary festival work? Organisation, programming, author-coddling (very important), marketing; beyond these, location, location, location." Parati, a small town on the coast halfway between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, is an out-of-the way, unlikely location for a literary festivalóand it has produced unlikely...

Brian Eno once famously remarked that the problem with computers is that there isn't enough Africa in them. I kind of think that it's the opposite: they're bringing the ideals of Africa. After all, computers are about connectivity, shareware, a sense of global discussion about topics and issues, the relentless density of info overload, and above all the willingness to engage and discuss it allóthat's something you could find on any street corner in Africa. I just...

Editors' Note: This month we present the first in a series of dialogues: two translators produce versions of the same text, then discuss their choices and approaches. Here Daniel Hahn and Clifford E. Landers consider their renderings of Germano Almeida's "The Best Seller." Links to their respective translations appear at the end. In the spirit of the discussion, we have retained the translators' orthography. Daniel Hahn: Let me start by asking you a question—or rather,...

2007 Words Without Borders/Reading the World BOOK CLUBS ARE HERE ALL ARE INVITED TO READ, COMMENT, AND PARTICIPATE RTW BOOK CLUBS 2007 LINEUP: JANUARY and FEBRUARY James Marcus and Cynthia Haven, Collected Poems by Zbigniew Herbert (tr. Alissa Valles) James Marcus introduces Zbigniew Herbert Cynthia Haven interviews Peter Dale Scott Peter Dale Scott talks about translating Herbert's "Pebble" with Czesław Miłosz Anna Frajlich discusses human...

You will have had no difficulty recognizing the German crib tacked onto Daniil Kharms's neologism in the title of my remarks. It is Nietzsche's essay "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life," written in 1874 and published in the collection Untimely Meditations. In the essay, Nietzsche warns of the dangers that arise when a self-sufficient sense of history turns excessive. This historical sense tends to degenerate into an uncritical, antiquarian attitude, which undermines...

My family has always had complicated relations with cars. Our first car was a beige Zaporozhets made in the USSR, which had a Beetle-like design. I was eligible for a model with manual controls because I had a problem with my leg. Getting the car was rather simple: tests on a treadmill, proof that my leg acted weirdly, a certificate proving that I had good eyesight and a stable psyche, and, above all, coming to terms with the woman in charge. To this person, who dealt out these cheap...