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...

A New Talent From China Posits Mind Over Matter by Alexis Almeida For all of you literary thrill-seekers, clamoring to uncover yet another author in whose dizzying cerebral mindplay you will delight, I give you Can Xue. Can Xue's cunning and sinister prose will send even the most intrepid readers reeling, trying to recall the precise juncture at which they completely abandoned reality. I have nothing tangible to offer by way of preparation: Can Xue's world cannot be encoded by...

“Hassan Khader is a poet, author, and translator. And like many Arab novelists and poets, he has turned to the essay. If poetry is historically the first art form of the Arabs, the essay is a close second.”—Ahdaf Soueif    Unlike Alice's adventures, Nora's didn't start with the appearance of a late and harried rabbit, checking its waistcoat watch. In fact, hers began immediately after her birth, which was sometime in April 2002. It's safe to...

I was five years old and had just started school when one of my teachers discovered that I could not make out what was on the blackboard. The boy with whom I shared a desk whispered in my ear, "Your eyes are broken." During those early years, before the discrepancy was adjusted with spectacles, the sky was without definition, a high pale canvas that by night fell darkly. The sea was a murmuring landscape of color: when loud, it turned gray; when silent, its green turquoises and azure...

In the Country of Sands There are hours apart, very mysteriously privileged moments, when certain lands reveal to us, during sudden intuition, their soul, in some way their own essence, when we develop an accurate and unique vision, and which months of patient study would not be able to complete, nor to modify. However, during these furtive instants, the details necessarily escape us and we are only able to perceive the whole of things. A peculiar state of our soul, or a special aspect...

Who is an Israeli writer? Israel's dominant language is Hebrew. Its twentieth-century renovation was central to the Zionist project, it is the language of the common culture, and the equation of Israeli=Hebrew is everywhere evident. But for some twenty percent of the country's citizens, their first language is Arabic. Another twenty percent arrived relatively recently from the former Soviet Union. So for a very big part of the population, languages other than Hebrew are preferred...

Leo Tolstoy prefaced his Anna Karenina with the following statement: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Palestinians today are unlucky enough to be counted among the world's leading families of multifarious misery, the Zionist project having transformed them, time and again, into refugees in far-flung places-and also into refugees on the land of Palestine in which they were born. Some of them have had to live through the experience of...

As we approach the end of the year, the editors at Words Without Borders would like to celebrate the wealth and variety of literary translations published in English in 2006. To this end, we approached our advisory board for their thoughts, and we feature their praise and recommendations here, including novels set in the nineteenth century and the 1970s, an opus interruptus opus of the Holocaust, a clearheaded look at the Middle East, and Roberto Bolaño's annual appearance on...

A contemporary, retroactive review of the cultural identity of the Palestinian Arabs living inside Israel can form a basis for the critical study of the literary culture of this geographic area that is also known as the 1948 Region. The 1948 Region is delineated by a specific historical juncture and the momentous events related to it, which has had a pervasive, divisive, and acute influence not only on the culture of the Palestinians inside Israel-who are often referred to as Palestinians...

With the arrival of the first signs of spring at the end of the second month of the year, on the third day after the rains had stopped, the rababa1 appeared at the military checkpoint, and what is meant here is not the white cloud, the classical, linguistic meaning of the word, whose appearance did not catch anybody's attention. Winter's spring is more pristine and beautiful than spring itself. The wash of the world has dried, but it is still fresh, soft, fragrant, free of the...

Mahmoud Darwish has recently begun a diary: a daily record of reflections, observations, and intimate personal commentary on the ordinary life of Palestinians today. The following sections were among fourteen published in the Summer/Winter 2006 edition of Al Karmel, the Palestinian literary Journal Darwish edits. Enemy I was there a month ago I was there a year ago I was there always, as if I had never been anywhere else In the year '82 of the last century something happened to...

In late August, Mexico City and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico signed an agreement to teach Náhuatl language and culture to Nahua (Aztec) students in Santa Ana Tlacotenco in the high southern reaches of the city. The signatories were a deputy mayor of the city, the coordinator of humanities at the university, and an honored witness, Miguel León-Portilla, the leading scholar in the world of Náhuatl history and culture. It had been many years, perhaps...

In the days prior to my return I had decided to assume a cool demeanor and contemplate my country as a tourist might, and not as a rapturous and homesick returnee. I wanted to hold the moment in my hands, examine it, and write up the experience. And I wanted to minimize, to the extent possible, any emotional entanglement on my part, so that I could see things clearly. I've gotten tired of emotional entanglement . . . My entire life has been full of that. Now I am an old man who wants...

During their lifetimes, Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño struggled against vanity and all things pretentious, aspirational, ordinary, and obliging. They are peculiar cases in literature, ones that the literary machine itself seems to reject. They were not bestsellers. During a substantial part of their lives, they existed either under the shadow of public rejection, or in the clandestinity of aesthetic infringement. The relationship they sustained with "their time" and the...

1 I'm convinced that some languages, languages we neither speak nor understand, are familiar to the ear. For myself, the romance and Semitic languages, the languages of the Mediterranean and the Middle East are familiar to my ear, as opposed, let's say, to Slavic and Asian languages. I come from a household of three languages-Ladino, Hebrew, and English-one that I could understand but not speak, one that I could sing but not understand, and one that is the language of my...

Whenever he comes to Paris, he calls immediately. "My friend,'' his voice explodes, "Why don't you come have lunch with me?" Now he's the owner of a neat, tranquil apartment right in the heart of Montparnasse. Inside, everything's dressed in light colors and seems to be organized with order and taste: English leather chairs, Wifredo Lam's engravings, a magnificent stereo, and always, always, a crystal vase in the library, with recently cut yellow roses. "They...

When it comes to countries that have been locked away—or locked out of—the Western world, Westerners tend to believe that little happens there during the time that they are not paying attention. Like trees that fall in the middle of the forest without someone to witness them, third world countries like Libya must undergo some kind of comatose existence when the West stops looking at them, or so Westerners believe. The reader of these selections from Libya will quickly become...

They meet every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday morning in front of the newspaper shop, where they discuss concerns of the day, most of them too old to remember their exact age, the years only evident by their wrinkled and parched faces, their trembling hands. Some blow their noses, some chew tobacco and some smoke, drawing at their cigarettes with great effort. Haj Bu-Zaid sneezes, looks at the locked door of the newspaper shop and says, the scoundrel is late. Perhaps he tripped over his...