"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...

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...