Arnoldo Gálvez Suárez examines the violence of urban Guatemala through the anecdotes of its taxi drivers, finding that where they've been is less telling than where they are no longer willing to go.   One asks the questions and the taxi driver responds. After many years of taking taxis, I know that although there are some more inclined to chatter than others, no taxi driver can resist talking about his job. And what does his job involve? Does it involve...

Photo: Courtesy of Dana Awartani and Athr Gallery   The four writers featured in the July 2017 issue of Words without Borders are among the over 150 artists coming to London this month as part of the biennial Shubbak Festival. Shubbak: A Window on Contemporary Arab Culture encompasses a dazzling range of art forms and an almost overwhelming array of artists. This month, we welcome artists for sixteen exciting days of events across more than thirty venues, closing the festival with...

In the current environment of relentless political strife, both the US and UK seem increasingly polarized. Debate deteriorates into name-calling; partisans morph into zealots, complex issues are reduced to binary terms, and hostility seethes just beneath the surface. To date, the discord has been restricted to verbal sparring; no arms have been taken up. Yet much of the world—torn by racial and ethnic conflicts, clashes between political or religious factions, and territorial...

In this essay, Basma Abdel Aziz considers the consequences of the coarse rhetoric that surfaces when Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi goes off-script.    In the theater many decades ago, actors would have been at a loss without prompters, because they were expected not to deviate from their scripts. Actors waited to hear their cue and then delivered the line just as the playwright wrote it, not a word more or less. If they blanked or missed their cue, they tried to fill...

Between 2012 and 2016, I traveled across Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany, interviewing more than three hundred displaced Syrians about their experiences, feelings, and reflections on the conflict in their country. My new book, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria, weaves these individual narratives into a collective narrative that chronicles the lived experience of the Syrian conflict, exclusively through the words of Syrians...

The following excerpt is from the tentatively titled Doring: Remembering Dorje Tsering, Pema Bhum's memoir of coming of age in Tibet during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, in which the author recalls a resilient teacher in Rebkong who kept the Tibetan language and traditions alive. When I first came to Dharamsala as an exile, the question that I kept hearing from Tibetans and non-Tibetans alike was how I had managed to learn such decent Tibetan when I...

Our eighth annual queer issue launches in the wake of several notable international LGBT literary successes. Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You, a smash in the US last year, was awarded the British Book Award for a Debut Novel and will be translated into a dozen languages. Édouard Louis’s autobiographical End of Eddy promises to be only the beginning of a major career, selling a remarkable 300,000 copies in the original French and arriving to acclaim in English. And...

The translations of Kashmiri poetry presented here grew out of a project at Sangam House, a writers residency program in the Indian countryside about forty-five minutes west of Bangalore. Every year, Sangam House invites writers and translators working in languages across India—and, indeed, the world—to live and work among their peers in a safe, supportive, and nurturing space. As an outgrowth of our core residency program, Sangam House began organizing workshops to facilitate...

In this chapter from Polish journalist Karolina Domagalska's I Won't Apologize for Giving Birth: Stories of IVF Families, the author meets a Tel Aviv family of six: Dana and her girlfriend, Dafi; their two daughters; and the children's fathers, Ronen and Yanai, a gay male couple who have just broken up after seventeen years.   “Hey, Dana, I just wanted to ask which shoes Abigail's wearing today. The pink Crocs? Right, I'll pop over to your place before...

Translators and queers have a lot in common. For one thing, we’re both invisible. You can’t tell just from looking at someone that they’re a translator or that they’re lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or otherwise queer (LGBTQ). (Unless, that is, they’re wearing a T-shirt that proclaims “I’m a Queer Translator,” and now that I think of it, I’d like to get one of those.) Furthermore, many people would like us to stay invisible. They...

When I was asked to make a selection of four Basque poets for Words Without Borders, my mind filled with possibilities. I thought: oh, my fellow coastal poet Kirmen Uribe and his seafaring poems, or what about the tortured Parisian Jon Mirande, the irreverently clever Ricardo Arregi, the always on-point Bernardo Atxaga, the fantastic love poet Padron Plazaola, the newbie Alaine Agirre and her raw, distraught poems, the richly oblique Felipe Juaristi, the difficult but rewarding Koldo...

“The proper progression of courses in a dinner is from the most substantial to the lightest.”   Though I’m happy to disregard this prescription in both life and in food, it still feels meet to invoke it here, a tutelary quote from Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste. This injunction is from the book’s prefatory list of the Professor’s aphorisms. It’s become de rigueur for food writing of any seriousness to invoke...

The Argentine national food is the asado. I won’t go on about its mystery and metaphors, because that tends to be mere decoration, sometimes exaggerated, other times just rubbernecking. Really, it’s a simple custom. You cook meat on a parrilla (grill), or on a disc, or even stuck onto metal spears if the asado is out in the open. In Argentina, we eat the whole cow. Its intestines, which we call chinchulines. Its glands, or sweetbreads, which we call mollejas and are...

  I. Exile Let’s see. I grew up in Tel Aviv, in a neighborhood where almost everyone was Ashkenazi. I remember a literature teacher at school who claimed that mothers in fiction control their children through food. And indeed, my childhood friend’s Polish-Jewish mother used to say: “If they want to eat—they’ll eat. If they don’t want to eat—they’ll also eat.” Another neighborhood mother would fling open the window and yell in a...

The winter this year was harsh in Greece. Unprecedented snow fell on the Aegean islands, while temperatures in usually temperate Athens hovered around zero degrees centigrade for most of January. The television channels seemed to thrive on repeated footage of people’s hardships, but what made me shiver with horror were the scenes of refugees in flimsy clothes and sandals with only tents for shelter. Three on Lesbos even died in the blizzard. Besides the pitiful films of refugees, the...

Translator's Note: Discovering Prasanta Mridha's essay series "Lost Livelihoods" was a delight. The first one I spotted was about black market Indian mill-woven cotton saris—a flourishing business during the early eighties. I was instantly transported to my childhood. There were many products being smuggled from India, but saris are the contraband I have a direct memory about. Bangladeshi mill cottons, according to my grandmother, had not achieved the softness of...

Last winter, I reunited with my fifth-grade homeroom teacher. It had been thirty years since I last saw her. She ran the school’s literature club as well, so I’d been under her tutelage for three straight years. She was the one who first planted the dream of becoming a writer in the mind of this country boy who grew up without enough good books to read. Back then, she used to loan me books and take me to writing contests. Her notes on my daily journal assignments were sometimes...

Recently, I heard a story from a friend. Apparently my friend’s boyfriend had a bad habit that bothered her so much that finally one day she begged him to stop. Her boyfriend had agreed, resolving not to do it anymore, and then told her that there was something he wanted her to stop doing as well. My friend said she could comply with his request but, knowing how difficult it would be for her boyfriend to stop doing the thing she had asked, she wondered with trepidation what he would...

Catalan literature enjoys a long, vibrant tradition. Beginning with Ramon Llull—who was celebrated throughout 2016 to commemorate the seventh centenary of his death—and, after a long period of medieval splendor, with important contributions by Ausiàs March, Joanot Martorell, and Bernat Metge, literary production in Catalan once again flourished in the final decades of the nineteenth century and, above all, in the twentieth. Jacint Verdaguer, Narcís Oller, and...

The following pages are not intended to be representative of contemporary Russian poetry per se, but rather to introduce some of the most extraordinary poets working outside of the main cannon. If anything, the three poets collected here are “outliers,” who yet may be read as having points of commonality with developments in post-war American poetry. While each is singular and sui generis, collectively they are representative of a relatively new trend in Russian poetry...