Franciane Conceicao Silva considers how racial relations in Brazil have affected literary history.  As the inquisition questions my existence and belittles the blackness of my body-word in the semantics of my verses, I carry on [ . . .] I carry on in search of other words, words that are still damp, voices drowned.   —Conceição Evaristo In my take on Afro-Brazilian literature in Brazil, I chose to consider first the works that had the most cultural...

At a time when public education and a rise in the rate of literacy were changing the audience demographic in Brazil, one writer challenged the increasing classism and elitism of the literary establishment by writing for the people.  Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto (1881–1922) was born to a generation that grew up in Brazil with two important words reverberating ideas of equality among the members of society: abolition and republic. On the one hand, the demand for...

This selection of writings is by no means or intention a full and general picture of Vietnamese literature. The reading choice returns/moves toward the presences, the ruins, and the enduring silences of writers-in-between, the hyphenated writers, the writers who hide themselves, the writers of unshareable struggles. The past, the present of the past, the present. North, South, the North in South, the South in North. Inside and outside. Here and there. Vietnamese and English. The fallen and...

Marcin Wicha discovers that choosing the right urn for his father's ashes is a process fraught with nightmarish options that could wake even the dead. “Please choose an extension number or wait to be transferred to the front office,” and the voice of Louis Armstrong on the phone:                             And I think to myself,                    ...

The author remembers how his father asked for American cookies from the hospital bed, and how, after a tumor claimed his life, no one ate the oranges in the garden.     In memory of José João Serrano Peixoto   The day begins to stir and things around me begin to stir a little also. I open the shutters. The flowers in the vases lift themselves toward the slender light that bathes them. The light skims low over the earth, like a plague stretching...

In the US, Thanksgiving is this month’s major holiday, but for others November opens with the second and third days of the celebration known collectively as the Day of the Dead. Those days—Halloween, All Saints’ Day (that much-missed, exquisitely timed holiday for Catholic trick-or-treaters), and All Souls’ Day—prompt our consideration of the departed, as well as contemplation of our own mortality. We’re marking the holiday with writing that explores...

A Different Context I first came to know another side of Vietnamese poetry, outside of the formal education system, through “virtual encounters” and friends in distant places, writers and works on internet forums like Talawas, Tiền Vệ, Evan, Gió-O, Hợp Lưu, Tạp Chí Thơ, and overseas Vietnamese publications passed from hand to hand between friends inside the country. The circulation of these publications over many years even now...

A popular image of Mongolia is that of clear blue skies, wide open steppe, and nomads on horseback. Conversely, Mongolia has recently garnered international attention as a site of rapid urbanization and high air pollution. These images, though both true to some degree, are incomplete. The reality for many people in the country is less starkly divided. People move through and across rural and urban spaces frequently throughout their lives, engaging in both settled and nomadic modes of...

Dalit literature has emerged as an integral part of a larger political movement that offers substantive and detailed protest against the entrenched system of untouchability, or the socially institutionalized system of caste-based hierarchy and discrimination, in contemporary India. It traces its modern history to the early 1970s with the foundation of a literary-activist collective called the Dalit Panthers, whose members wrote primarily in Marathi—the language of Maharashtra, the...

Activist Kausalya Baisantry recalls the ambivalence that greeted her Dalit family's attempts to modernize their life in pre-Independence India.   Translator’s Note: Italics indicate words the author transliterated from English into Hindi. Parenthetical comments are the author’s.  Definitions of Hindi words may be found in the glossary.   When my parents finally, after six girls, saw my brother come into this world, their happiness could not be contained....

When representatives from Georgian publishing houses first visited the Frankfurt Book Fair at the end of the 1990s, they could only dream that in 2018, some twenty years later, Georgia would enjoy the status of guest of honor. Nevertheless, to our surprise and delight, the dream has become reality, and now, as if seeing the light at the end of a long tunnel, Georgian writers and publishers find themselves face to face with the most important project in their history, the main event of...

Poet Hiroaki Sato, whom Gary Snyder has called "perhaps the finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English," reminisces about his collaborations with Ashbery. Photo Credit: Seiji Kakizaki. John Ashbery and Hiroaki Sato in September 1991, on the occasion of the publication of Sato's translation of A Wave into Japanese.   Toward the end of 1973, I was about to move from my apartment on the Upper East Side to one in Chelsea when I...

On September 3, 2017, the world lost John Ashbery, the pivotal American poet whom the New York Times hailed as "a tradition unto himself." On this, the first anniversary of his death, Words Without Borders pays tribute to this giant of American letters with work from three poets and translators working across varied languages and literary traditions. Fady Joudah contributes "The Poem as Epiphyte," a poem in conversation with Ashbery's poetics; poet Hiroaki Sato...

Uruguayan poet Roberto Echavarren, a personal friend of Ashbery and translator of his work into Spanish, considers Ashbery's poetics and his legacy vis-à-vis other poets in the US and internationally.   The Voice, the Voices Unlike the Beat Poets (Allen Ginsberg in particular), poets of the New York School like James Schuyler and John Ashbery wrote to be read rather than heard. Frank O’Hara was a possible exception, and Schuyler also occasionally declaimed in public...

Georgian writer Gela Charkviani describes his early days as an aide to then-President Eduard Shevardnadze.   Listen to Gela Charkviani read "Shevardnadze and Me" in the original Georgian   My relationship with Eduard Shevardnadze developed slowly and painfully, and our first business meeting ended in complete failure. An overseas delegation was due to arrive in Georgia, and I had brought for his approval a plan for the visit, which had been prepared at the Ministry of Foreign...

Guest editor Jeremy Tiang kicks off our Macau issue with a look at the contradictions of this tiny yet complex territory and its literature Macau is tiny: an area of forty-five square miles, home to half a million residents. It was a Portuguese colony from the sixteenth century to 1999, before being handed over to China. This territory has long been a crucible of language and culture. It was here that the British missionary Robert Morrison holed up in the early nineteenth century to...

The guest editors for Words Without Borders’s August feature of Panamanian short fiction discuss the project’s genesis and give readers an insider’s look at the country’s literary scene.   Pam Carmell: As often happens, this project got its start at an ALTA conference. In 2015, you read a compelling short story by Panamanian Melanie Taylor Herrera. Coincidentally I was headed to Panama on a hiking and boating trip a few months later.  ...

If Lebanon can be said to be a collection of fragments that cohere uneasily, mirroring each other in unexpected ways, Lebanese literature can be called a kaleidoscope. One turn of the wrist this way or the other, and suddenly an entirely new abundance of writers comes into view, a sweeping array of cultures, politics, wars, exiles, religions—and, of course, languages: French, Arabic, even English. Consider Etel Adnan, now in her nineties, whose 1977 novel Sitt Marie Rose...

Time never forsakes memories. It just preserves them in quieter pastures. While preserving a culture through literature, the familiarity of daily life sometimes gets forgotten. Capitulating to changes around us, we change our creations. We are afraid of perceived mistakes and consequences, since life’s trials and errors present frequent dilemmas along the way. And as we become exhausted in our journey, we tend to become seekers—seeking the very nature of the energy that makes...

A famed diva walks into a Beirut shop and creates an indelible memory for a five-year-old.  Fairuz represented a new kind of Arab star. In making the Rahbani brothers a household name, she offset with their music the predominance of Egyptian song but conducted herself in a fashion far from common to starlets of her standing. Her songwriter, manager, and, later, husband Assi Rahbani had laid down new rules for the game, and these were at polar odds with longstanding custom....