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...

The following excerpts are taken from novelist Marta Rojals's nonfiction work We Could Have Studied Less, the portait of a generation—hers—that, after years of making a living in positions related to their degrees, has been forced to accept precarious jobs.   The Faithful We swallowed up everything they told us. We, the children of modest families, became believers in the creed of the JASP: the jóvenes aunque sobradamente preparados, the generation...

There is a long history of neglect of the work of women poets in Montenegro. The Montenegrin literary canon reflects patriarchal thought and culture, dominated by elites and not receptive to dissenting voices. The many all-male anthologies and collections of poetry confirm the lack of mapping, the undervaluation and neglect of women poets in Montenegro.  Some scholars and critics have challenged the reluctance of both the patriarchal society and literary structure to recognize...

Let’s make Bulgaria great again! We hope that got your attention. Why Bulgaria? Why great? Why again? Just think about it: What do you know about Bulgaria? Do you know anything about its history, where it is located, do you know any of its great figures, heroes, myths? Do you know anything interesting about Bulgaria? Do you personally know anyone who comes from Bulgaria? It’s very hard to get someone’s attention when they’ve never given a moment’s thought to...

In this text, read on the opening day of the Leipzig Book Fair on March 18, 2010, Bulgaria's best-known contemporary writer extols literature’s ability to bolster us in the midst of economic and moral crisis.   Ladies and Gentlemen, I plead my innocence from the very start. I have been invited here to talk as a writer about a crisis I have not caused. Not I, nor the whole of the writerly guild, nor the people at this fair, readers and publishers....

The authors who appear in this special Polish feature, prepared in the run-up to this year’s London Book Fair, at which Poland will be the “market focus” country, illustrate the diversity and dynamism of modern Polish fiction. Julia Fiedorczuk is perhaps the best established of these names, with five volumes of poetry and four of fiction already published. Her poetry collection Oxygen, translated by Bill Johnston, will be out with Zephyr Press very soon. Strong themes in...

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the world has witnessed a surge in the production of graphic narratives. The world has witnessed this surge—not just the US, though its dominance does continue in both comics practice and comics studies, innovating and influencing in equal measure. But the form has now migrated to writers and artists from all over the globe, presenting itself as a medium of expression that is particularly oriented toward the communication of stories across...

In this issue of WWB we present five pieces of prose by authors from Macedonia, a landlocked country in southeastern Europe bordered by Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, and Kosovo. Macedonia is a successor-state of socialist Yugoslavia and has been independent since 1991. It is slightly larger than Vermont. The country has a population of just over two million. The majority (about 60%) are ethnic Macedonians, who speak a Slavic language closely related to Bulgarian and Serbian. There is...

Among the many traditions observed at the New Year—eating Hoppin' John for luck, stocking the larder to assure twelve months of abundance, lurching for the aspirin—making resolutions may be at the top. Many greet the clean slate of a new year by pledging to chalk up only virtue and moderation, vowing to wipe out bad habits across the board. If you're not quite ready to embrace this pious trend, we invite you to welcome January with a sampler of bad behavior, an array of...

Hanna Krall makes the rounds with a con woman In the elevator with Małgorzata P. We are going down to the ground floor, but first stop on the seventh, where the door flings open. Małgorzata P. freezes in terror—the woman who delivers milk lives on the seventh—but luckily someone else gets in. The sixth is a joke, Małgorzata has paid off her debt here and the elevator can stop, for all she cares. Once we get through Mr. Burek on the third we are home free. With...

One of the unique qualities of theater translation is that the text the translator translates is not really a “text” at all. It is a written invitation to make theater—to occasion a moment of fleeting complicity between an actor on the stage and a spectator in the audience. In the movement from page to stage, the otherness of the playwright’s words—written in another language, in another time, and another place, imbued with dramatic potential and gesturing...

Paul Russell Garrett reflects on breaking into theater translation, mistrust between theater makers and theater translators, and “collective dramaturgy.”   Recently I found myself in a quandary when asked to identify myself as either a translator or a theater maker. Under normal circumstances, I would consider myself a translator, but surrounded as I was by actors, directors, and producers, about to participate in an “actory” workshop involving movement...

William Gregory argues for a greater role for theater translators in theater-making and looks at theater translation’s curious position straddling the fields of drama, creative writing, and modern languages.   I began translating plays in 2002. I was a jobbing actor, euphemistically “resting,” and looking for a way to stay creative and to make use of my languages degree. So I went to the London Instituto Cervantes (the Spanish cultural center), found...