As a young man, the late Russian scholar Dmitry Likhachev spent several years in a Soviet prison camp in the Solovetsky Archipelago. The stone complex in which he and his fellow inmates were detained had once been a monastery, founded in the fifteenth century by Russian Orthodox monks. The islands lie in the far north of Russia, but despite this remote location the Solovetsky Monastery was once a bustling center of religious and commercial activity. Likhachev, an enthusiastic young student...

Gaby is just a boy. He steals mangoes and disobeys his father. He patrols his block with friends. He imagines his first love, his school pen-pal, freckled and green-eyed in her Orleans garden. He likes the sugar in ice cream but not the cold, swimming but not the chlorine. Gaby is just a ten-year-old living in Burundi.   “The war between the Tutsis and Hutus,” Gaby asks his father, “is it because they don’t have the same land?” “No,” his...

I first encountered the work of the Austrian poet Ilse Aichinger about seven years ago. I was translating an article by a friend, in which Aichinger’s poem “Versuch” (“Attempt”) appeared, along with a reference to the poetic essay “Schnee” (“Snow”). I dutifully translated the poem, which read to me like a random assortment of nouns, plus a verb and an adjective, and the quotes from the essay, which I found intriguing but, in their...

“Would you be so kind as to carry me across the river?”  According to Iranian myth, this request is made by the creature Davālpā, an elderly man-like form whose legs unfurl like leather straps from the base of his torso. Unable to move on its own, it enlists passerby to hoist it onto their shoulders. It is a grave mistake, however, to consent to carry the Davālpā. Once hoisted, the creature wraps its straplike legs around the carrier’s neck,...

Cuban writer José Lezama Lima once remarked that he began to grow old the day his mother died. A similar sentiment haunts the pages of Tomb Song, the novel by Mexican writer Julián Herbert, which is both a visceral lament about his mother’s death from leukemia and a scathing portrayal of the author’s home country. Born in Acapulco in 1971, Herbert was already known in Mexico for his poetry, his essays, and a well-received collection of short stories. Tomb Song,...

Ulf Stark and Linda Bondestam’s sweetly eccentric picture book My Little Small opens itself to many layered interpretations. On the surface, it’s a story of finding a small friend to care for. Dig a little deeper and Stark’s philosophical ruminations come through.   “In a mountain, deep in a cave In the dark, there lives a Creature. The sun hurts her eyes and her skin, too.” Like her mountain cave, the Creature is “gray, gray, gray.”...

I don’t have children. The youngest “children” I’ve taught were adults in their first years of college. I have, however, eluded the stress, responsibility, and possible heartbreak that raising children entails by escaping into books—I’m no stranger to fantasy. When I started writing and editing for a living, experimental literature, with its promises of a cerebral experience, replaced the tall tales of my youth; the books I read as a child—such as...

The Emissary, a slim and bitingly smart dystopia from Japanese writer Yoko Tawada, takes its readers in a distressing incursion into the future, but begins by pointing back to a book published more than half a century ago: Kenzaburō Ōe’s A Personal Matter. Ōe’s story of a young man abandoning his severely disabled newborn child is a classic of modern Japanese literature and helped earn Ōe the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994. In Tawada’s novel, the...

“If only he could put into words what he feels it would be almost like thinking clearly, but he cannot think clearly.” This is the distress signal sent up at a crucial juncture by the protagonist of “Marathon,” the third of the four novellas in Andrés Barba’s The Right Intention, a collection originally published in the author’s native Spain as La recta intención in 2002. With its intimations of an inability to communicate, paranoia, and...

Since her debut novel, Shankini (2006), the Indian writer Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay has been exploring female sexuality with an uncompromising and subversive vision. The radical nature of her works might have contributed to the fact that they remain largely inaccessible in the West—the only title available in translation outside of India up until now was her novella, Panty (2007), which represented Tilted Axis Press’ publishing debut in 2016. In her own country, however,...

If one has come across any English translations of modern Czech poetry, it is likely to have been something by a member of the Devětsil group, perhaps Jaroslav Seifert, or maybe Vítězslav Nezval. Comprised of young leftist artists and authors primarily living in Prague, Devětsil  paradoxically embraced a raucous Epicureanism alongside the socialist ideals of Marxism-Leninism. With the end of the First World War, the group made an ethos out of play, celebrating...

Even though the cooked-up myth of transparent translation has been debunked many times before, anthologies of world literature and Great Books courses haven’t budged a bit.  The standard recipe goes like this: put together their English renderings and read these texts pretending they’ve been originally written in English. Surely, this is often the only way out of the monolingual impasse; otherwise Anglophone readers wouldn’t have the faintest idea that these texts are...

Elke Erb is a poet of observation, and her observations often lead quickly and vividly to problems of the act of observing: A Rhyme on Ever The bushes, the bushes, the brambles, the clumps of wild roses and round sloes have torn our gaze forever into bushes, brambles, roses and sloes. The gaze on nature does not perceive nature whole; it is always "torn" by the perception of its individual parts. That tearing is not immediately a matter of language, as the plants are distinct from each...

In the terrifying new world order, Cairo is a place where people walk about with microchips in their heads, where everyone laments a green Egypt that never was, and where scientists warn against "unsafe levels of nostalgia" that come from hearing strains of old songs. Such is the premise of Ahmed Naji's dystopian novel, Using Life, fluidly translated from Arabic by Ben Koerber and just published in the US by the University of Texas Press. The story is a rich, wild ride narrated by...

In thinking of Polish poetry after the Second World War, a characteristic tone of sharp-eyed moral clarity often comes to my mind. Czesław Miłosz exemplified this school of writing, and codified a canon of like-minded writers in his influential 1965 anthology Postwar Polish Poetry. That book included giants of Polish poetry such as Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Różewicz, who confronted the traumas and injustices of that country’s 20th...

In The Construction of the Tower of Babel, the Spanish writer tackles Bruegel, the Bible, and the necessity of treason. It is the special prerogative of the essay to wander: to explore, through trial and error, sifting its material to reach an unexpected conclusion or perhaps, unexpectedly, to not reach one. It is thus both a joy and a frustration when an essay truly lives up to its name, for the best essays constantly wrong-foot their readers, teasing with feints in every direction and...

Beyond the Rice Fields, a sprawling work by the Malagasy writer known as Naivo (his full name is Naivoharisoa Patrick Ramamonjisoa), is the first novel from Madagascar ever to be translated into English. The book was originally written in French, like most literary works in the African nation of 24 million inhabitants, where authors hoping to find a wider audience resort to the European language instead of the native Malagasy. It is a vast and ambitious book, bristling with information...

Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Third-Millennium Heart, translated from the Danish by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, feels like strolling through a wide-open space that allows room for each poem to be itself; I walk through and visit different sides of the objects, different bodies, different possibilities of living. While there is a certain level of continuity to the two hundred or so poems in this collection, there is also the possibility of choosing a single poem at random and...

Is it ever possible to leave the past behind and restart one’s life? Is there any value to nostalgia? Why do those who are absent sometimes retain the greatest hold on our affections? In this short, fragmentary novel of a family’s displacement and dissolution, Bolivian author Rodrigo Hasbún explores these questions through a story in which private lives intersect with the convulsions of war, revolution, and political struggle. Hasbún’s book is a fictional...

Alain Mabanckou’s Black Moses is the story of the life of a Congolese orphan named Moses. His full name is Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko, which means “Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors” in Lingala. His grandly prophetic name leads him to a destiny that’s far less linear than that of the original Moses, but just as gripping and fantastical. Moses enters his teenage years in an orphanage as a...