When Ken Liu edited and translated his first anthology of Chinese science fiction, Invisible Planets, in 2016, it was the year after Liu Cixin had exploded onto the global scene as the first Chinese national to win the Hugo Award (for The Three Body Problem, which Liu also translated). Hordes of new Anglophone fans were minted overnight, Barack Obama among them. Naturally, they asked for more.  Two and a half years later, Liu is finally answering those...

“You have to push a dying person into talking about love,” declares the narrator of Biljana Jovanović’s Dogs and Others (Psi i ostali), recently released by Istros Books in John K. Cox’s dynamic translation. The narrator, Lidia, lives with her mentally ill brother and their elderly, infirm grandmother. Written in a highly experimental style, the book follows Lidia’s coming of age in 1970s Belgrade in something between stream of...

Lina Wolff’s novel The Polyglot Lovers, translated by Saskia Vogel, is a warning to those who write by hand, and to those who write villains. The book won the 2016 August Prize, one of Sweden's main literary accolades, and received a PEN Translates Award from English PEN. Its plot hinges around a manuscript by Max Lamas, an aging novelist and old-school literary sexist who believes he’s written the perfect multilingual book. Unfortunately, his sole manuscript...

Since the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri finished his Divina Commedia, in 1320, more than one hundred different translations of his work have been published in English, over a dozen in this decade alone. The selection currently available caters to various tastes and purposes. Allen Mandelbaum’s blank-verse effort, studied in thousands of classrooms and universities around the world, remains the canonical go-to and has been recognized as such by Italy’s literary...

One tends to forget, particularly in the United States where fluency in foreign languages runs low, that Surrealism began and had it widest influence as a literary movement. Poetry, reviews, short stories, essays, novels and various forms of experimental writing were at the core of its revolutionary practice and the radical notions they promoted were embedded in the very form these texts took on. Mary Ann Caws, distinguished scholar and beloved doyenne of all things surrealist, has edited a...

In the title story of Yu Hua’s The April 3rd Incident: Stories, the narrator hears his family and friends whispering about something that will happen on April 3rd. There is no reason to suspect that this event is any more nefarious than a birthday party, but the narrator immediately starts entertaining ominous thoughts about the conversation he has overheard. The sense of a plot against him becomes so intense that he ends up leaving his hometown on a train. His destination is not...

When Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, invited Dubravka Ugresic to serve as a guest lecturer in the fall of 1991, the timing was fortuitous, to say the least. Ugresic’s homeland, Croatia, was caught up at that time in a virulent nationalist movement that demanded independence from the crumbling Yugoslav Socialist Republic and was part of a surge of separatist insurgencies which would soon lead the whole region into open conflict. In the following years, the Yugoslav wars...

The literary world has a growing tradition of books about failing to write. This has a lot to do with the rise of auto-fiction: how long can an author write about herself, really, without bringing up writer’s block or how much she hates her work? Mostly, the only person getting disappointed in these novel-failure novels is the writer. Maybe there’s a contract about to be broken, or an opportunity getting squandered, like the Fulbright in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the...

The Greek poet C.P. Cavafy is a writer who elicits ambiguous reactions. He seemed to follow a conventional path in his writing in formal terms, while at the same time confronting moral taboos with his erotic themes, often tinged with suggestions of homosexuality. Conventional as they might sound at first for a reader more attuned to avant-garde experiments, the intense poignancy of his poems places him among the ranks of the extraordinary. In What’s Left of the Night, a novel by...

“That was his war. Yes, it was a real war. His father, too, had had his war. And he had gone to it singing ‘The Marseillaise.’ Like him. And before him, his father’s father, and thus numerous generations caught in the often tragic snares of history.” These are the ruminations of Maïssa Bey’s unnamed female protagonist in her novella Do You Hear in the Mountains… as she rides a train somewhere in southern France. Originally published in 2002,...

I first encountered Jin Eun-Young’s poetry by way of her prose. Her biographical essay appeared in a booklet published by the Korea Literature Translation Institute for a conference in Seoul that we both attended during the spring of 2006. The British poet Polly Clark read the essay, too, and agreed: we needed to meet this woman and needed to read her poems. Here’s some of what that caught our eyes and ears:    I was born in Daejon in 1970. I don’t remember...

“You have the perfect golf swing in you, you just have to find it.” That’s the set-up line of choice for writer Kåre, one of the protagonists of Gunnhild Øyehaug’s novel Wait, Blink, to pick up girls and make audiences laugh. Golf can’t be this simple is the title of the self-help book he likes to quote derisively during dates or lectures, before remarking that “life is not always as simple as golf” and turning to a...

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...