WWB Daily is excited to introduce a new series on children’s literature in translation. In recent years, a proliferation of books in translation for children and young adults has brought imaginative stories from around the world to new readers. We’re speaking with some of the extraordinary publishers who make these books possible about their experience working in this vital field. For the first installment, we’re delighted to share an interview with Kendall Storey...

As the year comes to an end, our staff, contributors, and board members share their favorite international reads from 2020 and the titles they’re looking forward to in 2021.   Eric M. B. Becker Editor This year, I'm keeping my recommendations to the Southern Cone, perhaps out of the wistful recollection that as we face gray, blustery afternoons here in New York, warmer climes hold elsewhere. Daniel Tunnard's Escapes (Unnamed Press), set in a world in...

As the year draws to a close, our staff, contributors, and board members share their favorite works-in-translation of 2019 and the titles they’re looking forward to in 2020.   Eric M. B. Becker Editor To pick a favorite read is well near impossible, so I’d like to suggest a book that is both excellent and timely: Eliane Brum’s The Collector of Leftover Souls: Field Notes on Brazil’s Everyday Insurrections (Graywolf Press), translated by...

This holiday season give friends and family the gift of literature from around the world. Here are our recommendations of exciting recent international titles for all of the readers in your life.   Art enthusiasts will relish María Gainza’s Optic Nerve (tr. Thomas Bunstead, Catapult), which blends episodes in art history with the narrator’s life in contemporary Buenos Aires; or Geometry of Shadows, poetry by Italian Metaphysical painter Giorgio de...

Chloe Garcia Roberts is the translator of Li Shangyin’s Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes (New Directions), which was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant; a collection of the poetry of Li Shangyin (NYRB Poets); and a children's book by Cao Wenxuan, Feather (Elsewhere Editions). She is also the author of a book of poetry, The Reveal (Noemi Press). Her essays, poems, and translations have appeared...

Emma Ramadan, whose recent translations include Who Left the Light On? and The Boy (co-translated with Tom Roberge), spoke with five top translators—of Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, and Dutch—about their experiences bringing children’s books from around the world into English.   In recent years, more and more children’s imprints have cropped up within US publishers of translated literature. To name a few, Elsewhere Editions...

This issue started with a question that sharpened to a point in the autumn of 2017, when a neo-Nazi organization was given a permit for a protest that would begin outside the annual Göteborg Book Fair. Leading up to this moment was the Book Fair’s controversial decision to yet again allow Nya Tider (New Times), a far-right extremist publication, to exhibit on the convention center floor. Debates raged for months and months in Sweden, as well as in Finland, the 2017...

As the year draws to a close, our staff, contributors, and board members share their favorite works-in-translation of 2018 and the titles they’re looking forward to in 2019.   Elisa Wouk Almino Contributing Writer Ana Cristina Cesar’s At Your Feet (Parlor Press) introduced a tremendous voice in Brazilian literature to an English-reading audience. Ana Cristina Cesar, or Ana C. as she is known in Brazil, published her poetry in the 1970s and early...

In the past, I often felt lost buying books for the kids of friends and families. Goodnight, Moon may be inexhaustibly good, but everyone already has it; same with The Phantom Tollbooth; same with most all of the (sadly few) books I remember from my own childhood. But once I had my own kid, I started not only reading children’s books anew but wishing I could talk all my friends into reading them, too, so that somebody could speak with me about these stories that read like...

For International Translation Day, we’ve compiled fifteen essays, interviews, and conversations from the last fifteen years of Words Without Borders on the art and craft of translation, with topics ranging from translators as sci-fi heroes to the undeniable ubiquity of a phrase.   “[Translation] expands and deepens our world, our consciousness, in countless, indescribable ways.” —Edith Grossman discusses the vital importance of translation in an...

If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities   Can you describe the mood of Glasgow as you feel/see it? It’s hard for a city to have one mood, I think. Stand on one street and it’s all money and restaurants and shops full of Gucci and Prada. Stand on another and it’s like stepping back a...

In memory of Mireille Knoll   I’ve always envisioned literary translation as a form of creation—a creation by a third party who takes the baton passed by the author to move the text somewhere new, permitting it to unfold in the space of a new language. This creation draws upon the experience of the author and demands a certain self-distancing. A retreat. A sort of humility. It’s not the task of the translator to infiltrate the already-written text. The...

If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities   Can you describe the mood of Paris as you feel/see it? Of all the cities in the world, Paris is probably one of the rare ones where reality is constantly rubbing shoulders with fantasy. Whether you live there or not, whether you’ve been there once or...

In recent years, a proliferation of books in translation for children and young adults has brought imaginative stories from around the world to new readers. We spoke with some of the extraordinary publishers who make these books possible about their experience working in this vital field.    Elsewhere Editions “We are interested in books that ask questions rather than provide answers.” —Jill Schoolman and Kendall Storey, publishers of Elsewhere...

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...

This holiday season give friends and family the gift of the world on the page. Here are our recommendations for all of the readers in your life.   For children and the young at heart, get lost in the vivid, dreamlike world of Brazilian writer and illustrator Roger Mello’s You Can’t Be Too Careful!, translated by Daniel Hahn. (Elsewhere Editions) Read an interview with Elsewhere Editions For those looking for narratives about coming-of-age and sports, pick up...

John Freeman, founder of the literary journal Freeman’s, discusses finding, reading, and editing literature from around the world, as well as the creation of his recent poetry collection, Maps, with journalist Francesca Pellas.   Fred McMorrow, Nora Ephron’s copy editor at the New York Post, used to say that a piece should never begin with a quote, and I try to follow that rule. In some cases—like this one—that’s very difficult: John Freeman has written...

To conclude our celebration of Women in Translation month in 2017, we interviewed some of the women on the front lines of the effort to promote literary works by women around the world: their translators. Jennifer Croft, Bonnie Huie, Emma Ramadan, and Julia Sanches answer our questions about their work, their approach to current challenges, and what to read next.   Words Without Borders (WWB): What is a recent work by a woman that you’ve translated? How did you find...

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator each month. This month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question.  For March’s installment, Emma Ramadan passed the baton to writer, translator, and editor Jennifer Croft. What is your connection to the language(s) you translate from and/or the place(s) where the books you translate are written? My strongest place connection is...

Read Part Two of the interview. When the poet Eugene Richie mentioned to me several years ago that he and his wife, the poet Rosanne Wasserman, were coediting a collection of John Ashbery’s translations from the French (Collected French Translations), I was overjoyed at the prospect of a book that would bring together the poet’s extensive work in translation, most of it originally published by small presses or in hard-to-find magazines. Little did I suspect, however, that...