An aphorism is a distilled, laconic reflection about the author’s intimate experiences of reality, expressed through paradox, provocation, or shocking self-disclosure. Aphorisms cannot be conceived theoretically, and one cannot learn how to write them from a manual. They rise up out of authentic ex...

Photo by blacque_jacques/Flickr Later this year, Bloomsbury will release Michelle Woods’s newest book, Kafka Translated. This will be the first book-length study about translating Franz Kafka’s work. WLT talks with Woods about translating Kafka’s style, his humor, and even his image....

Rights free potrait. Library of Congress. Join us in celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s birthday by adding your translations of this short Lincoln quote in the comments of this blog post. Thanks to WLT friends and staff, we begin this project with translations from Hindi, French, German, Itali...

A bookshop in Norway. Photo readingoutloud/Flickr All of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania [Oslo]—that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him. . . .                                                 Hunger by Knut...

November 27–December 11 Tears in Rain Rosa Montero, Lilit Žekulin Thwaites, tr. AmazonCrossingNovember 27, 2012 Detective Bruna Husky, a replicant or “techno-human,” was designed by humans to perform dangerous and undesirable tasks. She has ten years to live on the United States of Earth before she...

The Bird That Swallowed Its Cage: The Selected Writings of Curzio Malaparte Walter Murch, tr. Counterpoint  For the first time, the works of Curzio Malaparte, an Italian journalist, novelist, and diplomat who wrote during World War II, have been translated into English. Walter Murch starte...

Many times when we think of fantasy or science fiction, we think of trite stories of dragons, wizards, and maybe some machine-gunned armies on distant planets. But throughout the world, fantasy and science fiction are used subversively as political commentaries or more broadly to reveal often-overl...

Peirene Press forthcoming books in 2013. Recently, I came across a blog post from the Economist’s Prospero blog entitled “Stories from Elsewhere” that opened my eyes to the shocking statistics surrounding translated works: “Only 3% of the books published annually in America and Britain ar...

“I think that’s what a lot of us want to do—bring something new to people who wouldn’t have it otherwise. And even though I’ve lost my naiveté about the translator’s ability to make much of an impression, I still get pleasure from hammering even a small chink into the obsidian wall of ignorance we...

The Mercato in Addis where Moskowitz did much of her work in Ethiopia. Photo by Alvise Forcellini/Flickr In April 2007, at the invitation of a charity called the Create Trust, I travelled to Addis Ababa to run some creative workshops with the Ethiopian community using writing, drama, and storytell...

Nathan Englander and Etgar Keret at the Edinburgh International Book Festival Israeli author Etgar Keret and American author and translator Nathan Englander spoke in fervor and friendship about the art of translation last Friday at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. In Keret’s best and mos...

Marion Bloem Londonp/Wikipedia Social media platforms have become a dynamic way for people all over the world to connect with one another. Thanks to these outlets, people can now find others interested in the same activities, be it sports, music, or—our personal favorite—literature. Daily interact...