“[W]ords like Spanish, gypsy, black, or immigrant. / Words that rise like swords, walls that are constructed with words, / the old continents, the new continents, / with the fading kingdoms and kings over there, / on the same ruins, / on the myths and oracles, / America rises,” from “Race,” by Fernando Valverde (trans. by Carolyn Forché)
Translator Tomoyuki Endo on translating the poetry of Shuri Kido. “Since humans acquired command of language, we learned to compare one thing to another, that is to say, metaphor,”
Bite-sized reviews of thirteen books newly in translation in 2021
“what all happens to you under the fig trees / this dizziness the weakness in your knees / an untraceable memory,” from “biting into figs,” by Nilay Özer
“The clouds advance, the winds they swell / The people come, from sorrows they come / With the rains they come, with the winds they come / and thus, for you, they come,” from “Tik'ha Takiy | Song to the Flowers,” by Elvira Espejo Ayca
“I had been thinking of the massacre down the street from here, and how ghosts keep their place among us. How I might be a ghost set loose here in the wind, walking with a ghost of fire,” from “Somewhere,” by Joy Harjo
The following tales were recounted and shared collectively by a group of women who wish to be identified by name: Agnes Kaunda Chiwamine, Rosemary Mushota, Scolastica Kalengule Chiwamine, Exildah Mwansa Musoka, and Sarah Mweba.
Each Saturday evening, they would meet, braiding and unbraiding their hair in a synchronized rhythm. But then one night, everything changed.
Why would a girl of fourteen choose a minor key? Let Chopin carry you away, just as he does Nina, who brings the revolution to the keys of a prewar Steinway.
Life and politics are the same on an empty plate, in a body plagued by a pandemic. But in Cuba, people are rising up and challenging the regime. Here, Cuban American poet Carlos Pintado traces the horror and the hope.
For Indigenous writers like Zoque poet and activist Mikeas Sánchez, language serves as a unifying element in the struggle to defend lands and life.
Seventy years of Palestinian fragmentation since Israel’s creation have taken their toll. The Palestinians of today are split into different communities living different lives from one another. Here, a British Palestinian writer reflects on both the identity forced upon her and on the one she has created.
Sarah Moore interviews multitalented French writer Noémi Lefebvre. “You can’t be afraid of yourself when writing, but at the same time you need to be afraid because writing reveals who you really are.” - Noémi Lefebvre
Keija Parssinen interviews Isabella Hammad, author of The Parisian, a book that “luxuriates in language and radiates intelligence.”
Contributing editor Erik Gleibermann interviews Colombian writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whose memoir-in-progress, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, centers on her curandero grandfather.
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