June 27, 2022
May 23, 2022
Essays
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It is hard for me to believe that this column has appeared in almost every issue of WLT for a decade, and I am gratified that it has been so well received. For that I thank WLT’... -
The opening lines of Lea Goldberg’s poem “A god once commanded us,” from Found in Translation: Modern Hebrew Poets (2006), tr. Robert Friend, ed. Gabriel Levin. Israeli poetry of protest... -
Illustration from Feng Yunpeng’s Jinshi suo 金石索 (1821; Index of inscription on bronzes and stones), as featured in The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, translated and edite... -
Photo by Jonathan Adami In our hyperdigital era, mass reading events provide opportunities for human interact... -
Photo by Lotus Carroll/Flickr To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.Octavio Paz Writing... -
A translator contemplates the challenges and rewards of translating the humor of American writer David Sedaris for a Greek audience. Some years ago I wa... -
Illustration adapted from Nikki Pugh/Flickr With bookstores and the publishing world in crisis, could ads within books be the answer? Victoria’s Secret in Pride and Prejudi... -
Written in the wake of the Barcelona Olympics, Eduard Màrquez’s Zugzwang reflects the tensions of a culture straining against its minor status with aspirations toward a cosmopolitan outlo... -
Photo by Fey Ilyas/Flickr The immense space of the supersensible. . . is filled for us with dark night.— Immanuel Kant... -
Evening Time Ha Jong-o On the subway at evening rush hourI called my wife to say I was on my way home.Hearing a familiar voice, I looked round,among the exhausted people on their way home,and saw m... -
Photo illustration by Mary Wuestewald There are, as evidenced by the working-class literature special issue of World Literature Today, many working-class writers around the world. However, t... -
Photo by luipermom/Flickr Computational reading puts us in touch with an exploratory way of engaging with language, with how we use words and how we arrive at their meanings. It...
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For guest editor George Henson, it’s been a long journey from reading The Front Runner in 1977 in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, to writing about queer lit for World Literature Today. But ju...
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In an address to the Yale Political Union on April 23, 2013, Meena Alexander began with a line from Shelley’s 1821 essay, “A Defence of Poetry.” The resolution—“Poets are the unacknowledged legisl...
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By Peter Groth (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-3.0],via Wikimedia Commons This essay is adapted from Leonardo Padura’s November 2012 speech in Havana, Cuba, at the Casa de las Améri...
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Last year, thousands of Tibetan students took to the streets to protest the Chinese government’s decision to conduct all elementary and high school education in the official Chinese language, Mandarin...
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The essence of photography is writing with light. It is the visual language that we use daily and increasingly communicate with. Millions of photographs appear everyday in newspapers, magazines, books...
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It’s not only individual lives that Mistry paints with such meticulousness; it’s how he stretches his canvas to embrace the wider world that makes his work comparable to the contemporary giants of...
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Having just spent a year in Berlin, novelist Claire Messud reports on her observations in and around the city. “In Berlin,” she writes, “a sense of becoming trumps a sense of bel...
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“If the law permeates our lives before we are born, reaching even into the womb, so too do stories, guaranteeing that law and literature will remain intimate bedfellows in the years to come.” Deji...
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The Arab Spring may have destroyed the perception that Arab cultures are inherently incompatible with democracy and the values of freedom, but writers of Muslim extraction who are politically and...
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Sudden, Flash, Nano, Short-Short, Micro, Minificción . . . "I usually compare the novel to a mammal, be it wild as a tiger or tame as a cow; the short story to a bird or a fish;...
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Photo by Pesis/FLIKR Under the sign of the bicycle, writers and riders share a special affinity. Alon Raab offers a global literary tour. Bicycles: because lo...
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"Science fiction works differentially from other written categories, particularly those categories traditionally called literary. . . . It has its own particular ways of making sense out of langua...
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Scenes from Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats, directed by Susan ShaughnessyUniversity of OklahomaMarch 10–14, 2012 Photos: Ty Johnson / ...
