October 26, 2021
October 12, 2021
Translator’s Note
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Photo © Keiko Onoda BIRDS CHIRP AND MIGRATE. Rivers flow. People die. Snow falls. Many people know about the Buddhist notion of reincarnation. None of these singular things is... -
Photo by Luke Porter on Unsplash ANDREA TOMPA’S WORK, as a theater critic and public intellectual, has been an inspiration for me for years, and I am delighted to bring her mo... -
Photo by Wendy Tanner / Flickr THE PEOPLE IN DIAA JUBAILI’S STORIES have a confounding habit of turning themselves into other things: a eucalyptus tree, a dung beetle, a light... -
I first came across Ariel Magnus’s work back in 2012 when I was working on an anthology of Argentine writers for the city government. The texts tended to be sent to me already excerpted with little c... -
Photo: Andre Benz / Unsplash IN REAL LIFE, TOSHIKO HIRATA (b. 1955) is a uniquely kind, warm, and outgoing person, famous for her sense of humor as one of Japan’s best-known l... -
Photo: Nick Fewings / Unsplash ONE MORNING, WHILE READING his newspaper, the narrator of Sadaa al-Daas’s “Zoo Syndrome” looks up to find his wife changed into a prancing doe.... -
Photo: Yuris Alhumaydy / Unsplash ELIZABETH JOY SERRANO-QUIJANO’S stories are set in Matanao, Davao del Sur, a town in southeastern Philippines. She is part Blaan, an indigeno... -
Photo: Hayley Mechelle / Flickr WHEN THE NARRATOR of Bibiana Camacho’s “The Other Woman” compares the face reflected in her mirror with the face on her work ID, she muses, “Ye... -
Photo: Samuel Zeller / Unsplash IN HIS WORK on color symbolism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Florian Bast describes one of the typical reactions to trauma in the novel as “a... -
Aleksandra Tsibulia. A PROFESSOR ONCE COMPLAINED to me that American students struggle to learn Russian because English, as a language, is too selfish. “You’re obsessed with the... -
LITERARY TRANSLATION IS A mysterious form of writing that I love for its mandate: rewrite a Russian book in English so it represents the author’s Russian text. There’s no plotting. No... -
Librería Ulíses in Santiago de Chile. Photo courtesy of Librería Ulíses. I ARRIVED IN Santiago de Chile on a blisteringly hot Sunday afternoon in early December 2016, too trave... -
Svalbard Photo: mariusz kluzniak/Flickr A YEAR AGO I TOOK A TRIP to Svalbard, the nearest inhabited archipelago to the North Pole. I was there to work with the Libyan poet Ashur Etwe... -
Photo: Eric Kilby/Flickr Ursula Andkjær Olsen is one of Denmark’s most important contemporary poets. A poets’ poet and a critics’ darling, she won the prestigious literary award Montanaprisen in 2013... -
Photo: Google Earth The Herring and the Saxophone (Le Hareng et le saxophone), a hybrid work by Sylvie Weil, is listed as a novel, yet just as in Tim O’Brien’s The Thin... -
A house in Iceland with a turf roof. photo: jonathan andreo/unsplash W hen asked to contribute to a speculative fiction folio, I noticed only afterward I’d picked two tales that revolve around house... -
photo: sweet ice cream photography/unsplash Who is Aleksandur Kristiansen? The question was simple on the face of it. My co-translator had sent me a biopic note explaining that he was a Faroese poet... -
I was struck by one of the poems Liu Xia released a few days before her husband, Liu Xiaobo, died of cancer as a political prisoner in China. One line in particular hovered in my dreams until one morn... -
One of the reasons I love living in Cairo is the fact that everyone spins yarns: the porter, the maid, the taxi driver. No one has the corner on stories—many of these stories rely on rumor, humor, an... -
Photo: Kelly Deluded “I like simple writing, straightforward and uncomplicated, and I try to write like that,” Eli Eliahu said, upon receiving Israel’s Matanel Prize in 2013. His work is characterize... -
Photo: Annabelle Shemer The creative collaboration between myself and Israeli poet Gili Haimovich began around 2009. The first poem of hers to be published in English translation was “Evolution,” wit... -
Migrants heading north through Mexico on La Bestia (“The Beast”). Nadia Villafuerte’s collection of short stories Barcos en Houston (Ships in Houston) portrays a wide variety of voices inhab... -
Gunnhild Øyehaug’s “Dreamwriter,” among other things, is a story about layers, layering, the lattice of the finished work and the trickle down that is life—that wonderful image, the tørrfiskstati... -
Ana Blandiana Ana Blandiana is a poet of rich formal resources. Since her first book, First-Person Plural (1964), she has written in a variety of forms ranging from sonnets to traditionally... -
When Random House contacted me about translating a book by Pope Francis, I did a double take. I had worked for the publisher in the past on fiction but never on nonfiction. How on earth did my name c...
