Mirza Alakbar Sabir and the first issue of Molla Nasreddin / Photo courtesy of Wikipedia
The satirist and poet Mirza Alakbar Sabir (1862–1911) is one of those prominent voices known t…
On Translation
September 16, 2025
September 15, 2025Pioneer Summer, also referred to in English as “Summer in a Pioneer Necktie,” is a queer romance written in Russian in 2016 by Ukrainian author Kateryna Sylvanova and Russian author Elena Mal…
August 28, 2025Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (2004) transcended cultural boundaries to become a global environmental parable. This essay explores the transformative roles of publishers, translators, and…
May 15, 2025BazziBa / Stock.adobe.com Here form is content, content is form.—Samuel Beckett on Finnegan’s WakeOn April 8, 2025, Europa Editions published City of Fiction…
April 8, 2025Editorial note: The following is in reply to Wendy Call and Whitney DeVos’s letter to the editor, which itself is in response to the author’s “Language as Refuge” column in the March 2025 iss…
April 8, 2025Dear editors of World Literature Today,In her March 2025 column “Language as Refuge,” Veronica Esposito explores questions of language development and loss, responding to the question: “What…
December 11, 2024The Christie Archive Trust, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Who is the world’s most translated author? Agatha Christie? Antoine de Saint-Exupéry? Lewis Carroll? It depends on how you coun…
August 13, 2024Can translation make us mentally healthier? Can adding new words to the English language somehow increase the amount of positive emotions that we experience on earth? This, in short, is the argument…
April 18, 2024Photos by Natalia Senatorova In the following appreciation, the author compares the poetry of Russian writer Lev Rubinstein to wandering through a conceptualist art museum. “Rubinstein’s atten…
April 3, 2024Photo by Katie Barrett / Unsplash In her ongoing column about untranslatable words, Veronica Esposito here considers the Dutch concept of niksen—to do nothing. But is niksen real…
March 28, 2024Photo by chayanit / Adobe Stock After being “struck mute” in Russian, her first language, after the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the author doubled dow…
February 6, 2024Photo by New Africa / Adobestock.com In her column Untranslatable, Veronica Esposito considers why various words are so difficult to translate. Here, she considers how hygge pres…
October 19, 2023Photo by Enrique / stock.adobe.com In her ongoing column of untranslatable words, Veronica Esposito considers the Japanese art of wabi-sabi and how its iconic image of an aged, cracke…
September 5, 2023In her column Untranslatable, Veronica Esposito considers why various words are so difficult to translate. Here, she looks at the famously difficult Tshilubà word ilunga and wonders wha…
April 6, 2021Browsing a Copenhagen airport bookstore, a translator picks up a book. The journey between that impulse and his eventual translation of the memoir into English was both emotional and serendipito…
April 27, 2020Statue of Ramos at Ponta Verde beach, Maceió, Brazil / Wikipedia In her new translation of Graciliano Ramos’s São Bernardo, forthcoming early next month from New York Re…
December 4, 2018Ksenia Buksha / Courtesy of the author With apologies to Raymond Carver, what do we translate when we translate literature? What are we doing? And how do we do it? There…
August 21, 2018An emerging translator explores how translating The Lover helped her become “unstuck” at a time when she felt neither fully at home in English or in French. The Lover…
August 21, 2018Photo: Creawebpro / PixabayIn this short excerpt from the early pages of Marguerite Duras’s celebrated work of autofiction, The Lover, Duras looks back to her crossing o…
July 3, 2018Born in Yangzhou and currently living in Beijing, Zhu Zhu is the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and art criticism. The Wild Great Wall, recently released by Phoneme…
May 22, 2018Raboni in the 1990s / Photo by Carla Cerati / Courtesy of giovanniraboni.itIn memory of Giovanni Raboni & Vinio Rossi 1Some thirty-five years ago,…
May 8, 2018Non-Oui is a biographical novel that tells the story of a woman from Split, Croatia. In her youth, Grandma Nedjeljka, or Non-Oui, as she was called (a literal French translation of the syllables o…
December 19, 2017Translating poetry is impossible in the sense that prose works can be translated (not to speak of the translation of nonliterary texts). But re-creating poetry in a different language is always possib…
December 12, 2017Looking back on 2017, it’s easy to declare the year a success for literary translation, which continued to thrive and move in exciting new directions. Of note, Emily Wilson translated The Odysse…
November 14, 2017Top right: Ben Faccini / Courtesy of English PEN. Bottom right: Kelsey MadsenBen Faccini is a novelist, writer, and translator based in London. He was born in England and brought up in France and Ital…
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