Only I never came back
I was not going to be long
—W. S. Merwin
1
I live where Lady Gaga files her taxes
where the police
do as they please
where this paleface multi…
Translator’s Note
View from the poet’s roof, Tumbalá, Chiapas / Photo by Carol Rose Little TO VIST THE Ch’ol poet Juana Peñate Montejo’s house in Chiapas, Mexico, requires several flights, at…
THE FACT THAT Mehrnaz Shirazi Adl’s story “Anahita” has made it to English-language readers is, in itself, a bit of a miracle. Due to wide-reaching sanctions on Iran, here in t…
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 thi…
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 m…
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 ligh…
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…
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…
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 prancin…
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 indigen…
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, “Y…
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 “…
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…
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 trav…
Svalbard Photo: mariusz kluzniak/FlickrA 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 E…
Photo: Eric Kilby/FlickrUrsula 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 f…
Photo: Google EarthThe 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 Things…
A house in Iceland with a turf roof. photo: jonathan andreo/unsplashWhen asked to contribute to a speculative fiction folio, I noticed only afterward I’d picked two tales that revolve around hou…
photo: sweet ice cream photography/unsplashWho 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 a g…
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, and…
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 characterized…
Photo: Annabelle ShemerThe 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,” with…
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 inhabit…
