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Presented here for the first time in English, the cult writer Charles Chahwan—"Lebanon's answer to Charles Bukowski"—tells a tale of rival militiamen euphoric with violence.   Under the gentle afternoon sunlight, Serge’s body appeared limp and more slouched than usual as he rested against the back seat of the shared taxi, a Morris Princess. He was the sole passenger in the service as it made its way down the coastal highway, as if other potential...

In the seventeen years Words Without Borders has been publishing, this is only the second issue dedicated specifically and exclusively to writing for children, and the first since November 2004. I can well understand the delay—children are not WWB’s main constituency of readers, after all. But I’ve been keen to work with them on this issue for a while, not only because children’s writing has been even more neglected for translation in the Anglophone world than its...

A furry creature named Raur discovers the power of hugs in this story for young readers. This is Raur. No, not him. Him. Under the stairs. That’s the one. What’s he doing there? He lives there. You’ve trodden over his roof a hundred million times. Every time you’ve come to preschool, you’ve gone up the stairs and trampled on Raur’s roof. And every time they’ve come to pick you up from preschool, well, you’ve stepped on Raur’s roof...

This twist on a traditional fairy tale features a reclusive witch and an inventive young woman. A war raged on for years. Witches had little choice but to protect themselves. Some gave up magic and passed as humans; others fled to the mountains and severed all contact with villages and towns. Still others, hoping for compensation, became castle witches and fought alongside lords of the realm at the battlefront. Through all of the fighting, the witches’ ways of coping were as varied...

A dragon gives a boy the courage to face a life-and-death situation in this children’s story by Hooda El Shuwa. Khidr’s heart was pounding as he stepped into the house. It was almost sunset, and his mom wasn’t usually this late. Was she on an emergency visit to the hospital to see his dad? Then a buzzing sound sliced through the sky above the camp. It was a familiar sound—the continuous whirring of a drone, the sound of the monster that harassed the camp...

An East Asian boy struggles with racist bullying at school and pressure at home in this children’s story by Sandrine Kao. “Yes, Sybille, I would like you to back off . . .” I didn’t allow myself to actually say it. But I really would have preferred it if she just went her own way. I needed to walk alone awhile and think. Her chatter stopped. She was waiting for an answer. I was only half-listening to what she was saying, and she could tell. I wasn’t that...

 A girl discovers her grandmother’s hidden talents and taste for adventure in this children’s story by Angelika Glitz. Some people are like surprise eggs. You know, the chocolate ones with a tiny toy inside. You don’t discover what’s inside them until you’ve nibbled away some of the outside. And Granny Hilde was an egg with an extraordinary number of surprises. She’d totally fooled the security guard, and that was just the start. While he was...

Mr. Gimbal’s Incredible Invention follows Danny, a bright and curious boy, and his neighbor, Mr. Archibald Gimbal, who is an inventor. Since becoming friends, they have acquired two Sussex hens named Sherlock and Watson, who roam freely around the garden and can travel through gaps in space and time in search of lost belongings. There is also a cat that divides its time between the two houses, going by the name of Spigot in one and Fluffy in the other. Unbeknownst to them all,...

A boy is visited by a mischievous demon in this children’s story by Pietro Albì. Translator’s Note: Farfariel: The Book of Micu is set in rural Abruzzo in 1938. The narration shifts between the scribe who is writing the text and the mischievous devil Farfariel, whose sections appear in red. The crossed-out sections are parts that Farfariel thinks should not be included in the scribe's text.   Summon me. No, it’s too soon to summon me, or...

If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities   Can you describe the mood of Lisbon as you feel/see it? Anyone who strolls down the Rua dos Douradores leading to Praça da Figueira [Fig Tree Square] in the amber hours, who lounges on one of the rooftops of the Baixa, the downtown quarter with its...

As the world battles the COVID-19 virus, Words Without Borders is commissioning new work from contributors all over the world to offer humanistic perspectives on and literary responses to the crisis. We published the first piece, from Italian writer Silvia Ranfagni, on Monday, March 16, when the extent of the wreckage this coronavirus would leave in its wake was just becoming clear. Check back often for new selections of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to...

In this dispatch from Mexico, Milena Solot provides a glimpse of daily life in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic.   Rocío’s brother Carlos came back today. I wasn't worried but Rocío was, or at least she seemed to be. Maybe Rocío was worried for her mom, rather, because her mother was worried about Carlos. They hadn’t heard from him for a week. They thought he might be in prison, they wondered if he was dead. The boy he went with, Ely's...

Taiwanese writer Sanmao inspired generations of Chinese-language readers with Stories of the Sahara, an account of her travels in the Sahara Desert (recently translated into English by Mike Fu). Today, on what would have been Sanmao's seventy-seventh birthday, her niece, Jessica Chen, reflects on her childhood memories of Sanmao and the writer's enduring legacy.    Listen to one of Sanmao's stories in Chinese, Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, and English in...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about.   From Milkweed Editions | When the Whales Leave by Yuri Rytkheu, translated from the Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse | Fiction | 136 pages | ISBN 9781571311313 | US$14.00 What the publisher says: “Buoyantly translated into English for the first time by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse, this new entry in the Seedbank series is at once a...

They led you away at dawn. So begins the section of Anna Akhmatova’s iconic poem “Requiem,” which Monika Zgustova chose as the frontispiece for this immensely powerful book about women’s experiences in the Soviet gulag. Zgustova was a teenager in the mid-1970s, when her family fled Czechoslovakia to escape political persecution from the Communist regime (her father was a prominent Czech linguist). She grew up in the US. Intensely interested in Russian literature,...

Victor Meadowcroft attended the 2019 international book fair in Guadalajara, where he interviewed writers María Fernanda Ampuero, Ariana Harwicz, and Alejandro Zambra, and publishers Diego Rabasa (Sexto Piso) and Carolina Orloff (Charco Press). Read more about his experience at the book fair. Alejandro Zambra is a Chilean poet, short story writer, and novelist whose work has been translated into twenty languages. He is the author of six books,...

Arabic literary traditions are rich with women telling their own stories, from Andalusian Wallada bint al-Mustakfi’s fakhr poetry—allegedly embroidered on her clothes—through the epistolary practice of Nahda writers like Mayy Ziyadeh to the autobiographies of feminist pioneers Huda al-Shaarawi and Nawal al-Saadawi, as well as the memoirs of established literary authors such as Radwa Ashour and Samar Yazbek. In this feature, we bring you a small selection of...

Content warning: this piece contains descriptions of female circumcision that may be upsetting. Writer Ishraga Mustafa recounts her experience of genital mutilation in this excerpt from her autobiography. Things didn’t stay as the toy boats of my childhood would have wished; unrestrained and free, I used to play with the boys in the street . . . the skies would open and pour down, and we would amuse ourselves to the hilt. The taming began the day I heard them, the women,...

In this excerpt from her autobiography, novelist Sahar Khalifeh describes how she and two of her friends became the first middle-aged university students in Palestine. Birzeit University offered me a place, and I grew wings, feeling that the world was finally opening up to me. I forgot about my novel completely and cast it aside. It felt too small, too frail, to be a real source of support, one that could restore the balance I had lost because of my ignorance, my dependence on...

Writer Rasha Abbas spans countries and decades in these interconnected musings on the relationship between food and political upheaval. “He who kills the ovenbird or breaks his house draws the storm upon himself.”1 —Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, translated by Cedric Belfrage   Damascus, 1949—Announcement #4 “We were obliged to temporarily cede the reins of power.” The first Syrian revolutionary coup d’état was announced by...

In this memoir/biography hybrid, writer and filmmaker Nadia Kamel describes her mother’s experience as a member of an Egyptian communist cell in the 1940s. As the French communists left the country, they handed me over to an Egyptian cell. The guy in charge of this Egyptian cell—and by extension, me—was someone called Abdelssetar Ettawila. He was a member of the organization’s central committee, not by election and not because he’d earned it, but by rising...

I’m living in a sci-fi movie. In fact, you are too. We’re just further along in the plot than you are. A man buys food in a market in some little-known spot in China and Rome becomes a ghost town. It’s a strange movie and the popcorn tastes of hand sanitizer. This is Italy. Once it meant “pasta,” now it means “coronavirus.”   A war with no bombs and no pizza—not even in Naples. Every street is...

In the “Best of the B-Sides” series, critic and bookseller Lori Feathers recommends a new work in translation along with a number of backlist (“B-side”) titles that you might have missed.  There is a way of knowing that exists outside the realm of reason and intellect, a special awareness that allows those rare individuals with extraordinary sensory or perceptive powers to intuit things that the rest of us quite simply cannot. Some of the most...

  If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of Berlin as you feel/see it? Berlin is an inside-out city. In most cities, the bankers, lawyers, and doctors are the insiders, while tramps, addicts, artists, and radicals are on the outside, marginalized. In Berlin, it’s the...

Part-time New York, NY Words Without Borders seeks applicants for its editorial fellowship. The WWB Editorial Fellowship program is designed to provide training for individuals looking to build a career around the publication and promotion of international literature. The editorial fellow will gain hands-on experience with all aspects of the publication of a digital literary magazine—from issue planning to online promotion. The fellow will become familiar with the special...