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Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about. February's selection includes books translated from Arabic, Russian, French, Swedish, and Japanese.   From Other Press | In the Company of Men by Véronique Tadjo, translated from the French by the author and John Cullen | Fiction | 160 pages | ISBN 9781635420951 | US$14.99 What the publisher says: “In a series of moving...

Sabrina Jaszi's translation of Alisa Ganieva's "Munkar and Nakir" appears in the February 2021 issue of Words Without Borders. Preparing to translate “Munkar and Nakir,” I reread the stories of Flannery O’Connor, whose darkly comic and grotesque portrayals of the American South are described as “Southern Gothic.” First published in the regional journal Dagestan, Alisa Ganieva’s “Munkar and Nakir” could be said to...

Davit Gabunia's cinematic debut novel, Falling Apart, from which this excerpt comes, recalls Rear Window in its dark exploration of voyeurism, and broke ground it its treatment of a male sexual liaison. Gabunia found fame aged twenty-two as the Georgian translator of Harry Potter, and later Shakespeare and Ibsen.   The people in the photo look like blue and black blotches. I can’t pick out Tina. Just last night she was lying in bed, the...

Tamta Melashvili's 2015 novel, Eastwards, from which this excerpt comes, is the story of a young woman, Irina, in present-day Georgia, who is simultaneously suffering from depression, a vanished lover, and a taboo medical condition, vaginismus. She is researching Elene Dariani, a mystical poet believed to have had a secret affair with the famous Georgian poet Paolo Iashvili. Cofounder in 1915 of the Blue Horn Symbolists, Iashvili committed suicide in 1937 during Stalin’s...

Born in Jerusalem, Najwan Darwish published his first poetry collection in 2000. He has since become one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets, and one of the most powerful poetic voices to emerge from Palestine in the modern era. His first book to appear in English was Nothing More to Lose (NYRB Poets, 2014), which was listed by NPR as one of the best books of the year. Now, with the publication of his second major collection in English, Exhausted on the Cross, Najwan has become the...

György Dragomán's The Bone Fire, a Gothic novel about an orphan who's adopted by her mysterious grandmother, is out this week with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In the excerpt below, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, a day of household chores takes an unexpected turn. It’s Saturday; I’m heading home from the market with Grandmother. We’re standing in front of our gate. I wait for Grandmother to take out her key and open it. She takes out the key,...

Lasha Bugadze's A Small Country, which won the Saba, IliaUni, and Writers’ House Litera prizes in Georgia––all for novel of the year in 2018––is based on the real scandal surrounding the publication of the author's 2001 short story “The First Russian.” The story outraged some MPs and clergy with its satirical allusions to the wedding night of Georgia’s revered medieval Queen Tamar, whose first husband was a Russian...

In their introduction to Words Without Borders’ “#Russophonia: New Writing in Russian” issue, Hilah Kohen and Josephine von Zitzewitz highlight several significant issues that “preoccupy Russian society and Russophone communities around the world. The first is the war in Eastern Ukraine.” Words Without Borders’ “Women Write War” issue of April 2016 featured the writing of two Ukrainian poets about this war, Lyudmyla Khersonska and Lyuba...

In her quarterly column, Maya Jaggi, our Critic at Large, provides a brief history of Georgian letters, whose influences look east and west. Jaggi has curated Georgia’s Fantastic Tavern: Where Europe Meets Asia, an online festival of Georgian writers inspired by the café culture of Georgia’s first democratic republic of 1918–21, taking place online from February 25 to 28.  In a little park with soaring fir trees behind the old parliament...

Archil Kikodze's The Southern Mammoth, originally published in Georgian in 2017, takes place in a single day in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, as a filmmaker leaves his apartment to make way for a friend with a date, to wander freely through his city and his memories.    Armed with long poles, the policemen are busy at the Ortachala 1 hydro station. It seems they are the only ones on this sunny wintry morning who have something to do. They push as hard as they can,...

Airea D. Matthews to Judge Winning Poems to Be Published in Poem-a-Day and WWB   We’re pleased to announce the 2021 WWB Poems in Translation Contest spotlighting groundbreaking work by poets and translators around the world. The contest is open to submissions of contemporary international poetry translated from other languages into English. Four winning poems will be co-published in Words Without Borders and Poem-a-Day, the popular daily poetry series produced by the Academy...

Last year, Nigerian poet Onyinye Miriam Uwolloh published "Ishmael Na My Name," a long poem in Nigerian Pidgin that retells the story of Moby-Dick (an audio recording of Uwolloh reading from the poem at the Strand Bookstore is available here). Today on WWB Daily, Jesse Amar considers how "Ishmael Na My Name" updates—and challenges—Melville's original text. Onyinye Miriam Uwolloh’s poem "Ishmael Na My Name" is a sequence of 136 haiku,...

In her travel memoir Winter Pasture, out next week with Astra House, writer Li Juan chronicles the winter she spent with a family of Kazakh herders in a remote region of northern China. In the excerpt below, translated by Jack Hargreaves and Yan Yan, Li describes the preparations required for the journey.   From the moment I released my second book, my mother started bragging to the whole village that I was an “author.” But our neighbors only ever saw...

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 Thessaloniki as you feel/see it? Thessaloniki sits right on the Aegean, and the city’s mood is appropriately mercurial—moving from blaring sun to placid shadow, from wave to wave, from agony to ecstasy. Out on the larger...

Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler and Reilly Costigan-Humes's translation of Danyil Zadorozhnyi's "Letter to Ukraine" appears in the February 2021 issue of Words Without Borders. How do you translate a poem into a single language when it is interested in the liminal space between two languages? That was the first question my cotranslator Reilly Costigan-Humes and I asked ourselves when we read Danyil Zadorozhnyi’s “Letter to Ukraine,” a poem that explores...

The precocious seven-year-old protagonist of María José Ferrada’s picaresque novel How to Order the Universe, referred to simply as “M,” is one of the most astute, enchanting, and affecting characters I have ever had the pleasure to translate. Her concept of the universe, which she cribs from a hardware catalog, is an astonishing metaphor. I won’t spoil the delight of encountering it in the book by detailing too much about it here, except to say...

Islander                                                                    for Ivo Machado I listen to the sea lashing the word, the word that is a stone in flight. I listen to the sea singing your Azores, an ax splitting open silence. I, too, am that stone that sings: a bird stitched to the Atlantic. Oh Islander of...

In Evgeny Vodolazkin’s literary universe, time is always out of joint. His novels feature medieval wanderers who glimpse events centuries in the future, narrative structures that contrast vastly different periods of Russian history, and Tolstoyan ruminations on the nature of time itself. This curious blend of topics, along with the weighty themes and deeply engaging style that characterize Vodolazkin’s work, has led to his remarkable popularity, both in his native Russia and...

New York, New York, February 4, 2021—The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has just announced that it will distribute more than $25 million in support of 1,073 arts and cultural organizations nationwide. Words Without Borders is honored to be named one of the NEA’s 2021 grantees. WWB will receive an Art Works award to fund the publication of its monthly magazine, its education programs through WWB Campus, and its free virtual literary events.  The Art Works funding...

I encountered my first sestina in college, through a creative writing workshop centered on poetic form. For homework, we read the canonical examples, such as Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina” and John Ashbery’s “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.” We learned the rules of the form: the sestina comprises six stanzas of six lines each, followed by an envoi (or “tornada”) of three lines. The six lines of each main stanza end with specific...

Young, formally inventive, and digital by nature—these are only some of the characteristics of Russophone literature today. Here, we present Russophone writers born in 1985 or later who work in shorter genres, from minimalistic flash fiction and protest poetry to visual performance. This issue is not a collection of “Russian literature” because many of its contributors are not ethnically Russian, and many are not Russian nationals. What they have in common is their use of...

Driving to a prayer reading to commemorate the death of a relative, a man’s path takes an unexpected turn in this gripping short story by Alisa Ganieva.   The road climbed gradually up the mountain. After the excruciating evening traffic around Levashinsky, driving was fast and easy. The sorrel-scented night air rushed through the cracked window. Kebedov had already turned off the highway onto a crunching gravel road and kept glancing at the glowing face of his watch. About...

Questions of national and cultural belonging are at the heart of this poem by Danyil Zadorozhnyi.   Video: Danyil Zadorozhnyi reads "Letter to Ukraine" in the original Russian. well, what are you anyway—waves? or maybe particles— this ain’t atoms, baby, piercing the air like pins, freeing space from former contexts and discourses; it’s poplar fuzz somewhere near granny’s place outside of moscow, mosquito-bitten legs, genderless constellations like...

Translator’s note: This is the final chapter of a semi-autobiographical but speculative novella. The protagonist is the only subject of an extremely high-profile research project: a celebrity professor of the “experimental humanities” has apparently attempted to transform her into an Ubermensch by harnessing her traumatic experiences as an immigrant and émigré. The ninth and final chapter, which seems poised to take place a year later and in which I break...

Dinara Rasuleva questions received notions of home and national identity in this poem about her relationship to Russia.   Video: This video was created by the Russian-language, Berlin-based TV channel OstWest for a series called "Living Poets Society," which featured contemporary Russophone poets living in Germany. Used with permission from OstWest.   Words Without Borders · Dinara Rasuleva reads "Время...