Monthly Archives: July 2025

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 11, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by MARGENTO and Veronica Gisondi

The latest literary news from Italy, Romania, and Egypt!

This week, our editors-at-large report from prize ceremonies and literary festivals, exploring the entanglement of the literary establishment with the cultural industry and uncovering innovative artists fostering transnational collaboration. Read on to find out more!

Veronica Gisondi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Italy

Since 1947, on the first Thursday of July, the mannerist nymphaeum of Rome’s Villa Giulia has hosted the award ceremony of Italy’s most closely followed literary prize, the Strega Prize (Premio Strega). Its beginnings date back to 1944—just before the capital’s liberation from Nazi occupation—when a group of intellectuals, writers, journalists, and artists, self-named “Amici della domenica” (Sunday friends) and led by Maria Bellonci, began holding a series of informal meetings that, in the aftermath of WWII, gradually evolved into the literary prize we know today, bringing major works of fiction to national attention.

Last week, Andrea Bajani’s autobiographical novel L’Anniversario (The Anniversary, forthcoming with Penguin Press) was announced as this year’s winner. It tells the story of a family whose emotional life is underpinned by the delicate interplay of violence and subjugation—a story whose end, however, is marked by the writer-narrator’s drastic decision to “abandon” his parents for good. Deprived of psychological and emotional depth, the mother—who willingly gives up on life—functions as the novel’s narrative pivot; for Bajani, her entrenched passivity becomes the vantage point from which to observe the father, a “normal” man—that is, a controlling, aggressive, short-tempered provider—in whom the claim to authority, the shame of failure, and the need to be loved converge in a lifelike if partial portrait.

Bajani’s language is clean, precise, composed; inclined to circumlocution and upheld by an affable disposition, its coldness—along with the frequent use of ellipses—echoes the hollowness of a home where silence reigned, a “perfectly functional, closed” family system, akin to a “carceral” facility. While Bajani’s intent is to reject a 20th-century patriarchal legacy (first by breaking the yoke of secrecy, then by severing ties with his parents), the trajectory of his distancing remains nebulous—suggesting an unwillingness, or an inability, to envision an alternative. READ MORE…

“I will never die. I will dance. . .”: On Apotheosis of Music by Witold Wirpsza

July 10, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Katherine Beaman

Wirpsza’s work may provide some guidance as to what the artist’s role could be in the face of humanity’s darker moments. . .

Apotheosis of Music by Witold Wirpsza, translated from the Polish by Frank L. Vigoda, World Poetry, 2025

In the fourteenth century, writing from a state of political exile from Florence, Dante gave us an allegorical tour of the afterlife with an imaginary Virgil as his guide, presenting a cast of historical and mythic figures re-imagined. It isn’t hard to make the connection between him and the twentieth-century Polish poet Witold Wirpsza, who, as he contended with World War II and its subsequent outfalls, wrote from a state of exile in West Berlin and introduced his own cast of mythic figures: Dante, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Stalin. Now, from Frank L. Vigoda—the nom de plume of translator husband-wife duo Gwido Zlatkes and Ann Frenkel—comes Apotheosis of Music, a selection of Wirpsza’s cerebral and exuberant oeuvre in an indulgent, cheeky, rhythmic English, at times originating its own pleasant musicality. Where Zlatkes lends his native Polish perspective, Frenkel’s background in musicology allows for an execution of the musical structures and themes prevalent throughout Wirpsza’s work.

Born in Gdańsk, Poland in 1918 and educated in music and law, Wirpsza was drafted into WWII, held as a prisoner of war in a German camp, and, after initially being a supporter of communism following the war, eventually defected from the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR) in objection to its policies. After publishing an essay critiquing nationalist identities called “Polaku, kim jesteś” (Pole, who are you), he was banned from publication in his native Poland—a sentence that lasted until 1989, four years after his death. He then settled in West Berlin, where he lived for the remainder of his life; there, he brought works of Polish literature to a German audience and vice versa, translating works like a biography of Bach and a novel about Mozart from German into Polish.  READ MORE…

Ukraine’s Linguistic Front: A Review of Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns by Artem Chapeye

July 9, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sam Bowden

By focusing on the ambiguity of his new life at war, Chapeye resists Russia’s invasion on a psychological level.

Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns by Artem Chapeye, translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins, Penguin Random House, April 2025

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country, Ukrainian writers have brought the resistance into their language. Some who once worked in Russian have switched to Ukrainian; others stopped capitalizing the invader’s name, rendering it as puny russia (росія). This is about reducing Russia, ejecting it from a language it has tried to claim as its own, as if in anticipation of Moscow’s physical expulsion. In his latest book—equal parts memoir, treatise, and document of the first three years of the invasion—Artem Chapeye rejects not only Russia, but the cruel logic of war. Throughout Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns, Russia—and the grief, fear, uncertainty, guilt, and shame its war brought upon Ukrainians—is referred to as “Gloom.” It is Gloom that encroaches upon Ukraine, Gloom against which Chapeye, who joined the military shortly after Russia invaded, takes up arms alongside his countrymen. Gloom is both Russia’s literal tanks and missiles and the psychological conditions Russia’s invasion forces upon Chapeye—at once the monster and the terror it inspires. Yet Ordinary People does more than chase Russia from its language. Chapeye, rendered in affable English by Zenia Tompkins, resists the affect of war itself. Through Tompkins’s frank translation, which favors a colloquial, musing style, Chapeye remains irrepressibly human as Gloom tries to change him. The result is a surprisingly warm and compelling text that insists on rising above Russia’s war, even as it acknowledges the urgency of the real-world struggle to end it. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from That Any Might Be Saved by Panni Puskás

July 8, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Austin Wagner

I told them no mercy, you must be destroyed, because violence is the only path to happiness

Ready to dig deep? The narrator of Panni Puskás’s novel That Any Might Be Saved is, as demonstrated by this dizzying excerpt, brilliantly translated from the Hungarian by Austin Wagner. Asked by their psychotherapist to recall their childhood, the narrator draws up their very first memory: a tantrum provoked by their inability to find a plastic ball to play with. From here the narrator’s monologue unfurls in a dazzling spiral, transitioning seamlessly from their childhood recollections to their frustrating relationship with their perpetually unemployed friend and finally to the liberatory violence of vandalism and of the destruction of their mother’s possessions—an apparent rejection of their own richly remembered past, which frees them from the strictures of polite society and psychotherapy alike. Read on!

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An Interview with Mary Jo Bang on Translating Paradiso by Dante Alighieri

July 7, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

I wanted my translation to honor Dante’s decision to write the poem in the vernacular instead of in literary Latin.

In her new translation of Dante’s Paradiso, translator Mary Jo Bang has brought to bear an eagle-eyed focus on the power of lyric poetry. This book is the last of the three that form Dante’s The Divine Comedy—the most widely read of the three being Inferno, where the punishment of the sinners in Hell mirrors the nature of the sins committed in their lifetimes. The same process is at work in Purgatorio, although there, punishment is structured instead as restorative penance, which, once completed, enables the souls to enter the blissful realm of the tenth heaven. In Paradiso, then, Dante travels through the nine spheres of the solar system until he arrives at the Empyrean, where he finds the saved basking in the Eternal Light of God’s mind. Speaking to those he meets along the way, Dante becomes aware that bliss isn’t the same for everyone; one’s ability to feel God’s love in the afterlife depends on the qualities of their time spent on earth.

By translating Dante’s language into modern American English and adopting a matter-of-fact authorial tone, Bang retains the elegance of the original diction. Throughout, she adopts a loose iambic structure and preserves the three-line stanza to echo Dante’s terza rima, an arrangement he devised to gesture to the Holy Trinity. All of these measures combine to honor the imagery and meaning of Dante’s original vernacular Italian, while also acknowledging the fundamental differences between the two languages.

Curious to learn more, I spoke with Bang about the act of “carrying” poetry across from one language to another, the nuts and bolts of her translation process, and how Heaven is different for each person lucky enough to have made it there.

Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation for you? And has your view of the possibilities of translation shifted over time?

Mary Jo Bang (MJB): The best definition of translation I’ve encountered comes from tracing the term back to the Latin translationem (nominative translatio), which means “a carrying across.” When applied to a text, the suggestion is that you are carrying a text in one language over into a second language. The Greeks used the word for the work of metaphor, which, like the translation of a text from one language to another, is rooted in equivalency and substitution. In the Old French, translation also referred to carrying the bones of saints from one place to another, as relics. It makes sense to me that the preciousness of such bones would have gotten linguistically intertwined with the precious religious texts copied by clerical scribes. The scribes carried a text from book to book, and sometimes also from one language to another. There have been other uses of the word, from the sacred meaning of being transported (translated) to Heaven, to the secular meaning of moving plantings from one place to another.

When I began translating the Comedy, I knew little to nothing about translation. I had taken two translation workshops when I was an MFA student at Columbia in the early nineties, working on translating a French novel, but after I finished my degree and moved to St. Louis to begin teaching, the novel stayed in the cardboard box it arrived in. I don’t know that I would have ever gone back to translation except that I read Caroline Bergvall’s “Via (48 Dante Variations),” and marveled at the fact that in forty-seven translations of the first three lines of Dante’s Inferno, no two were identical. This felt like a demonstration of the fact that there is no single “right” way to translate one language into another; that might be obvious to some but for me, it was a decisive revelation and one that has been at the forefront of my mind in all of the translations I’ve worked on since. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 4, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Hongyu Jasmine Zhu, Mary Noorlander, and René Esaú Sánchez

The latest in literary news from China, Mexico, and the United States!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us to literary fairs, readings, and walks around the world, featuring Malaysia as the country of honor at Beijing’s annual book fair, an “in-progress” translation reading in New York, and a thought-provoking reflection on a traipse around sites made famous by the works of Carlos Monsiváis in CDMX. Read on to learn more!

Hongyu Jasmine Zhu, Editor-at-Large, reporting from China

Between June 18–22, the 31st Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) welcomed over 1,700 exhibitors from 80 countries, with Bangladesh, Belarus, Chile, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Jamaica, Kenya, and Oman joining for the first time. Over 300 thousand visitors of all ages and backgrounds participated in the fair’s multi-sensory literary walk, from family-friendly activities to down-to-business panel discussions.

READ MORE…

REFUGE and Immersive Theater: In Conversation with Vita Tzykun and David Adam Moore

July 3, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Ian Ross Singleton

[T]his immersive experience can offer a chance to understand—on a visceral level—the uncertainty and disorientation that refugees so often endure.

In the spring of 2022, Vita Tzykun and David Adam Moore began working on the immersive theater installation REFUGE, “ignited” by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Developed and first presented with the support of UC Davis’ Granada Artist Residency, REFUGE is an exploration of the refugee experience and the meaning of home. In a series of interactive, multilingual scenes, audiences are brought into the stories of refugees, navigating the unfolding of events guided only by the dynamic sets, the lights, the voices, and their own intuition. At the end of it, David remarked, “The thing that I want more than anything is for the audience to leave with a changed frame of reference.”

In the following interview, Ian Ross Singleton speaks with Vita and David on the urgency of this project, its development, and its role in uniting disparate refugee communities in a shared narrative.

Ian Ross Singleton (IRS): What was the inspiration when you began this project?

Vita Tzykun (VT): We were awarded a dual Granada Artist Residency at the University of California, Davis during the pandemic, but the closures of live performance spaces meant we couldn’t bring our vision to life. When the world began to reopen, the invitation returned—this time, just two weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

READ MORE…

Acts Against Fate: A Review of Cautery by Lucia Lijtmaer

July 2, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Maddy Robinson

Refreshingly, in Cautery, the stifling confines of gender in both past and present are treated in a way that defies easy essentialism.

Cautery by Lucía Lijtmaer, translated from the Spanish by Maureen Shaughnessy, Charco Press, 2025

Last October was a particularly busy month for news providers in Spain. Deadly, climate change-induced floods ripped through Valencia; the desperate residents of Barcelona and the Canary Islands continued to protest against unsustainable levels of tourism and unregulated property speculation; and in Madrid, sleazy stories of coercion and coverups involving a prominent young politician rattled a progressive left-wing party to its core. Despite the depressing familiarity of such headlines, it almost seems portentous that all of these subjects appear in one form or another in Lucía Lijtmaer’s 2022 novel, Cautery. An accomplished writer and co-director of the acclaimed feminist pop-culture podcast Deforme Semanal Ideal Total, which tackles everything from critical theory to modern dating, Lijtmaer’s finger is firmly on the pulse of millennial Spanish society.

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Translation Tuesday: “Dear Italian School” by Marilena Delli Umuhoza

July 1, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Monica Martinelli

That Whiteness is taken for Italianness itself represents the very beating heart of this privilege.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present to you a powerful essay by Italian-Rwandan author Marilena Delli Umuhoza, translated from the Italian by Monica Martinelli. A moment of casual racism in her daughter’s school play inspires the narrator to reflect on her own memories of bigotry as an African-origin woman growing up in 1990’s and 2000’s Italy. She traces how racial prejudice is passed down through children’s books, advertising, TV shows, and teachers; Black men and women depicted as criminals or sex objects, always, in some way, dirty. These tropes spill into modern immigration debates, where refugees are stripped of dignity, their suffering sensationalized: “And so there they were, those bodies, taking over my entire television screen without any respect for people in their most vulnerable moment: dead, naked, washed up on Italian shores.” Against this erasure, Delli Umuhoza insists on the significance of writing, of inscribing the truth of Black lives into history. Childhood racism leaves deep scars precisely because it is so pure; children, innocent yet perceptive, directly reflect the biases of society. Blending incisive cultural analysis with raw emotion, the essay makes clear why antiracist education must begin early.

A letter from an African-Italian mother

Last week I attended a musical at my daughter’s school. The show they put on was Around the World in Eighty Days, inspired by the movie recounting the adventures of Phileas Fogg.

After visiting European countries like France and Spain, welcomed by songs of joy and rather coquettish dancers, our hero comes to Africa. Welcoming him there is a person whose foolish way of speaking reminds me of the Italian dubbing actors in the film Gone with the Wind, with their mispronounced monosyllables in a typical “African” accent. I dug my nails into the fabric of my seat’s armrest, as I always do when I am nervous.

The journey continues toward the heart of Africa, where Fogg is chased by a group of Africans for unclear reasons (the acoustics were terrible and the representation pretty confusing). I thought to myself, I’m so glad they cut it. I was thinking of a scene that I had reported to the teacher six months earlier, after my daughter had come home in tears and asked me: “Mom, does grandma eat people?”

“Baby,” I replied, “what are you talking about? Of course not.”

“So why do they make us play African cannibals who eat Fogg at school?” 

“What do you mean?”

“In the scene where he gets to Africa, we have to say, ‘Mmmm … It smells so tasty! What do you say, shall we cook him?’”

I was speechless. READ MORE…