Language: French

What’s New in Translation: September 2025

New publications from Palestine, Afghanistan, Italy, Senegal, France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia, Poland, and Kyrgyzstan!

Ten titles, ten countries! This month, we’re presenting reviews of a wide-ranging text of image philosophy in the age of virtual reality; a Russian master’s memoirs of his infamous literary friends; poetry anthologies featuring testimonies from the genocide in Gaza and the bold voices of Afghan women; a delicate and revelatory Serbian novel parsing lineage and dementia; and so much more. . .

1

From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, translated from the French by Dylan Temel, Other Press, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Power is domination—at least, that’s how it’s been overarchingly conceived. Though the concept abstracts out to a vast array of actualities, from the centralized to the diffused, the individual to the plural, the Foucauldian and the Weberian, the most immediate and base display of human power is that of one subject being undermined by another. Translation, then, as an intersectional arena between two bodies that are as similar as they are different, is an optimal stage by which to study the varying dynamics of power; but especially within the postcolonial context, it has commonly begun with the premise that translation is a dominating act, with one more powerful language exercising its patterns, definitions, and cultural values over another. In From Language to Language, the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne wants to build his theories on a different foundation.

It may seem that the closer one looks at translation, the less feasible an equilibrium seems—at least, from the outside. For bilingual or multilingual persons, however, the idea of equal values for different languages is simply fact; the hosts of multiple languages are likely to regard them as equally essential components, regardless of any diglossic differences in fluency, utility, or geographical relevance. As a speaker of Wolof, French, and English, Diagne is in this camp, and opens this English edition of From Language to Language with a personal anecdote on his family’s migration, which ends with the determination that his children should “live out their different identities and the languages that expressed them with self-assurance as pride.” His own multilingualism therefore places him at a position more primed to think of translation less as a sequence of conquests, and more as a rendezvous of common goals, whether that be the making of a fully-fledged individual, or of a more varied and generous world. There is, he says, a “gratitude and equality within a shared humanity, which is at the very heart of translation.”

By bringing the notion of hospitality into the translational exchange, Diagne coopts the innate generosity and charity of the act, but evades the pitfalls of gift-related debt by noting that both languages gain equally from the exchange, as “to translate is to create human community with the speaker of the language that one is translating.” Even when the resulting text is reductive, appropriative, or produced for colonial purposes, Diagne suggest that the undertaking of the translation—what takes the mediating individual from being a “vehicle” to being a translator—is a sense of hospitality, of taking in two languages into the mind and moving, shifting them against one another in the pursuit of knowledge and elucidation. It is not necessarily the human being—with all of our various motives, prejudices, and desires—who can accomplish what Derrida had called a pure gift, but the languages themselves are open to each other, that cultivates within the translator a “cross-pollination.” They lead us to curiosity, wonder, and finally the recognition of a common humanity as we realize what all language is meant to do: to make us real to one another.

Where Diagne does face the real failures of cross-cultural exchange, such as the regard of ‘primitive’ African art that gained so much traction in the Western world, he distinguishes these instances as projection, not translation. The simplification and repurposing of foreign expressions can only be categorized as an intellectual and imaginative failure, one that completely neglects the necessary reciprocity of translation. In this, From Language to Language is less a guide to the ethics of postcolonial interaction, and more an ode and an appraisement of translation’s generosity, compassion, and grace—which in fact forces us to first acknowledge, then see beyond our limits. When we dehumanize ourselves by devaluing or reducing one another, it is our most human invention—language—that urges us back towards coexistence, that opens the door of our little rooms and ushers us back into our common world.

2

Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev by Maxim Gorky, translated from the Russian by Bryan Karetnyk, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025

Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

The earliest complete edition of Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev first appeared in English in 1934; now, in Bryan Karetnyk’s sensitive new translation, Gorky’s sketches of his tumultuous friendships with these three titans of Russian literature have once again come alive with a scintillating play of memory and imagination, tenderness and criticism.

In these anecdotal portraits, born of meticulous observation and sympathetic reflection, Gorky defies the self-enclosed perspective that Leo Tolstoy saw in him, having groused: “This is why [your stories] have no characters.” On the contrary, these novelistic descriptions fortify real-life specifics into the aura of fictional characters, and Karetnyk’s translation renders Gorky’s keen attunement with graceful clarity; in Anton Chekhov’s “sad and gentle smile,” for instance, “. . . you could feel the subtle scepticism of a man who knew the value of words, the value of dreams.” Among their wide-ranging meanderings, the writers’ musings on aspects of the literary life—story ideas, interactions with fans, stylistic choices, words like “wishy-washy”—are particularly fascinating.

Not only do the three men themselves get under the skin of Gorky’s writing, so also does their work, causing shifts in perspective that inspire stylistic transpositions and modulations on all levels of his prose. In a montage of carefully numbered notes, he recalls Tolstoy as godlike and diminutive, lofty and earthy—as if the great author had personified one of his own larger-than-life, paradoxically intimate novels. Chekhov, in contrast, Gorky remembers with affectionate vignettes which, complete with rural schoolteachers and other Chekhovian characters, protest the “banal,” ubiquitous, socially accepted forms of violence that Chekhov lamented throughout his life. Turning to the morbidly flamboyant Leonid Andreev, Gorky’s concise formulations suddenly give way to a prolix digression on lying down between train tracks, reminiscent of Andreev’s gruesome sensationalism.

In this edition, J.M. Coetzee provides a valuable introduction to Gorky’s life and work, describing how, as a student of Tolstoy, admirer of Chekhov, and mentor to Andreev, Gorky rocketed to worldwide fame with his novel Mother. He was imprisoned for anti-monarchist activity but, horrified by the violence of the October 1917 Revolution, was eventually sidelined by Lenin. So deep was Gorky’s faith in communist ideals, however, that he allowed himself to be taken in by Stalin’s flattery, ascending to the greatest heights of the Soviet nomenklatura and publicly endorsing the gulags to preserve his lucrative reputation. Yet, throughout his life, he used his considerable influence and resources to support writers who faced persecution and starvation under the repressive regime. Reminiscences reasserts the value of what Gorky is best known for today: his remarkable ability to relate to someone with generosity, vivacity, and precision.

3

Orlanda by Jacqueline Harpman, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, Seven Stories Press, 2025

Review by Regan Mies

“Do you remember the sound of my voice inside my head?” Aline asks the part of herself sitting across the table. “What does I mean when you say it?”

In Jacqueline Harpman’s Orlanda, the 35-year-old university lecturer has long been uninspired, worn down, forlorn for what seems like forever—or at least since she was twelve, when her mother began demanding the modesty and restraint of young womanhood. Then one day, everything changes in an instant: Aline is reading Woolf’s Orlando when she spots a young man at a train station café. Inexplicably, a part of herself, of her soul, zeroes in on him, departs from her body, and occupies his. As she invades, Aline senses only a tremor, a strange sorrow that matches her melancholy stasis, the “perpetual feeling of emptiness” she’s never been able to shake. The body-hopping part of her, which our narrator christens Orlanda, revels in her—his—new form. The consciousness of twenty-year-old music journalist Lucien Lèfrene has put up no resistance whatsoever.

What follow, in Ros Schwartz’s lively translation, are Orlanda’s ecstatic exploits with men; his gradual unearthing and worming out of the responsibilities of Lucien’s former life; and eventually, his trickster’s impulse to confront the repressed Aline and shock her with his intimate knowledge of her life and desires. He is, somehow, that buoyant, unrestrained, twelve-year-old part of her, become flesh.

Having first published Orlanda in 1996, Harpman is best known for the enormously successful I Who Have Never Known Men, a dystopic story of thirty-nine women and one girl who find themselves trapped in a bunker without explanation. Its main character is a singular girl in this makeshift society of women, facing a coming-of-age within the rigid confines of their prison, and through her, the author poses the question: What could it mean to transform from girl into woman in a world without freedom or possibility? In Orlanda, too, Harpman lingers in the territory of puberty and adolescence through Aline, who feels trapped by her mother’s expectation of charm and femininity and stifled by her mother’s insistence that energy, anger, and vigor has no place in a woman’s life. But where I Who Have Never Known Men never strays from its weighty solemnity, Orlanda shows Harpman at her wittiest and most delightful. The narrator—presumably a fourth wall-breaking stand-in for the author—frequently exclaims in surprise when her characters act unexpectedly, and on every page, the sheer pleasure Harpman seems to derive from exploration and imagination is clear, though the gravity of her characters’ very real dilemmas never seems to fall far out of reach.

After Aline and Orlanda first meet, a cosmic magnetism pulls them back to one another time and time again. Together, they’re relaxed and confident; they give each other strength. Orlanda brings out in Aline abilities she no longer realized she possessed, whether an unabashed attraction to her longtime partner or the ability to confront an obnoxious dinner party host. How would your ego and id interact were they distinct entities? Who might have the upper hand? Aline and Orlanda’s clashes and codependences help pave Harpman’s way toward an answer: What could we learn from ourselves, about ourselves, when confronted head-on by ourselves?

4

At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to Virtual Reality by Andrea Pinotti, translated from the Italian by John Eaglesham, Zone Books, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

“Imagination has turned into hallucination,” the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser once warned, in response to our collective hypnosis after the advent of the image: “They are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens. Instead of representing the world, they obscure it. . .” It’s a familiar line of thought within the study of image consciousness, for as long as there has been representation, there has been the struggle to track the real and the facsimile—where they separate, where they congregate, and to what extent they denigrate and draw from one another. Now that technological innovation is coming in a deluge to redefine magic, to create surfaces anew, to induce vision and sensation, and to readdress our bodies’ sensual functions, the same question of demarcations is growing alongside the innovations. It is into this dialogue that Andrea Pinotti arrives with his fascinating and rangy At the Threshold of the Image, which advocates for neither admission nor insulation against the invasion of image, but simply—as the title states—addresses our enduring romance with the boundary, and how it underscores our resistance to physical limits.

Narcissus falls in love with his reflection, Alice plunges into Wonderland, Galatea’s marble body begins to move, a viewer attempts to swat away a fly painted onto a canvas, the near-opaque figure of Tupac Shakur sways in front of an audience of thousands, Brecht knocks down the fourth wall, Wan Hu-Chen writes himself into a book in order to be with its protagonist, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome constructs the television screen as a passage . . . These are but a few of the samples, references, artworks, productions, and narratives that Pinotti draws on throughout his treatment of the threshold between representation and reality, forming the conceptualization of this in-between space as an “in/out dialectic” that incites both our desire to become a part of the image, and to have the image come to life. As he illustrates with encyclopaedic knowledge, images represent doorways of imaginary proportions, and we’ve never been able to resist tapping on a door.

Still, now that this door is no longer an unopenable photograph, cinema, text, painting, or dream, and has morphed with digital largesse into something that can truly be considered “an osmotic membrane,” Pinotti is attempting to diffuse this semi-traumatic evolutionary jump by mapping out the aesthetic and phenomenological lineage of humans skipping back and forth across the threshold. It is a yearning that stems from the very first mirror-reflection, he surmises—from the very first acknowledgement that what one sees looking back is not only an image, but an extension of the self. As such, this is not a text that presumes any judgment or prescription for the increasingly morally complex presence of growingly convincing un-realities, but one that positions this pursuit of immersion within the history of human consciousness.

Because the instinct and fantasy of entering the image is a possessive one—and possession is so human. We are creatures covetous of experience, and the more we are aware of our own experiential limits, the more we seek to surpass them. It is our appetite for feeling, for navigating, for discovery, and for conquest that leads us not only to create works of unreality—which expand and multiply our reality—but also to long for the real potentials of those unrealities. History evinces that standing at a threshold never means turning back, it means forging on. Even if, as Pinotti so artfully and expertly illustrates, we have to invent somewhere to go.

5

Castigation by Sultan Raev, translated from the Kyrgyz by Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Syracuse University Press, 2025

Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

In Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s virtuosic translation, Sultan Raev’s novel Castigation displays an astounding variety of tones and forms. The translator’s note advises readers to “give up all attempts to fit this tale into any frame,” and indeed, within the text you’ll find poems, lists, digressive footnotes, vengeful snakes, Soviet punitive psychiatry, extensive quotations from Shakespeare and Şayloobek Düyşeev, and references to several of the world’s religions. Rich with polyphony and plethoric subtexts, Castigation rewards careful reading—and rereading.

From the beginning, Raev employs doppelgängers and recurring images to agitate the vortex of uncertainty in which his characters—seven psychiatric patients trudging through a desert to the Holy Land—find themselves. Is the desert a post-apocalyptic world? Or is it “The Seven” who are lost between death and reincarnation? Does the Holy Land even exist? The disorientation becomes thoroughly terrifying as the characters’ historical namesakes, including Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, invade their dreams and undermine their sense of self, and their relationships are complicated by mistaken identities and past traumas.

Denominated “a new Kyrgyz epic” on its cover, Raev’s novel has earned a place among the monumental thousand-year-old songs that inaugurated Kyrgyzstan’s indigenous literary traditions. Balladic rhythms and refrains suffuse the prose along with soothsayers and gods of epic poetry, but Raev’s story overturns the tradition of celebrating bloody military exploits; instead, he amplifies the voices of victims—women, the mentally ill, exploited animals, children . . .

The bitterness of the vulnerable betrayed by the powerful pervades the novel’s sense of history and The Seven’s coerced expulsion from their world. Kyrgyzstan was formed when the Soviet government took it upon itself to decide what being Kyrgyz meant and where to put people who seemed to fit the official description. In return for being basically exiled to a reservation, the indigenous nomads were promised advantages which Stalin later retracted, allowing poverty to overrun the Kyrgyz peoples.

Raev critically juxtaposes such imperialist violence with domestic abuse, political repression, and ecological destruction. The desert is partly a figure for an exhausted Earth suffering from deforestation and post-extractivist climate change, and in chastising humanity’s exceptionalist illusions, the curses that rain down upon Castigation’s conquerors are reminiscent of Kojojash, a traditional Kyrgyz epic in which a hunter is cursed by a mountain goat after driving her kin almost to extinction. “You’re not the pillar of the World!” an elderly woman screams at Alexander the Great. “All the living beings on Earth were not born to feed your belly!”

6

House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025

Review by Christopher Alexander

For readers already familiar with Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s rich literary imagination, her patchwork novel House of Day, House of Night will seem like a homecoming of sorts. Set in the author’s adopted home of Krajanów, the stories return to her familiar themes: feminism, spirituality, astrology, the more-than-human world, and a mysticism rooted in the rich humus of the everyday.

Krajanów is part of the region of Silesia, annexed by the Prussians in the eighteenth century and slowly Germanized until it was returned to the Poles after the Second World War in a land swap. Tokarczuk addresses this porousness of borders and the trauma of relocation in House of Day, House of Night, which could not be more rooted in place and its shifting nature. In a scene loaded with tragic irony and sly humor, a relocated German returns to his village with his wife to see the town he grew up in, only to die on a hill, unwrapping a chocolate bar he would never eat, as his wife waits in the car below. What follows is an administrative tug of war as Czech and Polish guards discover the body and shove it repeatedly across the border to avoid claiming responsibility. The foxes, for their part, crisscross the frontier with impunity.

The cast of characters are the town’s residents—the intrigue of their foibles and follies, the adventures of their lives. The narrator is a writer who has recently moved in, and one of her closest friends is an older woman and wigmaker, Marta, who is both the guardian of the town’s memory and a reminder of human time’s fleeting nature. As they listen to Anna Karenina together on the radio, the narrator muses about her friend: “I sometimes wonder if she can understand these stories made up of dialogue read out by a single voice, and I think maybe she’s only listening to individual words, to the melody of the language.” In the next sentence, she hints that Marta may be becoming senile. The human tendency towards meaning becomes lost in music, and memory, and—like life—fades out and on.

But for those of us still able to distinguish words and make meaning out of sentences, House of Day, House of Night is a joyous read for the deep empathy and consideration Tokarczuk has for her characters. In this reissue of Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s luminous 2003 translation—which brought Tokarczuk’s work into English for the first time—readers will find deep insights into the origins of Tokarczuk’s fiction, which lie in the genius loci of Krajanów.

7

The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez, translated from the French by Alex Niemi, Dorothy Project, 2025

Review by Christopher Alexander

Laura Vazquez’s The Endless Week begins with a promise of sorts—a biblical epigraph hinting that the following pages contain knowledge of the face of God: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; / then we shall see face to face. / Now I know in part; / then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” But as much as the novel is a meditation on both the divine and the human, it is also a reflection on the omnipresence of images on social networks and the way they mirror and refract our reality.

Salim, the young hero of the The Endless Week, is a poet who posts his work online and lives at a remove from the world. He has stopped attending school after a classmate had his eye gouged out, disturbed by the collective non-response of the administration; instead, he learns about life outside his doors through the internet, speaking to his followers and messaging his friend Jonathan, whom he eventually meets in “real life.” Sharing this isolated existence is his sister Sarah, their father, and their dying grandmother. Vazquez threads all these various elements to form a plot that involves Salim and Sarah’s search for their lost mother, who is a potential blood donor for their grandmother. This leads to a departure from their insulated life to confront the flesh-and-blood incarnations of existence, which show up in a motley cohort of the homeless, drunk, and disenfranchised. Yet, despite The Endless Week’s novelistic appearances, it is at its core an exceptional work of poetry.

Vazquez aligns herself with a mystic tradition that observes the world with a detached, almost clinical view of events as they occur. Operating on the level of koan, a concise paradoxical wisdom similar to that of verse, Vazquez extends both aesthetics to deploy them in prose. The result is a mediatization of images that reflect and refract on the fragile, slippery nature of existence and its essential nature. In one scene, Salim becomes conscious that he is a collection of images (thoughts) while engrossed in his phone:

He wondered how many images were engraved in his mind like that, how many ads, how many words, shapes, songs, smells, scenes, faces, how many thousands of clips lived like that in his mind, and how many more would get in without him realizing. He wondered if the scenes in his mind belonged to his mind or if they belonged to the world. Was he made of this combination of images and memories, some abstract, some clearer, in his mind? Did his memories make him, or did he make his memories? He locked his phone, he shuddered once.

For Vazquez, the world itself begins in words that come from a distant voice, whispering us into being. In a world of deepfakes, The Endless Week reminds us that reality is pure fiction and that we co-author our existence with a cohort of other agencies, suggesting that each one of these others is a face and facet of God.

8

The Investigator by Dragan Velikić, translated from the Serbian by Christina Pribichevich-Zorić, Istros Books, 2025

Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

How does the past manifest in us to shape our sense of possible futures? Celebrated Serbian writer Dragan Velikić confronts this question with quiet torment in The Investigator, his second novel to be translated into English.

Dragan Velikić, a fictional narrator who shares his author’s name, suffers a paralytic tremor of the soul when his mother dies in Belgrade, upon which his recollections of her become entangled in his terror of losing his memory to Alzheimer’s. He recalls her domineering passion for order and detail; over and over she had poured over old photographs, “obsessed with wanting to have the full wealth of her experience at her disposal at every moment. That was why she had to keep remembering the life she had lived and vigilantly reign over its vast territory.” Here is a suggestion that time can be ruled—and that the ruler may select their life experiences from the offerings available within the territory’s borders. “The world was like a catalogue,” says Velikić of his strictly organized childhood. In his mother’s eyes, anything in the catalogue, any past or present detail, could be read as a “warning sign” for the future. This is the logic of genetics as well as superstition: using past circumstances to explain the present and anticipate the future. But even as he notices his mother’s inclinations surfacing in himself, Velikić finds them stifling.

Is it madness to seek order in a life consisting of unfinished stories—especially considering how easily events may be forgotten, families lost, borders redrawn? Velikić’s grappling with bereavements, memory lapses, and aborted projects is part of his struggle to exist in a place that should be home but offers none of home’s comforts or stability; in violent ethnic conflicts, his native Pula becomes Italy one minute, Yugoslavia the next, and ultimately Croatia. When Yugoslavia’s disintegration renders Pula unsafe for Serbs, dispossession and relocation to Belgrade catalyze the fatal decline of Velikić’s parents.

Christina Pribichevich-Zorić’s beautiful translation of Velikić’s muted conflicts insists on a slow read; his ruminative plot appears to leave no loose ends while in fact creating sheaves of them. As the novel progresses, it becomes difficult to distinguish actual events from what the narrator merely imagines, and the reader may find herself unable to trust her memory of what she has read—or sometimes not wanting to trust it, when Velikić re-envisions a previously remembered episode in a richer imaginary. With uncertainty pathing the text, The Investigator’s greatest revelation may indeed be the creative promise latent in the truth’s vulnerability.

9

Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets, translated from the Persian-Dari, Two Lines Press, 2025

Review by Liliana Torpey

Ideally, anthologies would act contrary to our expectations, shining brightest when they complicate what might be simplified, and introducing plurality over a flattening unity. This is certainly the case in Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets, the broad parameters of which shelter other, more specific descriptors: clandestine, diasporic, exilic, activist, academic, feminist, feminine. In her introduction, Aria Aber states that Afghan poetry is one “of fragmentation, multiethnic positionalities and languages, and geographic variation.” The five poets featured here, writing in Persian and brought into English by eight translators, deliver a variation in poetics that will surely offer any reader of poetry a place to land.

I was particularly taken by Maral Taheri’s poems, which writhe and dance like a ball of worms (figures that feature prominently in her verses). “I need to spit to one side / and send kisses to the other / then come back and fill out my crosswords / I would never admit that the world has no meaning,” writes Taheri in Hajar Hussaini’s muscular translation. Here, love and irreverence wrestle and embrace amidst existentialist chaos and material violence.

Mahbouba Ibrahimi’s poems, on the other hand, elicit feelings of longing, a troubled introspection: “Mournful, enraged, / these days / poetry / can’t work its poetry.” Meanwhile, Mariam Meetra’s work throws a gut punch of tenderness and despair: “and plant a tree in the middle of the room / so the explosions can’t shake it / the blood stench can’t smother it.”

Some poems are unyielding in their act of witnessing war, terror, and stolen childhoods, as in Karima Shabrang’s lines: “Of all things silent I am afraid, / of a silent God / who dwells where the hands of orphans can’t reach.” Others grasp with determination toward freedom: “If you have no legs, leap into the dark . . . By any path that can lead away from this prison / you have to escape,” writes Nadia Anjuman.

In focusing only on five poets, Hair on Fire brings their stature into focus, recognizing these writers’ place in a global, feminist canon. You could never make me believe that poetry has no meaningful effect—not when collections like this exist.

10

You Must Live, New Poetry From Palestine, edited and translated from the Arabic by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, Copper Canyon Press, 2025

Review by Christopher Alexander 

You Must Live, New Poetry From Palestine is both a prayer and an order: that the rich polyphony of voices continue to live in face of ongoing genocide. Bringing together works from contemporary poets currently living in Palestine (with the exception of Yahya Ashour, who was stranded in Michigan when the war began), the poems in this collection vibrate with present urgency, acting as a testimony not only to the brutality of the Israeli invasion, but the vibrancy of the fractured literary community in Gaza. In one of the early poems of the collection, Waleed al-Aqqad addresses this mutilated body politic and the collective mourning of its citizens in “I have never seen a corpse intact”:

I have never seen a corpse intact
but I recognize each of them
every one of them, each victim.
Even those fingers, I know whose they are.

For the most part, the collected works are written in an experimental vein of modernist Arabic poetry inaugurated by Mahmoud Darwish, which—while resolutely contemporary—is rooted in classical traditions. In their introduction, editors and translators Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Boor address some of the difficulties of bringing this form of verse into contemporary English, particularly given the prevalence of poetic devices in everyday speech and the common motif of personification that speaks to a pre-Islamic, animist view of the universe.

One example of this intersection between past and present aesthetics can be found in the queer politics of Nema’a Hassan’s “How to build a pub in a country prohibited from love.” Arabic verse has a long tradition of odes to young boys and a running theme of liberation through excess and drinking, both of which existed alongside strict conservative mores. In referencing not only the repressive force of the Israeli army but also the theocratic rule of Hamas, Hassan demonstrates the possible subversions:

To my neighbor whose window I peep through each night,
urged by the tight dress I love to wear,
I smile and feed
naughty children syruped pies.

For the poets included in this volume, simply submitting their work was an act of courage, as each message sent to the outside world initiated them as potential targets—and still does. The process of translation and editing also put them at risk, shining a beacon each time they connected to a cell tower or satellite; to hone their language, they put their lives on the line. Still, as the authors of this volume remind us again and again, simply living in Palestine is deadly, and the depths of the tragedy must be heard and understood for it to stop. To imagine such a future, certain poems in this volume also conjure up an end to the war, such as in Khaled Juma’s “When the Soldiers Leave this Place”:

When the soldiers leave this place,
I’m going out to buy a few millimeters of air
and try, if I can, to sing you
to sleep.

. . .

When the soldiers leave this place
don’t mess with what remains of the story.
They know—they only know
what is only known to them.

The story is not over, and this collection grants its readers access to the knowledge and experiences of those living on the ground: the bonds of family and kinship, the intimate awareness of death, the devastating impacts of genocide, and the will to go on living.


 

Christopher Alexander is a poet, performer and multidisciplinary artist. S he is currently engaged in a long-term investigation on interspecies communication and the performance of nature in the Mediterranean. Together with the visual artist and researcher Alexia Antuoferomo, they co-founded the collective of artists and researchers, Tramages. Heir texts and translations have been published in Asymptote, Belleville Park Pages, Pamenar Press Online Magazine, parentheses, Point de chute, FORTH Magazine, Fragile Revue de Créationsremue.net, and Transat’, among other publications. Heir work has been exhibited at 59 Rivoli, La Générale Nord-Est, Mémoire de l’avenir, and the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Heir first poetry collection, play-boy, explores the seepage of toxic masculinity into contemporary gender norms and is forthcoming in a bilingual edition with Le Nouvel Attila in 2026.

Regan Mies is a writer and translator in New York. Her work has appeared in the LA Review of BooksCleveland Review of BooksNecessary Fiction, and elsewhere. 

Xiao Yue Shan is a poet, writer, editor, and translator.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong writes experimental fiction, essays, and poetry. Her books include The Box and Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl, both published by Graywolf Press.

*****

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“Swarms touch the text where thought burns”: An Interview with Aiden Farrell on Translating The Vitals by Marie de Quatrebarbes           

The text is as bodily as the body is textual, their respective functions included.

The Vitals, written by Marie de Quatrebarbes and translated from the French by Aiden Farrell, examines the chasm of loss and desire to “conjugate the moments outside of me, spent so far from you, with this distance that is ‘I see’ and you who are ‘so far from me.’” Written in lyrical, diaristic fragments that take place between July and December, the poems certify de Quatrebarbes as a master of the short prose poetry form, which she imagines as nestled matryoshka dolls. Each poem is titled with the day of the month as the speaker lives her life and thoughts intrude. “Say again, do mourners have a singular?” asks de Quatrebarbes, as she lives and re-lives: “The day of his departure–the eye simply wanted to take stock.”

Farrell’s English translation is a deft reflection of the poet’s angular and defamiliarizing experiments with syntax, discontinuity, and memory; in this interview, I spoke with him on the ongoing process of translational work, its intersections with his personal writing, and the ways in which de Quartrebarbes subverts language.

Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation to you?

Aiden Farrell (AF): I like that you’ve framed literary translation as an act, because that’s exactly what it is, and any definition that tries to go beyond the action of translation has to be taken with a grain of salt—which is to say that translation is nothing if not a process, necessarily changing from project to project and from translator to translator.

A writing practice necessitates a reading practice; translation is both at the same time, and also not exactly, because when I’m reading to translate I’m not reading as I otherwise would, and when I’m writing my translation I’m not writing as I otherwise would, but I’m still doing both. To varying degrees, every poem I read asks me to reinvent the way I read poetry, and calls attention to my standards for reading, and then also for writing. The same goes for translating—I have to reinvent, surrender just enough of my instincts that I can be open to receiving what the original poem is giving me, but also hold on just enough that I can respond accordingly. I have to disappear so as to appear, only a second later. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2025

The latest from Palestine, France, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Bulgaria, Japan, Canada, Cuba, Argentina, Slovakia, and China!

This month’s round-up of newly released titles spans twelve titles across twelve countries. We’ve got a profound and lucid collection compiled of diaries from the genocide in Gaza; a readdressing of womanly sacrifice in the domestic realm; an Argentinian novel reinventing the history of Italy’s famed “Park of the Monsters”; the long-awaited esoteric and experimental tome from German writer Michael Lentz; essays and textual riches from the father of surrealism; and much, much more. . .

9781917093064

Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Nahil Mohana, Sondos Sabra, Ala’a Obaid, and Batool Abu Akleen, translated from the Arabic by Basma Ghalayini and Ayah Najadat, Comma Press, 2025

Review by Justin Goodman

Similar to the intimate testimonies of Atef Abu Said’s Don’t Look Left and Plestia Alaqad’s The Eyes of Gaza, Voices of Resistance compiles the diaries of four Gazan women, tracing their thoughts as they mourn their martyred, fear their decimation, celebrate the Palestinian people, and sacrifice meals for the sake of birthday pastries. Together, Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid highlight what Gillian Slovo describes in her introduction as both a beauty “in [their] honesty and spirit” and a horror as they gain “a whole new vocabulary for describing the sounds of different bombs.” This latter is compiled by Mohana in a list running half a page long, as she distinguishes the subtleties between “Bouf” (aerial bombing) and “Dddof” (artillery shelling). Most importantly, however, she adds: “. . . we have begun to lose our hearing.”

READ MORE…

Summer 2025: Highlights from the Team

Our bountiful Summer 2025 edition is filled with gems—as these highlights from our team show!

I have complicated feelings about Carolina Brown’s “Anthropocene” (tr. Jessica Powell). The brevity it accords its narrator’s transness is alternately touching and maddening, the fatphobia is at once completely spot-on for such a self-loathing narrator and at the same time it is pretty dehumanizing‚ but, ultimately, all that falls away in the ravaged face of a one-armed zombie jogging across the post climate-change Antarctic wasteland. A wonderful sci-fi tale.

I’d love Syaman Rapongan’s Eyes of an Ocean (tr. Darryl Sterk) for the title alone, but fortunately, Rapongan seems like a strong contender for the title of the actual most-interesting-man-in-the-world. His play with words, his treatment of colonization and indigeneity, the kindness with which he talks about younger generations. I really needed to read something like this, after all the ugliness that’s been going on in my own country.

I love the gender-bender secret agent in Valentinas Klimašauskas’s Polygon (tr. Erika Lastovskytė) so freaking much. The concluding discussion of airplane spotters is a particular stand-out for its treatment of how individuals become conscious of their political power.

Refugees are human beings. Where Rodrigo Urquiola Flores’ “La Venezolana” (tr. Shaina Brassard) shines is in its steadfast refusal either to vilify or idealize them, to present them in all their messy humanity, and in its willingness to show how shameful the narrator’s behavior towards them.

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

Emmanuelle Sapin’s story “A Child Is Stolen” (tr. Michelle Kiefer) starts off with a swift, telling punch to the gut and builds from there.

Ahmad Shamlou’s poems in Niloufar Talebi’s lilting translation hover in waves of emotion and radiance: “Give me mirrors and eager moths, / light and wine…”

With playfulness and insight, Katia Grubisic sharpens the discussion about AI and translation by focusing on error in her piece “The Authority of Error”: “My argument is that AI makes the wrong kind of mistakes.  Mistakes breed resilience, and, most importantly, humility.”

Fawwaz Taboulsi, in Yasmine Zohdi’s translation, steers us directly into the sadness of Lebanon, 1982, and the time of the Siege of Beirut. His grief speaks with lucidity: “And, ever so slowly, the departing fighters peel away from the grasping, waving hands and from the embracing arms. Like skin peeling off its own flesh. They peel away from the farewells. From the prayers. From the promises.”

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how writers build characters. Jana Putrle Srdić’s poem “End of the world, beginning” in Katia Zakrajšek’s translation, does this in striking ways: ” Sitting on a warm rock, scratching in the wind, / you are a monkey, a branch with ants filing along it, debris in the air, / spots of flickering light”

—Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2025

Newly released titles from Morocco, India, Norway, Haiti, Spain, Austria, Argentina, Egypt, Brazil, Germany, and Chile!

This month, we’re delighted to present eleven titles from eleven countries, including a lyrical litany of dreams from a Nobel laureate, a psychologically thrilling fiction-study of domestic violence and complicity, a rollicking novel on poverty and police repression in a Brazilian favela, a sharp and surrealistic collection that deeply probes the connection between death and poetry, and much, much more. . .  

1

Writings on Translation by Abdessalam Benabdelali, translated from the Arabic by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jordan Silversmith

“What is at stake in translation,” Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali writes, “is the strangeness of the other.” In Writings on Translation, a slim but resonant volume translated with clarity and philosophical sensitivity by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Benabdelali argues not only that translation is foundational to the development of Arabic and European thought, but that it constitutes a mode of ethical relation—a hosting of the stranger.

Composed of essays selected from two earlier Arabic-language works, this collection positions translation not as the failed transfer of meaning between stable tongues, but as a generative rupture in the myth of linguistic purity. Echoing Derrida and drawing on classical Arabic poetics, Benabdelali deftly critiques the nationalist drive to see language as a closed identity. “The instrument of translation is a living language,” he writes, “and its mirror is condemned to be broken.” It is in this shattering that thought is permitted to migrate.

What emerges then is a meditation on translation as both inheritance and resistance. Benabdelali revisits the Abbasid-era Bayt al-Hikma, critiques 18th-century French Orientalism, and confronts the ambivalence of Arabic literary modernity, where some authors write in expectation of translation while others fear its erasure. His essays resist binary framings of colonizer and colonized, instead advocating for a polyglossic hospitality in which meaning is always provisional and always in motion. READ MORE…

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

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…

Portrait of a Faceless Man Without a Country: A Review of Alparegho, Like-nothing-else by Hélène Sanguinetti

Alparegho disarms its readers with a forceful and muscular language that tenderly rips through.

Alparegho, Like-nothing-else by Hélène Sanguinetti, translated from the French by Ann Cefola, Beautiful Days Press, 2025

Today is the day! “It’s today, / great day! / Let’s shake sheets out / the windows, / smash panes and  / replace them, / empty drawers, pockets, / shelves. / Great day!” Hélène Sanguinetti’s collection, Alparegho, Like-nothing-else breaks through walls, those we erect with mortar and brick as well as the more insidious ones we draw in our minds and on the Earth. Through Ann Cefola’s translation, Alparegho effortlessly draws readers into a patchwork of vignettes that question the solidity of home and country, suggesting that these supposedly immutable objects are heavy burdens; we would be better off leaving them by the wayside. In seven chapters, the poet increasingly brings to bear the oppressive characters of the nation-state and the domestic sphere, shattering their hegemony in a sweeping motion that sweeps her readers from one scene, one place to another, looping us back and around.

Sanguinetti’s long poetic career has exhibited a practice that moves between polyphony and plasticity, and the resultant sense of vertigo disorients the internal compass as one move forward through this collection, which incorporates elements of fables, dreams, and songs to disenchant its readers from the sorcery of capitalism and authoritarianism. Alparegho opens with a potent symbol of the weight of home on our backs: a snail creeps through the dark of the night of the house, leaving a trail of slime. From there, the author slyly and gradually suggests that the rooms of the house, or the lands of the king, are interchangeable squares on a chessboard, abstract concepts just as much as lived environments. Here, home is neither comfortable nor cozy, but a rotting mess, slowly caving in. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Riversong by Wendy Delorme

I seek only those flammable things from which a story might be made.

Ever kept a secret way longer than you thought you would? A year? Two? What about seven? In this novel excerpt from French author Wendy Delorme, brilliantly translated by Asymptote’s own Kathryn Raver, a story of a love unspoken becomes a story about the nature of literature itself, and the parallels between writing and self-creation. Isolated in a mountain cabin, an unnamed writer reflects back on the years leading up to their relationship with their now-lover. At first hesitant to confess her feelings, she instead watches her friend’s gender transition unfold over the course of several years, only to find that as their voice and appearance change, her feelings for them deepen. When, after a an encounter on a rainy night, her feelings finally come to light, it sparks an epistolary conversation that will change both their lives. Read on!

A restless night. Sleep escapes me, but the words don’t come either. What does come is the thought of writing to you. I’m thinking again of how we met. How we really met. That night where I knew I wanted you.

Sometimes, a person comes along and we see them. Truly see them, I mean. Our perspective changes. Our line of sight suddenly sharpens, like that of an animal scrutinizing the brush to see what moves within. Our retinae focus, taking in details that up until that point had blurred together into a hazy landscape. The eye becomes curious and searches for more, latches onto a mouth, the clean line of an eyebrow, the velvety texture of a cheek, a shoulder muscle, a manner of smiling. This sort of gaze, when it lands on another, radically changes the bond two people share.

What turned my gaze on its head, that night? READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2025

New publications from Iran, Argentina, Spain, Peru, Mexico, Japan, France, Finland, Sweden, China, and Italy!

This month, we’re delighted to be bringing twelve brilliant titles from eleven different countries. Find here the novelization of a famous chess match that reveals the greater geopolitical game playing us all; a summery fiction that melds the structures of nature and human architecture; a poetry collection rendering tender portraits of working-class women; a lyrical rewriting of a remarkable nun-turned-conquistador’s New World adventures; and so much more.

oblivion

Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran, edited by Nahid Ahmadian and Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, translated from the Persian by Nahid Ahmadian, Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, and Hesam Sharifian, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Henry Gifford

In order, the five plays included in Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran are set in Arabia in the fifth century AD (The Sacrifice of Senemar by Bahram Beyzaie); China in the second century BC (Oblivion by Hamid Amjad); Spain in the twentieth century (Dance of Mares by Mohammad Charmshir); somewhere (per stage directions and blank spaces left in the dialogue) in the city you’re in, on the day you’re reading it (The Child by Naghmeh Samini); and a laundromat in Los Angeles at three in the morning (Bird of Dawn by Sepideh Khosrowjah). Their narratives are of a hubristic yet indecisive king and his palace; imperial bloodshed and familial betrayal; sex and mariticide; an infant born on a migrant raft, protected at the border by three women who all deny being his mother; and three generations of Iranian immigrants, each with romantic trouble and divided identities. Some are epic, and others are everyday. None of them are set in ancient Persia or modern Iran, and only the first and last are explicitly about Persians or Iranians.

Yet these are, in fact, plays from the same country over the same quarter-century, from 1995 to 2019. The diversity of their settings and scale is a wise editorial decision intended to highlight the diversity of theater in Iran, but it also reflects a practical need of addressing contemporary, local problems obliquely under a censorship regime. What is more interesting is the collection’s consistency, and in particular the nonchronological approach taken within almost all of the plays. Oblivion, for example, begins with two siblings going to meet their adoptive brother after years apart; the encounter then extends over the course of the play as a frame to the story of their lives and their parents’, acted out in shadows on a scrim behind them. The formal blending extends this sense of collapsed time; as the editors’ introduction explains in great detail, shadow puppetry (khayāl-bāzi) is an old Persian form, here embedded within a more modern, European-inflected mode. The other plays are similarly mixed—traditional aspects and motifs cohering with contemporary themes and styles.

Every nation has history, but I wonder, reading the plays of Oblivion, if there is something about Iran—a young nation of an ancient culture—that has made its past more palpable, fraught, and vividly present. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest from India, Hong Kong, and Sweden!

This week, our editors are introducing a generous new anthology that illuminates India’s capital, the winners of prestigious Swedish literary awards, and a feature of Hong Kong poets. Read on to find out more.

Zohra Salih, Editor at Large, reporting from India

It has been a harrowing week in this part of the world. We are still, very cautiously, coming to terms with the ceasefire that was finally declared to de-escalate tensions between India and Pakistan, the consequences of which have been disproportionately and brutally borne by the residents of occupied Kashmir (one of the most militarized zones in the world). Things are now supposedly returning to ‘normal’, yet the fact that war was blatantly invoked, justified, and celebrated by fellow citizens has created an atmosphere of unease around writing about India in its aftermath, to say the least.

If he were alive today, one person would have found the words to make something meaningful and urgent amidst this fog of madness: Saadat Hasan Manto. Born in India and forced to make a second life in the newly formed Pakistan, the fiery writer and chronicler of Bombay was considered prophetic for his stories that anticipated with stark-eyed clarity the savagery awaiting the two nations post-Partition, a decision he vehemently opposed. May 11 is the 113th anniversary of his birth, and there is no better time to return to his short story, ‘Toba Tek Singh, or his collection Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition, than now. Those in Mumbai have also been able to experience his stories—many of them excluded from the usual anthologies—as part of an audio theatre piece performed by Katha Khana at the iconic Prithvi theatre on May 13.

I would also be remiss to not mention The World With Its Mouth Open by another journalist turned author, Zahid Rafiq, which came out in December last year. Rafiq’s debut short story collection vividly and humanely renders the lives of the people of Kashmir as they go on with what has come to be called ordinary life, marked by precarity. There is a quietness to the writing that allows Rafiq to enter your mind and transport it to the valley, blocking out all the noise that obscures its image in the mainstream imagination. Needless to say, it is essential reading for the times we are living in today. READ MORE…

Dichotomies of Love: A Review of Living in Your Light by Abdellah Taïa

Taïa writes of the physicality and torture of love, alongside larger questions of agency and resistance.

 Living in Your Light by Abdellah Taïa, translated from the Arabic by Emma Ramadan, Seven Stories Press, 2025

Nearly halfway through Living in Your Light, the narrator, Malika, plainly states: “Survival doesn’t make us into better people.” Abdellah Taïa’s latest novel tells the story of this survival in three parts, ranging from 1954 to 1999, showing us the endurance of his protagonist through rejection, death, love, and loss—but also her gradual hardening. When Malika makes the above statement to her daughter, Khadija, she’s already recognized that life has made her more severe than the young woman who falls in love in the novel’s opening.

Malika is a complex narrator, at times honest with herself and at other times stubborn, and Taïa clearly designates her as representing his own mother, M’Barka. The author has written on his mother in previous works, but has never explored her motivations, her character, or her complications so intimately. In his collection of short stories, Another Morocco, he writes: “M’Barka and I love each other, with much more than the love between a mother and son,” and has said elsewhere that his favorite word is M’Barka. However, their relationship is complicated, and Living in Your Light is plainly Taïa’s way of deciphering and honoring his mother’s journey.

Thus, Living in Your Light is one of Taïa’s most impressive works to date for its ability to tightly capture the struggles of a woman’s independence in Morocco, headed by Malika’s determination to control her own life, and continually thwarted by the forces of poverty, war, and colonization. Throughout the novel, Taïa writes of the physicality and torture of love, alongside larger questions of agency and resistance. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The River and the Sea” by Abdoul Ali War

The sea is first / The sea is mother

That a poem so brief can contain a world may seem incredible to some, but here, Mauritanian poet Abdoul Ali War has accomplished just that. In this poem of fourteen short lines, elegantly translated by Patrick Williamson, Ali War offers a sparing vision of the interplay between river and sea, the water of life and the vast, world-separating lacuna from which all life once came, and to which all will, eventually, return. In a brilliant turn, Ali War inverts the traditional movement between the two forces, positing “The river is a branch / The sea is a tree,” calling our attention to the cyclical processes of the natural world, in which all that we the living depend on emerges from a greater, primordial body. Implicit in the brief, plainspoken lines and lack of punctuation is a deep appreciation for the delicacy of the relationship between these forces; we disregard the river and the sea at our peril. Read on!

The river goes to the sea
The sea has its own
space
It has its own
depth
The sea is first
The sea is mother

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2025

New publications from Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, Egypt, South Korea, Greece, and Poland!

This month, we’re introducing thirteen new publications from eleven different countries. A strange and visceral collection of poems that distort and reimagine the body; a contemporary, perambulating study of the contemporary city; a novel that forsakes linearity for a complex exploration of chance and coincidence; a series that splits the act of storytelling—and the storyteller—into kaleidoscopic puzzle-pieces; an intimate and unflinching look at motherhood and its disappearance of boundaries; and more. . .

Transparencies 2025 PROMO COVER

Transparencies by Maria Borio, translated from the Italian by Danielle Pieratti, World Poetry Books, 2025

    Review by Jason Gordy Walker

Italian poet Maria Borio’s English debut, Transparencies, transports us to an Italy defined as much by glass, screens, and holograms as it is by history and landscape. Divided into three sections—“Distances,” “Videos, Fables,” and “Transparence”—Borio presents a world where past, present, and future converge toward an audible silence, where the self presents itself as genderless, morphable—the I becomes you becomes we becomes they—and the poet plays not a character nor a confessionalist but an airy, elegant observer, as illustrated in “Letter, 00:00 AM”:

At the end of the video, soundless voices,
hollowed-out faces scroll like the ground stumps
of legend: even people with desires

emptied like furrows in tar can carry
a fable. The screams are timbers, old water
they turn to bark, white knots, even.

Danielle Pieratti’s translations preserve the glassiness inherent in the Italian originals; she has strived for accuracy of voice and image, as evident in “Green and Scarlet” (“Verde e rosa”), an eight-part poem that considers natural, national, and human borders: “Between the trees there’s the border’s furrow / the heavy sign that stopped them / all around shapes spring up like nations.” In an interview at Words Without Borders, Borio recalls how she and Pieratti chose to use “scarlet” instead of “pink” when translating “rosa”: “ . . . in English it’s literally ‘pink,’ but . . . the color referred to the luminous atmosphere of a sunset in the woods, so ‘pink’ would have given too sharp an impression . . . Danielle came up with the word ‘scarlet,’ which . . . feels softer, more delicate, with a gradual outpouring . . . .” Such close attention to diction permeates the collection.

Although the book examines the modern world and its technology—recordings, photos, videos, cellphones—Borio refuses to be glitzy (she’s no Twitter-verse poet). Describing the London Aquatic Centre, she pens lines like, “The transparent organs overhead open / become a soft line chasing itself, / cleansing the breath’s dark colors . . .” and “Life is everywhere, in the curved line / we inhabit as though thinking.” Simultaneously detailed and abstract, her verse brings to mind Eugenio Montale and Wallace Stevens, two influences that Pieratti mentions in her illuminating translator’s note—although there’s some European surrealism rolling through her veins, too: “The cactus spines clench their vertebra of water.” Such accents only add to her poetry’s dreamlike magnetism, its cultured mystique. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from the Philippines, Canada, and Guatemala!

This week, our team members report on writers resisting governmental oppression, newly collected poems, one of the largest multilingual literary festivals in North America, and more!

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines

Writer, translator, and Amihan National Federation of Peasant Women organiser Amanda Socorro Lacaba Echanis, whose imprisonment PEN International has denounced as ‘a stark reminder of how governments silence female voices to suppress dissent’, has rolled out an unprecedented bid for the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman student council while incarcerated under questionable charges.

The 36-year-old Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Malikhaing Pagsulat (Creative Writing in Filipino) student was arrested in 2020 for alleged illegal possession of firearms—an allegation she and several civil liberties organisations say is made-up. Amanda continues to write and translate behind bars, publishing her collection of poems, prose, and plays, Binhi ng Paglaya (Seeds of Liberation, Gantala Press) in 2023, and receiving fellowships from writing workshops like the Palihang Rogelio Sicat (which she attended virtually) in 2024. READ MORE…