Policing the borders of the Spanish language was a tool of religious and racial discrimination. Yet Spanish is not inherently imperial.
Literature in Translation
Editors: Bonnie Chau & Bécquer Seguín
Past Editor: Stephen Twilley
Books and Abandonment
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season makes other authors’ moral delicacy look like condescension.
A Man in Brussels
Storytelling about the European Union tends to be done by those aggressively disinterested in its survival. Isn’t that a problem?
Intellectual Alchemists
What distinguishes the American from the European intellectual? Does that matter?
How to Read Short Stories Like an Underdog
Departing from a fixed form, some Latin American writers employed the short story as a laboratory of writing.
Reading Against the Line: Translation, Fascism, Erasure
I’m just wary of the tendency to glorify revolutionary violence and masculinity.
The Kleist We Need
Heinrich von Kleist teaches how to resist heteronormativity, as well as how to imagine gender fluidity and a less restrictive masculinity.
We Other Victorians
The late 19th and early 21st centuries share a common loss of technological innocence.
Novels of Colombia’s Patriarchy
Fathers dead and fathers dying—as well as adult children struggling to leave their fathers’ shadow—shape two recent novels from Colombia. Though one concerns a ...
Ferrante’s Storytelling in a Global Age
Today Europa Editions publishes Elena Ferrante’s Key Words, by Italy’s foremost Ferrante scholar, Tiziana de Rogatis. Key Words takes the acclaimed Neapolitan ...
Temporal Lines
Public Books and the Sydney Review of Books have partnered to exchange a series of articles with international concerns. Today’s article, “Temporal Lines: An Interview with Pedro Mairal, Samanta Schweblin, Fabian Martinez,” by ...
“The Word Illegal Didn’t Make Sense Anymore”
Ten years ago, when I would ask my students if they knew any modern Italian authors—not Dante—I would occasionally get the response of “Calvino” and, more ...
Out of the Drawing Room: Italian Women Writers in Translation
“This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This ...
Translation and Other Children: Liberaki’s “Three Summers”
While metaphors linking translation to human reproduction abound, Karen ...
The South According to Coetzee
Readers waiting expectantly for the third novel in J. M. Coetzee’s late trilogy, following The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, were in for a ...
How Ken Liu Translates, and Why He Writes
Ken Liu is a celebrated author of American speculative fiction and a pathbreaking translator of Chinese science fiction into English. He has won the ...
Resisting the Rhetoric of Disaster
Ever since the Arab world achieved political independence, its great hopes for self-determination and freedom have been built up and razed down several times ...
Translators and Other Icons
Writers are sexy figures. Until recently, we tended to imagine them as drunk and glamorous, Hemingway at the bar in Cuba or Frank O’Hara partying with artists ...
Translation’s Burden
A book is a strange vessel of expectation. A published book imagines a reader, for a published book without a reader is a book that loses someone’s money. And a book about translation seems to have ...
Inside the Map: On Two Novels by Pola Oloixarac
One of Jorge Luis Borges’s most enduring fictions is the one-paragraph story “Del rigor en la ciencia” (“On Exactitude in Science”). Structured as a fragment of ...
