Section
Literature in Translation
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American Metamorphoses
“That rivers and wild rice can now become legal persons discloses the precarity of previously entrenched definitions of nature, personhood, property, and law: that is, the terms that constitute a world.”
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What Keeps the Dutch Up at Night?
Although the novels’ protagonists are fascinating, even magnetic characters, they are eerie—all the more so because their unsettling behavior forces the reader to confront what most worries the Netherlands.
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Toward the Next Century of Carmen Martín Gaite
A literary genius who remained in Fascist Franco Spain, she created new, hybrid literary genres, even while fluidly moving from fiction to nonfiction and back.
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The Ableism of Kings, the Fury of Trump
I usually flinch from swashbuckling claims, but let me make this one at least: No hero from ancient myth feels as human as Odysseus. No one as relatable in their indomitable will to survive. Is it any wonder, then, that the Odyssey is having a moment, as humans seem barely to be surviving at all?…
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They Would Not Dream of Flowers: Translating Through the Tehran Blackout
As the entire country was plunged into a digital blackout, the only light remaining in my room was the cold, clinical glow of my disconnected laptop. There, in that forced isolation, I sat translating a story about death.
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No End to the Spanish Civil War?
Latin America’s own conflicts over land, Church, labor, and democratization were played out, across the Atlantic, for all to see.
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Fantasy, Pedantry, and Painting: Stefania Heim and Ara H. Merjian on the Novels of De Chirico
“I came to translating de Chirico very much by accident.”
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Betwixt or Bewitched? Rethinking the “Middlebrow” with Dino Buzzati
Reframed as a “bewitched middlebrow,” Buzzati’s fiction re-enters literary history not as a comforting escape, but as a sharp tool for existential inquiry.
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“I Will Write to Avenge My Race”: Baglin, Louis, and Ernaux on Class Transition
“When people write about the working-class world, which they rarely do, it is most often because they have left it behind,” admits Didier Eribon, in his 2009 French memoir of class transition, Returning to Reims. “They thereby contribute to perpetuating the social illegitimacy of the people they are speaking of in the very moment of…
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Once upon a Time in Tenoxtitlan
Two novels published in 2024 return to some of the best-known, canonical figures and episodes from Mexico’s past.
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The Origin of Love and Nightmares
Hong Kong has become an apt prism through which to probe the skin tissue between state violence and victimization, and the widening wounds to personal freedom.
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“The Door’s Still Locked”: Fiction after Fascism
“Labor” forces us to ask: Who has power? “Horror” forces us to ask: Who is the monster? And the combination of the two, “Labor-as-Horror,” tells us to beware the uncomfortable fractures in our otherwise ordinary work.
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The Translator’s Dilemma: Thinking Versus Doing?
Would we get a different view of translation if we turned to translators themselves?
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When Language Is Lost, What Can Be Gained?
Aphasia brings up existential questions that get at the heart of human connection: Who are we without language?
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“Only the Northern Lights”: The Russo-Ukrainian War and Its Poets
These poets unsettle a collective sense of melancholy into a generative force, from which a transformed historical imagination can emerge.
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Modes of Witness: On “The Singularity” and “The Simple Art of Killing a Woman”
Despite their opposing answers to the question—what to do with the grief of witnessing?—both novels lead us up and back down the long, winding road of grief and witness.
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Lahiri’s Metamorphoses
Over eight years have passed since Jhumpa Lahiri announced her intention to leave behind the terrain of English letters and write only in Italian.
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A Translation the Size of the World
“Translators and writers must fight through the “labyrinth of [the] imagination,” find their way through their private language toward a text’s new picture of reality.”
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Phantoms of Patriarchy: On Ditlevsen & Bachmann
Revival fetishism perpetuates the gendered dynamics of authorship and reception that Tove Ditlevsen and Ingeborg Bachmann spent their lives writing about and against.
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A #MeToo Novel That Must Be Read #WithYou
A South Korean novel critiques violent misogyny within a literature department. Remarkably, it does so by addressing the reader directly.
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Cristina Rivera Garza: “the traces that shelter us”
One novelist spotlights an object, feeling, or sensation where the relay between past and present, or present and future, becomes visible.
