September was starting to look like a big month for miscreants making a comeback. Louis C. K. made a surprise appearance at the Comedy Cellar. Steve Bannon was ...
Literature in Translation
Current Editor: Stephen Twilley
Exile Is Treading Water in a Strange Sea
Two recent stylistically unconventional novels by Iranian authors in diaspora explore the particular cultural loss of the exile, as distinct from that of the ...
A Thousand and One Translations
In an era of increasing protectionism and nationalism, it may seem surprising (though encouraging!) that translated literature is actually on the rise in the ...
The Metamorphoses of Alberto Savinio
“Child prodigies usually have the fate of soap bubbles,” wrote Giorgio de Chirico in 1952, before observing that in the case of his recently deceased younger brother ...
Facts We Accept and Facts We Don’t
Several years ago, a student of mine accused me of bullying her. She looked me in the eye and calmly listed all the things I’d done: singling her out, dismissing ...
Neruda’s Ghosts
Pablo Neruda’s only daughter, Malva Marina, was born in Madrid, in August 1934, and died a little over eight years later, in Nazi-occupied Holland, from the complications of hydrocephaly. She hadn’t ...
What’s in a Gaze?
Only one authenticated portrait of the three Brontë sisters survives. Completed by their brother, Branwell, around 1834, it was discovered atop a cupboard in 1914. Remarkable as a record of the ...
Exile Is Treading Water in a Strange Sea
Two recent stylistically unconventional novels by Iranian authors in diaspora explore the particular cultural loss of the exile, as distinct from that of the ...
How the “Omega Male” Becomes a Psychopath
Among the many prurient pleasures offered by contemporary literature are thrillers hawking creative mistreatments of women. The subgenre’s prime was the ...
“Slave Old Man” in English, English in “Slave Old Man”
Linda Coverdale’s English translation of the 1997 novel L’esclave vieil homme et ...
The Polyphonic Gospel
At one point in Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum the narrator speculates about how the Gospels came to be written: “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet ...
Japan’s Isolation 2.0
The taxi driver who took me from Tokyo train station to my hotel had turned his cell phone sideways, like a television, and propped it up on the dashboard of his car. He was watching a historical ...
Chaucer and Humanitarian Activism
Refugee Tales, a recent adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, is more than a retelling of one of our “great books” of English literature ...
Taking Sides Against God
While mostly forgotten today, Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen was widely admired by his 19th-century contemporaries and went on to inspire the likes of Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, and James ...
Charlotte Salomon’s Triumphant “No”
Charlotte Salomon’s short life was haunted—by the rise of the Nazis, who ultimately took her life, but also by her family’s history of severe mental illness ...
Legacies of Italian Marxism
“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” What was left of this seemingly ominous prospect a century after the publication of Karl Marx and ...
The Triumph of Afrikaans Fiction
I’m reading one of the great novels of our time. I’m doing so slowly because it’s in Afrikaans, and although I learned the language for many years in South ...
“The Horticulturalist of the Self”
In a 1963 issue of the New York Review of Books, Susan Sontag hailed the translation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s major early works into English, unabashedly calling the ...
Ricardo Piglia and the Art of Interruption
With the attendant assurance of a 22-year-old, Ricardo Piglia proposed in 1964 that “Fundamentally, to narrate means to take charge of the distance between the ...
Somalia and Italy across a Century
The United Nations Refugee Agency has calculated that, by the end of 2016, there were almost 68 million “persons of concern” (refugees, asylum seekers, and other vulnerable groups) living on this ...