Latin American authors must defer to “Latin America”—as imagined by centers of literary power—to be translated, to sell, to make money.
Tag: Literature in Translation
Miguel de Unamuno in Spain’s Memory Battle
As fascist armies conquered much of Spain, a writer publicly and famously denounced high-ranking officers right to their faces. Or did he?
Subaquatic Homesick Blues
A Taiwanese scifi novel—set under the sea, after the surface becomes unlivable—reveals the remarkable burst of cultural freedom in 1990s Taiwan.
When the Vibe Is Off
Which matters more, intent or interpretation? What if a juxtaposition of images in literature or art is just that—a chance encounter?
“Between the Experiment and the Essence”: Emma Ramadan Talks Translation
“For those of us who can feel unsettled in terms of identity, translation can feel like home.”
A Dad Cartoonist Travels into Factory Life
The artist comes as a class outsider to the factory, marveling at the complexity of its machinery and the dexterity and dangers of manual labor.
The Borderland between Language and Genre
Within western poetry, women writers of color—and their lived experiences—are not nearly as recognized nor represented as their white peers.
Turkish Literature at Sea
The global literary market is a body of books in translation that, despite being from very disparate contexts, sound a lot like each other. Why?
The “I” in Murakami
Discussing Murakami within the Japanese literary tradition is in itself rare. He is, by his own admission, less well-loved in Japan than abroad.
On Our Nightstands: September 2021
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
How to Read like a Translator
To work as a translator is to encounter a text with an active desire in mind, a desire that both constitutes and modifies the way that text is experienced.
Four Ways to Ruin Dante—and One to Save Him
Why would Dante need help? Because if the poet’s only readers are Dante scholars, then we’ll all lose out. Dante deserves better, and so do we.
What’s in a Bookstore?
For more than five centuries, equilibrium between profit and passion has remained elusive to book buyers and sellers.
Precarity and Struggle: Kafka, Roth, Kraus
In their writings, Kafka, Roth, and Kraus rejected the ideology of rootedness that was rapidly encroaching upon early 20th-century European consciousness.
Re-embodying Palestinian Memory
A recent flourishing of Palestinian literature reckons with complications in historical memory caused by settler colonialism.
What Can Latin American Journalism Teach the U.S.?
In Latin America, high levels of violence threaten journalists today, and dissent has been effectively marginalized in the past.
B-Sides: Latife Tekin’s “Berji Kristin”
As in mythology, the characters in a 1984 Turkish novel are acted upon by forces distant and uncaring.
The Criminal’s City
In a recent French novel, an ordinary woman inadvertently becomes a drug kingpin—and does so by learning to see anew Paris’s urban landscape.
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 ...
B-Sides: Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”
When should a woman kill her husband? I have turned this question over and over ...