Politics Literature Arts Ideas

In Translation

Elaine Blair

Quick Words, Long View

Like many of her narrators, Lydia Davis is a taxonomist of daily life.

December 2, 2021 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

‘Magic Sayings by the Thousands’

At the heart of the Kalevala is the shamanistic power of words to transform, lead astray, destroy, create, or bring back to life.

November 4, 2021 issue

Lauren Groff

Herring-Gray Skies

Dorthe Nors’s characters are materially comfortable yet spiritually lonely.

December 2, 2021 issue

Geoffrey Brock

Our Emissary of Italian Prose

Frederika Randall’s translations introduced English readers to novels that expand our sense of Italian history and literature.

September 23, 2021 issue

Nicole Rudick

The Fourth Woman

In her triptych of genre-bending books, Nathalie Léger amends the archive’s gaps by introducing short flights of speculation and imagination into her accounts of real people, allowing them to swell into living figures.

August 19, 2021 issue

Clair Wills

The Possessed

In Carl Frode Tiller’s trilogy of novels, the varied accounts of the narrator’s youth build to a judgment on the ethics of writing itself.

July 22, 2021 issue

Sophie Pinkham

‘Something Resembling Normal Life’

Paek Nam-nyong’s ‘Friend’ tells ordinary stories of love and divorce in 1980s North Korea.

December 3, 2020 issue

Landscape painting, Tang dynasty era (618–907)

Madeleine Thien

Poems Without an ‘I’

In Chinese poetry, fiction, and philosophy, the “I” is not the nerve center from which thought and knowledge begin.

October 8, 2020 issue

The Latest

Robert Pogue Harrison

Labors of Love

Inspired new translations of Dante’s Purgatorio are faithful to its message of rehabilitation, reconciliation, and redemption.

December 16, 2021 issue

Ruth Margalit

Trains to Nowhere

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s novel The Passenger dwells on the hopeless roaming of a wealthy Jewish Berliner in the days immediately following Kristallnacht.

November 18, 2021 issue

Ursula Lindsey

In the Fire

The Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi fearlessly told unpleasant truths about discrimination against women in Arab countries.

October 21, 2021 issue

Ruth Franklin

‘The Lucky Ones’

Several groundbreaking new books chronicle the fate of the quarter-million or so Polish Jews who evaded Hitler only to wind up in the hands of Stalin.

October 21, 2021 issue

Robyn Creswell

On the Road

The Book of Travels, Hanna Diyab’s memoir of his Mediterranean adventures, is a mixture of clear-eyed observation and wide-eyed innocence.

October 7, 2021 issue

Ruth Margalit

The Mystical Realist

Jon Fosse’s Septology is suffused with religious symbolism, taking on, in its incantatory language and repetitions, the rhythm of the rosary.

September 23, 2021 issue

Aminatta Forna

A Document of Losses

Véronique Tadjo’s chronicle of the West African Ebola outbreak illuminates the link between disease and environmental destruction.

September 23, 2021 issue

Wisława Szymborska

‘No One Thinks in Esperanto’

A selection from Wislawa Szymborska’s anonymous advice column.

August 19, 2021 issue

Maya Abu al-Hayyat, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

I Burn Time

a poem

July 1, 2021 issue

Jaroslaw Anders

A Dark Belarusian Satire

Alindarka’s Children captures the depths of grief and frustration that have been building up for decades under the deceptively placid surface of Belarusian life.

June 10, 2021 issue