The first guests who have come to see you are already forgotten, such are the comings and goings of people in our life, and while you are passed from one guest to another, time adjusts your expressions, closes your fontanelle, settles on the color of your eyes and hair; and time is already digging deep […]
Featured Translation
Excerpt from Caderno de Um Ausente [Notes from an Absentee],
*In Tandem*
by Melinda Mátyus, translated from the Hungarian by Jozefina Komporaly
1. I left, just so that I didn’t have to set eyes on him. I could have left without saying a word, but I did tell him that I was about to leave. Only to go to the shops, mind you. He asked me what I wanted to buy, and I snapped that it was […]
Agua De Mayo
by Orland Agustin Solis
translated from the Hiligaynon by Eric Abalajon
Orland Agustin Solis is an emerging poet in Hiligaynon. Using visceral nature themes and urgent verbs, his poems often tackle themes of persistent feudalism especially in Western Visayas, Philippines.
Kind of an Artist
by Viggo Bjerring, translated from the Danish by Rob Myatt
My fast-talking brother-in-law had a proposition for me. The whole family had gathered round the table as he carved the Christmas duck and announced what an outrage it was that two nights per week I was staying up into the wee hours to stick a tube down the throat of some handicapped guy out in […]
The Center of the World
by Alain Berenboom, translated from the French by Shara Kronmal
It was a postcard that led me to the center of the world. “Tatiana. Needs a lawyer” was scribbled in pencil on the back of a photo of Errol Flynn taken from an old pirate movie. Underneath was the address of the detention center where she was being held. I reached the village at 9 […]
We Shall Undergo
by Diana Garza Islas
translated from the Spanish by Cal Paule
the foam
but say foam
and that poem I decreed
you’ll bite
caramel sphinxes in the sponginess
(for them)
This exquisite poem attempts the tender job of building an island in the foam and then breaking it down to sea level giving us quite the heady experience.
The Story of the God-Writer and Minotaur by Amjad Gholami Translated from the Kurdish by Himan Heidari
When the thread was severed, we were there, at that place which had been to me or maybe to you too as frightening and eerie as all other places. As such, I have the impression that I resemble the man who, on an inauspicious afternoon, gets into a taxi with a bearded man who keeps pushing him, “write about you and me,” but who instead notes,
I only write about people who you may or may not know in the future.
The Tree
by Zhe Zhang
translated from the Chinese by Xiaoming Shan
What a place, nothing but for some bare rocks. A stark mountain, literally.
in the pericardium
by Nadja Küchenmeister,
translated from the German by Aimee Chor
back to the core, center and crux /
a husked thing hangs from strands /
in the pericardium a span
History of a Piano in Spacetime
by Isis Aquino, Translated from the Spanish by Monica Louzon
On February 3, 1868, la señorita Margarita Vogler, daughter of a foreign merchant who lived in Santiago de los Caballeros, ran away with Ismael Pérez Soriano, a mulato who fought with the rebel soldiers in the Dominican War of Restoration. The girl was sixteen, and her disapproving father—who had prevented Ismael from courting Margarita—flew into […]
