Earlier this year, Yale University Press published the excerpt below from The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan, translated from the Ukrainian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler. We are revisiting this piece today to shed light on the continued and escalating tensions in the region. Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the
This month, Yale University Press published Voices of the Lost by Hoda Barakat, a chilling novel that weaves together a series of devastating confessions about life in contemporary Arab society. Set in an unnamed, war-torn country, the novel consists of six letters—all intercepted by unintended recipients, all of whom are compelled
Last month, Yale University Press published The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan, translated from the Ukrainian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler. Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the wartime storytelling of A Farewell to Arms, The Orphanage is a searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict
Sinan Antoon— A drop of sweat fell on the edge of the piece of paper and I stopped reading. His handwriting was neat and confident. The ink was black, maybe from a ballpoint pen. The words were perched like birds on lines that looked like small sky-blue threads running across
David Bentley Hart— When I came to the task of producing my own translation of the New Testament, I knew that there are certain words and phrases in the text that present special difficulties, and that no solution I chose would please everybody. In some cases, the difficulty lies in
László F. Földényi— This past April, the American edition of my book Melancholy was presented at the Rubin Museum in New York. While spending a week in the city, meeting friends and acquaintances, I was often confronted with the question: “Are you Hungarians melancholic?” Initially, my answer was: “No, not
Everyday Jews was first published in Poland in 1935 by Yehoshue Perle in an attempt to document the daily experiences of Polish Jews. It is a story of love and sex and spirit, a beautiful testimony to a strong and enduring people. Although originally chastised as crude, the novel quickly became
This interview by Jeffrey Gray was originally published in vol. 4, no. 2 (2007) in A Contracorriente. Placing the Placeless: a Conversation with Rodrigo Rey Rosa1 Jeffrey Gray, Seton Hall University Rodrigo Rey Rosa was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala, in 1958. As a young writer, he lived for several years in Tangier,
Every good translator (and appreciator of international literature) knows that a work in translation carries more than the weight of a language’s technical nuances and abnormalities. Like an immigrant to a new nation, it grapples in a no man’s land between the culture in which it was born and the
It would be no exaggeration to say that Romanian novelist Norman Manea is one of the most celebrated contemporary Eastern European writers in the Western literary world. His impressive collection of cultural and literary awards currently includes the MacArthur Fellowship (U.S.), the Nonino International Literary Prize (Italy), the Prix Médicis