Issue 45 | November-December 2016
Loving Kristeva: a Memoir
Media images of Philipe Sollers have portrayed him as a womanizer, and the multiple self-images he has created in his writing since the 1983 novel Femmes confirmed casual readers of his fiction…
Conversations: Mini Krishnan and Bhanumati Mishra on Publishing Indian Translation
Since 2001 Mini Krishnan has served as the Publishing Consultant at Oxford University Press (India), where she sources and edits translations of Indian writing into English from fifteen languages. Krishnan has edited more…
The Secret History of our Enemies: Balaban’s Translations of Vietnamese Poetry
Decades ago, when I first read All Quiet on the Western Front, I copied this sentence into my journal: “A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies;…
Women Writing in 21st Century Brazil: Experimentation and Narratives of Self
There were days when Dita hid all the papers (Ruth Ducaso/Luciany Aparecida). Brief considerations on writing by contemporary women authors I start this essay with the opening words of…
Introducing Zhongshi Chen’s Modern Classic, White Deer Plain
The Dream of the Red Chamber, one of China’s four great classical novels, written in the middle of the eighteenth century by Cao Xueqin, records the decline and fall of…
The Moscow Calendar’s Going Islamic; or, The Soviet Empire in Brodsky’s Poetry
Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek writer whose works are banned in Uzbekistan. He has lived in the United Kingdom since 1994. Several of his Russian-language novels have appeared in English…
The Trobriand Tower of Babel
In late November 1978, a small plane went missing after it left Alotau, the capital of Milne Bay Province in Papua New Guinea. The plane was en route to Losuia,…
Inventing a Nation: Jacques Roumain and Haitian Kreyòl
Haitian independence from France in 1804 led to a host of consequences for the first black republic in the world. Among them was a fraught relationship with the new nation’s…
Meskwaki Warparty: an Oral History
This war story was written in the Meskwaki language by Alfred Kiyana in about 1915 on the Meskwaki Settlement in Tama County, Iowa. It is among some 27,000 pages of…