A new edition of selected poems by Makoto Ooka, translated by Janine Beichman and entitled Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets, is a treasure chest for lovers of Japanese poetry and poetry in general. Ooka was one of the most revered poets and critics in Japan, and Beichman, is a masterful translator of Ooka’s work. This is the third anthology of Ooka’s poetry she has translated. Beichman captures the stark simplicity of Ooka’s language as well as the Western influences on his work. Ooka himself approved her translations, and he knew English poetry well. He even reciprocated by translating one of her Noh plays.

The poems below have been excerpted from a longer work called Wulf & Eadwacer, an experimental translation by M.L. Martin of the Anglo-Saxon poem “Wulf ond Eadwacer.” As Martin explains, “code-switching between the original Old English and Modern English, Wulf & Eadwacer embraces the proto-feminist, disjunctive voice of the original poem so that its enigmatic nature and plurality can fully be explored for the first time.”

These poems by Chilean poet Stella Díaz Varín have been taken from her 1959 collection, ‘Time, Imaginary Measure,’ and have been translated from Spanish by Rebecca Levi.

These poems by Lidija Dimkovska have been translated from the original Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Patricia Marsh.

In this interview with fiction MFA candidate Sonya Gray Redi, M. Kasper discusses his translation process and how he went about creating facsimile-style translations of some of the ‘unacknowledged literary greats of the twentieth century,’ the Belgian surrealists Paul Nougé, Paul Colinet, and Louis Scutenaire, in his new work Ideas Have No Smell.

These three stories by legendary writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa were translated from the original Japanese by Ryan C.K. Choi.

Peruvian born poet and linguistics professor Mario Montalbetti’s latest collection of poetry Language Is a Revolver for Two showcases his incredible ability to use poetry to rhythmically unfold a prophecy to his reader. Throughout these fourteen poems, Montalbetti consistently uses the motif of movement, particularly its risings and fallings, as a way of tracking his exploration of language’s, and by extension, the world’s economy of supply and demand. Essentially delineating the reason that law cannot be fully applied to love: “one thing and only one thing affects love: / the demand for love. / … supply doesn’t affect love.”

Reading No Budu Please is like committing to the excavation of the continual traumas that occur within a post-colonial consciousness that is paradoxically both foreign and too familiar.

Reading Amparo Dávila’s stories is like accepting an invitation for tea at a haunted house. It starts out ordinary, mundane even, and before you know it, the key turns in the lock and you are trapped.

These poems by the Iraqi visual artist and poet Ali Rashid have been translated from Arabic by Dr. Saleh Razzouk and Scott Minar.

When I first heard of Mercè Rodoreda, I was on a tour of an aerial bunker far beneath the streets of Barcelona, packed in tight with twenty strangers, sitting quietly in the dark and listening to the sounds of labored breathing. The bunker was located in the middle of Gracià, the neighborhood in which Rodoreda’s work is set, and I had signed up for the tour to better understand a crucial piece of Catalan history, one that Rodoreda takes as the starting point for her work — the realities of the Spanish Civil War, and its devastating, far-reaching fallout in Barcelona.

Four poems from the Israeli poet Ortsion Bartana, translated from the original Hebrew by Hana Inbar and Robert Manaster.

Three poems from Italian poet Franco Buffoni, translated by Moira Egan.

These poems from Sara Shagufta’s book Aankhein and translated from the original Urdu by Arshi Yaseen.

Another Scratch into a Postmodern Rabbit Hole

One way to talk about Haruki Murakami’s eighteenth work of fiction, Killing Commendatore, is as a bingo square. Many of Murakami’s usual suspects, whimsical tropes, and narrative-style of blurring the fantastic with the mundane in his works are present. Murakami creates a space for a nameless, recently divorced man as a protagonist, a space for supernatural occurrences, another for vivid descriptions about domestic chores. He creates a center space for female characters who are complex, supernatural forces at best, and reduced to coy, sexual objects at worst. The dialogue often consists of repeating what the protagonist has said. Bingo! Murakami’s characters’ lives are often described through a litany of what and how they ate and how they slept. The precise articulation of the mundane makes his more fantastical elements even more complicated and gorgeously weird.

Addiction doesn’t disappear, it only changes forms. I was hooked on idleness, but now I’m hooked on work. I was hooked on weed, now I inject Ketamine. I was hooked on Azadeh, now I’m hooked on Jaleh. I was hooked on being free of family ties, but now I’m hooked on my father.

A short story by classic Japanese mystery and horror writer Edogawa Ranpo, translated from Japanese by Lin King.

As I was reading ​Deviation​, Anne Milano Appel’s English translation of Luce D’Eramo’s 1979 novel, I found myself increasingly surprised at the relatively minor position to which Luce D’Eramo and her masterful book have been relegated in the Italian literary canon. The novel is, on the surface level, formally straightforward, consisting of four parts that are each clearly connected to D’Eramo’s biography: her life working in a labor camp as a fervently Fascist volunteer, a political reawakening that leads to her internment in a concentration camp, and ultimately the process of learning how to navigate postwar life in the wake of wartime injuries that left her paralyzed. D’Eramo weaves these episodes together with meditations on memory and self-perception in life-writing as she unpacks the shift from her original Fascist ideology, connected to her bourgeois origins, to the eye-opening experiences of life in the camps.

Laughing babies all over the wall
The moment you set your eyes on them
after waking up in the morning,

It was you, wasn’t it, Belmira? I know you can’t hear me, now that you’ve gone someplace far away and there’s no point in thinking you’ll ever come back. I’m alone, I and our secret, and I don’t even know how long I’ll be able to keep it, because the note, forgive me, Bel, I think I left the damn thing at Antonio’s house, I don’t know exactly where, but in that moment of shock, I ended up dropping the envelope in the middle of all that mess and only realized I’d left it behind when I’d already made it out into the street.