On Translating Matieu Caragiale

One of the central texts of Romanian literature, its singular, impossibly ornate Romanian weds so well to its decadent subject that asking the work to embrace English seems a… More

from Rakes of the Old Court

“The precepts,” continued Pashadia, “of elementary good breeding state: neither the knife in fish and vegetables nor the fork in cheese, and, in no case, the knife in the… More

Vitsvit

My mother let bleach run through her syntax / On the other side of punctuation her language became whiter / than a winter in Norrland... // To think that… More

from Nine Buildings

Yao Nan said, every year we come to grave-sweeping time, and only then does it feel like spring. He could never understand why we’d wait for springtime, when flowers… More

On Translating Zou Jingzhi

‘Nine Buildings’ works through what he [Zou] witnessed and suffered as a child and young man, all the while retaining his customary spare, elegant prose and detached vision. More

Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni

The night of the typhoon, the sky was full, the world destroyed. // From west to east, herds of black cattle rolled on their heads / the wind’s hoofs… More

On Translating Wang Xiaoni

The Chinese social and interpersonal landscape has been changing at breakneck speed for the last thirty years, and as witness to these seismic shifts, Wang Xiaoni consistently adopts an… More

Tristano Dies

You know, all told, life’s more what you don’t remember than what you do…Frau popped her head in, not one ripple now, she told me, to show you swam… More