Posted on January 24, 2018
This month, the magazine Words Without Borders features writing by Kazakh women, including Zira Naurzbayeva's essay "The Beskempir," a meditation on the lives of Kazakh grandmothers who were brought from "auls," or villages, to live with their urbanized children in cities like Almaty. The adjustment was not always easy: the essay begins with an overheard scream.
Posted on January 10, 2018
Posted on December 10, 2017
Amina Saïd's poems take on essential questions about life and fate, vision and blindness, death and memory. Marilyn Hecker's lucid translation will help students connect with these universal elements, as well as with the vivid sensory details, in Saïd's series “Clairvoyant in the City of the Blind.” The series appears in the December 2017 issue of the magazine Words without Borders, featuring women authors from Tunisia.
Posted on November 28, 2017
"I always knew that I was Mexican. What I didn't know is that I wasn't legal." Pablo*, one of the speakers on a panel discussion of exile in Mexico City last March, spoke for many other young people who live with the fear of deportation—or, as in his case, have already experienced it. Pablo arrived in the U.S. as a toddler, and was deported when he was in his twenties.
Posted on November 15, 2017
According to his biography, Peruvian author Marco Avilés is currently working on a memoir about being "a Latino immigrant in a not very nice time for Latino immigrants." The same witty understatement and sense of perspective is evident in his essay "I Am Not Your Cholo" (translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes), published as part of Words Without Borders' issue of literature in translation, written by authors living in the United States.