Pop quiz: What does the Chinese idiom "Nine cows and one strand of hair" mean? If you don't yet know, you're not alone—non-English cultures can sometimes get short shrift in U.S. schools, but that is slowly beginning to change.
This National Poetry Month, consider the powerful poetry of Amina Saïd, who takes on essential questions about life and fate, vision and blindness, death and memory. Marilyn Hacker'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,” which appeared in an issue of Words Without Borders featuring women authors from Tunisia.
“A woman could fall in love for a cheap word. That's women for you!" the street vendor Damao asserts in Ye Mi’s short story, “Love’s Labor.” Damao makes lots of confident pronouncements about women, but they are mostly proven false—the woman in the story is much too complex to conform to aphorisms. (And Teaching Idea 3 has relevant classroom activities.)