September 17, 2024

Janet Poole on Translating Ch’oe Myŏngik

When Ch’oe Myŏngik was writing short fiction in the mid-twentieth century, he was known as a master of the detail. While other Korean writers of the time were cranking out dozens of pages of writing per week, often for serialised...

September 10, 2024

Sheela Mahadevan on Translating Ari Gautier’s Lakshmi’s Secret Diary

L akshmi’s Secret Diary is a translation of contemporary Indian Francophone novel Carnet secret de Lakshmi by writer and poet Ari Gautier, who is from Pondicherry, a city in South India that was once the capital of French India. The...

August 9, 2024

Celebrate Book Lovers Day with Global Reads

Raina Mansfield

This Book Lovers Day, immerse yourself in the wonder of reading by exploring new titles. We’re excited to share some standout collections and collaborations that highlight literature’s diversity and richness. From powerful narratives by Roseway Publishing to the lyrical poetry...

April 11, 2024

Matthew Fraleigh on The Same Moon Shines on All

The last few decades have been a time of great change for the field of Japanese literary studies. The scope of the category “Japanese literature” is very differently conceptualized than it was just a generation ago; it now embraces a...

April 9, 2024

Jonathan Chaves on Yanagawa Seigan

Perhaps the largest body of great poetry in the world as yet undiscovered is the verse composed by Japanese authors not in Japanese, but in literary Chinese (C., wenyan; J., bungen). The phenomenon of great literature written in a language...

September 15, 2023

Johan Elverskog on Translating The Precious Summary

The Precious Summary is the most important work of Mongolian history on the three-hundred-year period before the rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty. Written by Sagang Sechen in 1662, it chronicles the fall of the Yuan dynasty in China, the...

August 3, 2023

Ten Must-Read Books for Women in Translation Month 2023

Great books deserve a second life on the international stage; however, each year, books authored by women make up a disproportionately small percentage of the total number of works translated into English. This gender disparity is exactly why Meytal Radzinski...

September 27, 2022

Interpreting the Nuances of Historical Texts

David Brophy

In the wake of the Qianlong emperor’s invasion of Xinjiang in the mid-eighteenth century, Qing-appointed Muslim governors preserved certain trappings of Islamic rule while serving alongside a rotation of Manchu and Mongolian ambans. In the 1780s, one of the local...

September 22, 2022

Becoming Vermin

Perhat Tursun as a Franz Kafka Character

Darren Byler

The imprisoned Uyghur author and poet Perhat Tursun hates it when people call him “the Uyghur Franz Kafka.” He thinks Uyghur writers should be recognized as world-class intellectuals on their own terms, not as derivative world literature representatives of a...

September 20, 2022

“Researching” for Translation

Anders Hansson and Bonnie McDougall

A few months ago, Bonnie received a request from the research administration at her university to submit information on any recent publications. She duly let them know about our translation of A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams are Made...

September 15, 2022

The Power of Female Same-Sex Love

Stephen Roddy and Ying Wang

In premodern China, descriptions of homoeroticism can be found in multiple examples of histories, poetry, fiction, and drama, but nearly all of these treat exclusively male-male relations. On female same-sex desire, the written record is almost completely silent. The few...

August 30, 2022

“Seoul, So Far Away” from Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

Park Wan-suh

“Suddenly a blinding flash shot from a building straight into my eyes. The light was unlike any I’d seen before. There was no fire, but it was more intense than any flame. I clung to my mother in fear. She...