Call it a dare: Words Without Borders, the nonprofit magazine devoted to literature in translation, has spent its existence insisting that not only do fiction and poetry matter, but fiction and poetry translated from Dari, Rajasthani, Tigrinya, Urdu, and Yoruba, no less. Since its initial issues in 2003 (which showcased writing from Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, a political statement in of itself), the magazine has aimed to change the publishing landscape for literature in translation and create a newfound appreciation for world writing among readers of English. This tenth-anniversary anthology is both a representative sampling and a triumphant "mission accomplished."
The editors frame their selection with a disarming admission: "All anthologies are unfinished and very private attempts to compose a song in many tongues." Given the breadth of WWB's archive, the thirty-three chosen pieces inevitably feel more like a generous aperitif than a full course. But the collection moves with the rhythm of a well-curated mixtape, antic comedy segueing into war reportage, lyric poetry is followed by fables, and surrealist nightmares make way for domestic elegies. Serious as their mission may be, the editors display a sense of humor in their sequencing: harrowing pieces tend to be followed by a frothy entry, tragedy and humor sparring with each other.
Above all, the pieces in the anthology capture motion: the feeling of eternal transition, of lives caught between departure and return, homeland held at arm's length or mourned at close range. Most of the contributing writers are exiles or expatriates, and the collection is at its most electric when focused on displacement. Kader Abdolah's "Eagles," which opens the volume, is a meditation on return: a son driving through Iranian landscape, his executed brother glimpsed in passing headlights like frames from an old silent film. As he names of villages accrue like incantations — Marzedjaran, Saroeg, Djeria — history and geography are inextricably, fatally entwined. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, Goli Taraghi's "The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons" works similar terrain: an 83-year-old woman kvetching her way through a Paris airport transfer, her sons scattered to Sweden, past misfortunes mixing with present banality. "Going away and returning," she observes, "is another way to live." It could serve as the collection's epigraph.
The fiction generally outperforms the poetry (perhaps not a surprise given the Herculean task of translating foreign verse into English), and the more grounded the storytelling, the more arresting the result. Ismat Chughtai's "Of Fists and Rubs," translated from Urdu, is a tour de force of bawdy, devastating economy: two women at a polling station, atrocities related in fractured flashbacks, bawdy on the surface and devastating underneath. Mohammad Hussain Mohammadi's "Dasht-e Leili," based on real-life Taliban incidents, places us inside a cargo container, prisoners licking each other's sweat, one man trying to breathe through a crack in the metal, the point of view switching between captives and captors until both are bound together by the reading of the Qur'an. The politics here are as overt as anywhere in the collection, rendered entirely in human terms, and all the more powerful because of it.
At the comic end of the spectrum, Adolfo Albertazzi's "The Devil in the Decanter" plays like The Exorcist staged as drawing-room farce, as a devilish little imp of Burgfarrubach finally meets his match in an erudite German who "never abandoned a subject without having dissected or exhausted it." Vjay Dan Detha's Rajasthani fable "A True Calling" tracks a bhand, a folk entertainer who can assume any personage, through a series of increasingly outlandish impostures, his honor the only thing worth keeping. The more surreal entries revel in their strangeness. Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues's "The Red Loaf" is Dali in prose form, as a dandy stripped of everything including his two hundred pairs of shoes is left to clamber over a half-eaten loaf crawling with aphids resembling tortoises covered in goose down. We might not understand the goings-on, but we can feel the tortured landscapes and heat.
In his included essay on the art of translation, Lawrence Venuti suggests that the translator is not a stand-in but a "resourceful imitator," that something irreplaceable is lost in transit even as something new (and sometimes extraordinary) is gained. In that vein, the better entries in Words Without Borders stand out not through strangeness of syntax but the unique sensibilities of their authors. Lucia Bettencourt's "Borges's Secretary" reframes the Argentine master's biography through the eyes of the woman who subverts his filing system, turning his writing into "a chessboard, where each of us tried to anticipate the possible moves of the other." Ernest Farrés's "Self-Portrait" could be a metaphor for the entire enterprise, contemplating a self-portrait as a mirror that reproduces not so much the painter's face as the static reflection of his image: "his anxieties and states of mind are mine / and mine, in the same breath, belong to everybody / in the light of the same moon all over the world."
A handful of the slighter poems and a few comic vignettes come off as filler, and occasionally the collection gives off a faint whiff of the "important," as if these distant writers' troubles are only weighty because they're not our own. But Words Without Borders is too full-blooded to linger on such anxieties. Abdellah Taia recounts a torrid love affair in Cairo's ruins; Najem Wali's Iraqi soldiers find themselves in a Casablanca-like bar in Basra, falling under the spell of a woman who sings a translated version of "Waltzing Matilda," itself an interpolation of Tom Waits' version of an Australian original, a translation of a translation, the whole world transmitted through a single song.
"Better to get someone on the telephone," write the editors, "even if there's some static on the line, than not to make the call." Words Without Borders: The Best of the First Ten Years makes the call, loud and clear, and if it doesn't provide the full scope of what the publication presents (how could any anthology?), it's still a fertile treasure trove of writers worth reading, a strong statement for storytelling as civic engagement, and more proof that the world, in all its terror and comedy, is large indeed.