‘If I had known she were heading for Tokyo then, and if I had known she thought of Tokyo as a city of zombies, I would have wanted to know, of course, whether she saw me that way, too.’
Toshiki Okada’s ‘Breakfast’ seems as though it ought to provide plenty of material for a discussion of the challenges with which it confronts a translator. Here is one candidate: its punctuation. The punctuation is decidedly non-English. How does one translate a comma from Japanese into Englis…
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‘These students only learn about Mauritius through our country’s literature; they are taught little to no Mauritian history.’
Ariel Saramandi visits a lycée in Mauritius.
‘The next editor of the university newspaper was chosen each year by a panel.’
A short story by Frances Leviston, set in the cut-throat world of student journalism.
‘He began to feel less like he was delivering a speech and more like a speech was delivering him.’
An extract from Ben Lerner’s latest novel, The Topeka School.
‘I thought she was the prettiest girl in our school. No one else seemed to think so.’
A short story about a high school friendship, by Che Yeun.
‘After my first day of clown school I tried to drop out.’
Nuar Alsadir goes to clown school at Yale.
An excerpt from Mariana Leky’s What You Can See From Here.
‘The day of the explosion, Bautista made his way through the camp as he had the previous days, months and years.’
Fiction by Miluska Benavides, translated by Katherine Silver.
‘I was trying simultaneously to numb the grief I felt and to burrow into that grief, so I could stand in it.’
‘What I thought was the world yesterday, today I couldn’t even touch its outline.’
Two essays by Hitomi Kanehara.
‘In my imagination I have been to many villages and cities in the world.’
