‘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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‘The flirtations of insects and plants are furtive, hidden and often so brief that if you literally blink you might miss what exactly is going on.’
Dino J. Martins on moths and orchids, from Granta 153: Second Nature.
‘The origin of the dysfunctional family: spores. / Friend or foe? True fern or ally?’
Poems by Sylvia Legris, author of Garden Physic.
‘And the trees were safely tucked in. Their roots were rallying in the soil, in this coil. Would the woman also take a turn for the better in her last decade?’
Three stories by Diane Williams.
‘walking alone down a country road – / distracted by the slightly annoying and toxic / first green of spring, eyes overflowing’
A poem by Emily Skillings.
‘Whatever the aftermath, you won’t see the city again except through the agency of absence, recalling this semi-emptiness, this viral uncertainty.’
From 2020: China Miéville on the UK government’s response to coronavirus.
‘Rosella and her co-creators curate an archive of pain, of endurance, of love and belonging, of alienation and disconnection.’
Nicole R. Fleetwood introduces the photography of Raphael Rosella.
‘Trouble was awake – we didn’t need anyone to tell us.’
New fiction by Adachioma Ezeano.
‘i buy my own selling / spiels, i mean them all, i am so bored’
‘Why can’t the heart keep still and why isn’t the brain smooth to the touch.’
An excerpt from Ariana Harwicz’s novel Tender.
‘All I do is write in my sickbed diary. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything else.’ Two poems by Lee Young-ju translated by Jae Kim.
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
