news from Words Without Borders

Memory of a Paris Street 
Siegfried Kracauer walks twice down a Paris street
Translated by Ross Benjamin 
It's been almost three years since I ended up on that street in the Grenelle quarter. Chance led me there–or rather, not so much chance as intoxication. The intoxication of the streets that always seizes me in Paris. At the time I encountered the street, I was spending four weeks completely alone in Paris and would walk for several hours each day through the quarters. It was an obsession that I couldn't resist. more>>>

"Survivors," from The Ears of the Wolf
Antonio Ungar depicts a grueling sojourn in the Tierra Adentro Mountains.
Translated by Katherine Silver
I wake up. The bus stops, and a village full of horses appears. Mama and her women meditator friends and her women communist friends and my sister are on the bus, along with the peasants. We get off, we wander among the horses, we eat something, we find someone to guide us. Beyond the village and throughout the following days are only the infinite mountains of Tierra Adentro. more>>>

How Old is the Queen of England?
Agur Schiff takes a late-night stroll through a Tel Aviv Cemetery.
Translated by Jessica Cohen
The old dog lumbers beside me, exhaling and inhaling laboriously and tracking my steps with her bowed head turned white with old age. Owls perch on the branches canopying the path, against the indigo background of the darkening sky. They give us sideways glances and emit long whistles like rubber toys. Their eyes are open in wonderment. more>>>

Paradise . . . Kind of
Troub's sketches a graphic memoir of a dual society in Borneo 
Translated by Edward Gauvin
The Total corporation–jewel in the crown of the French economy-maintains a presence in many countries across the globe, wherever there are fossil fuels to exploit. To do so, it hires locals, but also French employees with expatriate contracts lasting an average of two years. Two years in westernized surroundings, with housing, a company car, and schooling for their children in comfortable conditions and their own language. more>>>

"Walking"
Marjan Strojan paints a picture of a village procession.
Translated by Marjan Strojan
All along our Wooden Cross garden the peonies were dying. . .
The sun was dying on them, too, filling the orchard and
the village road with the scent of warm apricots and
squashed petal leaves way down to the cellar. more>>>

From The Geographer Drank His Globe Away
Alexei Ivanov follows New Year merrymakers into the snowbound Urals. 
Translated by Liv Bliss
Sluzhkin was being prodded by the old guy on the opposite bench. He unglued his eyes, sprang onto his knees still in his sleeping bag, and shot a look through the upper window pane, because the lower one was thickly overgrown with a dense cover of icy ferns. The lopsided, gray little houses of Valyozhnaya were undulating past the electric train, across the hillside.

"Code red, gang!" Sluzhkin roared. "We nearly missed Valyozhnaya!" more>>>