Excerpted from The New York Times, "Online Magazine Removes Cultural Binders":
The online magazine reflects a searching sensibility. Its table of contents guides readers not only to articles, poems and stories from other countries, but also to works about plains, deserts, cities, forests and villages. Click on the subject heading of "coasts," for example, and you'll be referred to "Games on the Banks of the Danube," a work of fiction by Ivan Ivanji, translated by John K. Cox from the German. In the "forests" category are poems by Ahmad Shamlou, translated by Zara Houshmand from the Persian. The site also recommends books for travelers.
Many thanks to Lia for pointing me to this article. I'm overjoyed to see that cross-cultural translation is not only being taken this seriously, but also that it's being funded! Amazing. My only quibble with the editors of Words Without Borders is their tendency to group authors according to national identities. If words are, truly, unbordered there should be no need for such limits. After all, isn't this entire project—not to mention translation itself—about challenging static cultural identities? It would be very interesting to see them take a more integrated, comparative approach in the future (the categories "deserts," "cities" and "forests" are a little too whimsical but definitely a step in the right direction).
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