Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
We in the English-speaking world are used to the idea that we apprehend Genji only dimly through translation, as if through a scrim, watching shadows. So why then have two Japanese sisters, both well-known poets, spent years retranslating an Edwardian English translation of the novel back into Japanese?
In Yuri Herrera’s 2009 novel, borders can be impenetrable surfaces, and language can open doors that can’t so easily be locked back.
Magda Szabó’s 1970 novel is an unusual coming-of-age story—the willful heroine finds her place in society not by learning to comply with its demands, but by learning the art of dissent.
Poupeh Missaghi’s debut novel follows a protagonist obsessed with finding out why Tehran’s statues are disappearing. It’s an experimental hybrid work that combines a traditional novel narrative with quotes from theorists and writers, dossier-style notes on people who have been made to disappear after death, and poetry.
Genet operated in social structures in order to subvert them, to explore and craft beauty from the darkest corners of modern civilization. While most artists can only imagine a prison sentence, prostitution, ecstasy, or evil, Genet lived through these experiences and, in some cases, sought them out.
Through etymological conversion, our minds have come to separate “flesh” from “meat,” sublimating the violent methods necessary to render bodies into food and making us believe we know with certainty what separates our own bodies from the bodies that we destine to be eaten.
Shannon Airport was empty at 8:30 in the morning, just twenty of us stumbling off the red-eye from Toronto. A few dark-jacketed employees leaned on brooms to watch the fatigued arrivals. One pointed me to the bus for Limerick, where a small, gray-haired man waited. “I’m going to Shannon View Farm,” I said, “Will you…
Charley sponges off the dinner dishes—hers and Karim’s, the girl’s, the Goat’s—then slots them one by one into the rack to drip. All the while staring straight ahead through her reflection into the night. Despite the heat, unusual for Paris in late October, she keeps the windows latched against police sirens and Maghrebi rap and…
translation by Owen Good It’s there. It’s gone. Both. Almost always. I didn’t go out for four days; I was inside the entire time. I stocked up on wine. At the time, I never considered that I shouldn’t, that I should do something to combat this; I forget resolutions I’d previously made…
No products in the cart.