Book Review: Readings

Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers

edited by Alane Salierno Mason, Dedi Felman, and Samantha Schnee

Anchor, 384 pp., $14 (paper)

Recently, the number of Americans applying for passports has grown, but the fact remains that merely 20% of U.S. citizens own traveling papers. For internationally promiscuous book-lovers, equally depressing numbers come from the Words Without Borders Web site: While 50% of books published worldwide have been translated from English, a mere 6% have been translated from other languages into English. Talk about one-way streets. It's little wonder that our commander-in-chief famously confused Slovakia for Slovenia and referred to Greeks as Grecians.

The new anthology from WWB editors Alane Salierno Mason, Dedi Felman, and Samantha Schnee, however, offers remediation for those who believe that there is value to understanding other national perspectives and reading – if not always traveling – widely. "It is up to us now to listen to the expression of our fellow human beings with whom we share the planet," writes Andre Dubus III, a former Austin resident, in his fine introduction. "Whether we know it or not, these are notes in the world symphony in which we all play a part." The book offers a range of contemporary translations from around the world, and if such figures as Gabriel García Márquez cast a long shadow, the collection does two things that help it outrun major authors already embraced by the academy. First, WWB has engaged some of the biggest names in literary fiction – Ha Jin, Francine Prose, Ariel Dorfman, and Günter Grass – to introduce their own selections for translation; second, the editors cast a wide net, bringing in authors from Korea, India, Iran, Haiti, Argentina, Turkey, and elsewhere.

The best of these stories and poems feature New Yorker-worthy writing. If there is a complaint to be had, it is that the collection is too slim and that many excerpts are so tantalizingly brief, a hunger prevails. It's an apt coda for the whole collection when Dorfman requests that "we remember all the other narratives that I had to leave adrift and shipwrecked and without a translator and that look forward to calm eyes, avid eyes."