Welcome to Hopscotch Translation

When Hopscotch suggested writing about the book, I became curious what such a note might look like. Not just because the book contains my translations of Swahili rap songs and translations of my interviews with pioneering Swahili rappers and producers. It also explores how Swahili rappers “translated” American hip-hop to an East African context… READ MORE

The 이야기 I’ve written in this collection are a little different from the ordinary kind. These stories have neither inciting incident nor conclusion. Nor do the individual sentences stand in ordinary causal relationship to one another. Each story is a “leaning in to whisper.” An intimate gesture to convey the vastness of the field that is the human heart, an unfathomable universe impossible to encompass… READ MORE

Unlike the twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who remain forever frozen in time, all translations, as we know, must eventually grow old. Philippe Jaworski’s translation for the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade is brand new; no doubt it, too, will age one day, but that day is a long way off. For now, the translation feels free and inventive. It seems to spring from the translator’s enduring love for Alice… READ MORE

Two years prior to Good & Safe, Ujvary published a collection of unofficial dissident poetry she’d smuggled out of the Soviet Union, and she certainly shares in the dissident’s joy of slipping one by the authorities, even if those authorities constitute the self. Her poems, which are largely lists or list-like assemblages, read like self-inventories of codes that, as if by their Eigendynamik, are allowed to subvert themselves… READ MORE