A travelogue in poems, Peter Blair‘s third collection limns the complexities and contradictions of being an American living abroad. The speaker of these poems is at once immersed in the life of a Thai city, while constantly remaining a farang, or foreigner.

READ Siripan’s Father

READ The Day after the Coup

READ Suang U’s Letters from Thailand

READ Back in Pittsburgh for My Father’s Funeral

CLICK HERE to buy a copy of Farang

A memoir translated by Robert Dorsett and David Pollard

Synopsis

In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labor Camp chronicles Er Tai Gao’s life under the political persecution of China’s Communist government. In 1957 at the age of 22, Gao published an essay titled “On Beauty,” arguing that the nature of beauty is subjective and individual—a stance that caused him to be branded a “rightist” by the Mao regime. He was sentenced to three years in a hard labor camp in the harsh central desert. During his sentence, 90 percent of his fellow prisoners died. Over the next 30 years, Gao was sent to labor and reeducation camps several times because of his outspoken views. He was last arrested in Beijing in1989 during the Tiananmen Square protests and held for six months without charges. In 1992 he and his wife Maya escaped China through Hong Kong. They were granted political refugee status in the United States the following year.

In Search of My Homeland is the story of his imprisonment for “thought crimes” against the Communist state and his eventual escape to freedom.

READ THE EXCERPT FROM IN SEARCH OF MY HOMELAND

CLICK HERE to buy a copy of In Search of My Homeland

READ Er Tai Gao’s essay on Tiananmen Square that appeared in Sampsonia Way, September 2009.

READ the Los Angeles Times review of In Search of My Homeland.

READ the New York Times review of In Search of My Homeland.

IN SEARCH OF MY HOMELAND, By Er Tai Gao, translated by Robert Dorsett and David Pollard, copyright ©2009 by Er Tai Gao. Reprinted by permission of Ecco.

Ever since I started preparing our most recent issue on Cuba, I have been following Yoani Sánchez’s blog, Generation Y. The first time I read it, I was enchanted by Yoani’s voice—bitter, sardonic but laced with a fierce optimism that change is possible. At times, she’s incredibly funny. While waiting in line at the Ministry of the Interior, she vainly hopes a worker distracted by hunger and eager to grab lunch will hastily approve her travel request. Yoani wrote, “You know well the effect that melted cheese and tomato sauce can cause in a bureaucrat who looks at her watch at three in the afternoon.”

She posted this just days after the death of her friend Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died during a hunger strike while in prison. Held for contempt, public disorder, and disobedience, Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience.

Today I opened the blog and read this: “To report what hurts us, to write about what we have encountered, touched, suffered, transcends the journalistic experience to become a living testimony.” This opens Yoani’s heart-wrenching entry about Guillermo Fariñas, who began a hunger strike after Tomayo’s death and vows to continue until all prisoners of conscience with health problems are set free.  It was through her blog that I learned Fariñas was hospitalized, an event initially not covered in the American press.

Blogs can offer their readers a street-level view of life under dictatorship—its tragedy, banality, and absurdity—that is at once intimate and informative.

Here are a few blogs from around the world that offer individual perspectives of life under political turmoil or instability. I don’t endorse everything the bloggers say,  but what they offer is invaluable—singular voices stubbornly pushing against the grain of mainstream media.

Generation Y, Cuba

Adventures of Mr. Behi, Iran

Angry Chinese Blogger, China

An Arab Woman Blues, Iraq

Anas Qtiesh, Syria

Scarlett Lion, Liberia/Uganda

What an African Woman Thinks, Kenya

High Peaks Pure Earth, Tibet

Baheyya, Egypt

GenderStan, Kyrgyzstan

The Devil’s Excrement, Venezuela

These are merely a selection of blogs I enjoy reading. Since I am an English speaker, they are all in English. Please feel free to add to the list using the comment section below. I’d enjoy seeing blogs in lots of languages!

Also check out Threatened Voices, a project of GlobalVoices advocacy. The site is mapping locations where bloggers have been threatened, arrested, or killed due to their work, and provides links if you wish to take action.

Click here to read Elizabeth’s bio.

Read issue 3 about Cuban Bloggers.

The Burial

How horribly hot it was in that church, my dear. I can’t figure out why they decided to hold the funeral so early in the day. They really should have air conditioning in churches. This isn’t the first time I’ve thought of that: if those priests installed air conditioning, I swear we’d come to church more often. I told my mother that the last time I went, and she made a face like you wouldn’t believe, like I was committing blasphemy. Good thing we’re in the car now and that I parked it in the shade. For a moment there I was sweating so much I thought my makeup would run. What a talkative priest, my dear. But let’s just wait here until the air conditioning kicks in—I’ve been sweating so much I feel like dashing home and taking a shower instead of following in the funeral procession. I’m going to join in behind Sergio and Cuca. Sergio’s car is such a pretty color, I love that lilac; I wanted one that color but BMW doesn’t make it, only Toyota, so I chose white, because it goes with everything and I wasn’t about to buy a different make just because there wasn’t lilac. Some people don’t care; Alberto, my ex-husband, is like that. I’ve had only BMWs for about twelve years now, ever since papa gave me my first car when I turned eighteen and entered the university. I remember celebrating with Olga María. A day that started out beautiful and ended up ugly. The day after the graduation party, there it was, the car, parked in front of our house. It was a total surprise, and I was ecstatic. I called all my friends from school and told them to come over and see it: BMW, latest model, crimson red. I drove around in it the whole day with Olga María and some other friends. Papa warned me not to drive too fast, but once we decided to drive to the port and we were out on the highway, I floored it. Poor Olga María, we were so happy that day, and now, look at her, ahead of us in that hearse. I still can’t believe it. That same night I was showing off my BMW, we also had a brush with death; that’s why I’m remembering it now, you can’t imagine what a horrible experience it was. We went to the Zona Rosa to have a few beers and hang out with some friends. You won’t believe it, but we’d just left Chili’s, and we were walking to the corner where I’d left my car and suddenly, there was a shoot-out. All hell broke loose. A bunch of terrorists suddenly appeared out of nowhere and started shooting some gringos sitting on the terrace of the Mediterraneo Restaurant. You can’t believe the panic. Everybody threw themselves on the ground and started shouting their heads off, because the shooting seemed to last forever. I tore my brand-new blue jeans, right on the knee, and Olga María almost broke her wrist. It was dreadful. When the shooting stopped, there was this deathly silence, and we all slowly crept over to where the gringos were all shot up. They killed them all; there were about ten of them sprawled out on the floor, bleeding like pigs. Dreadful, my dear, really gruesome. We’d just walked by there no more than a minute earlier. Isn’t that incredible, that nothing happened to us then and now Olga María ended up dying like this? I swear, we almost had a fit of hysteria. I don’t know how we managed to find our way to the car and get out of there. Two of the gringos were really handsome. I remember perfectly how they stared at Olga María and me when we walked past their table. That’s what we were talking about—hard as it is to believe, even if it seems like I’m making this up—about how hot two of those gringos were, when suddenly the shooting started. I hate driving in funeral processions. Other people hate you; it causes huge traffic jams; and it makes me feel like I’m on display in a shop window. If Olga María hadn’t been such a good friend, I’d have driven straight to the cemetery and not followed the hearse—that’s what I usually do when it isn’t someone this close. Hand me that Miguel Bosé cassette. He’s so hot. I love him. Finally, the air conditioning is starting to work. I don’t know why that hearse is going so slowly. It’s practically standing still. What’s going on? Maybe it’s because there are too many of us. This must be one of the longest processions there’s been in a long time—Olga María and Marito’s families are so well-known; well, to tell the truth, Olga María’s is more. By the way, did you notice how gorgeous Diana looked? She looks so much like Olga María, a Xerox copy. Miami’s climate suits her. I’d love to have a tan like that. But the sun here is too harsh: it just burns you, turns you into a boiled shrimp, and then the tan doesn’t last at all. Things are going really well for Diana in Miami. We had a long talk this morning. I told her exactly what happened. She suspects there’s more than meets the eye. She said she has no intention of standing around twiddling her thumbs, she’s even considering hiring a gringo private detective to come here and investigate; she doesn’t trust the police here at all. I don’t either, especially that Deputy Chief Handal, what an oaf. Did I tell you he started interrogating me this afternoon? Stupid idiot. He wants me to tell him all of Olga María’s most intimate secrets just so he can confirm his own filthy suspicions. He even threatened me, if I didn’t cooperate, he’d get a subpoena. Please, do me a favor! Ask me whatever you want, I told him, once and for all, but I warned him, I’m only going to answer the questions I feel like answering. And you know what he asked? If I knew of any life insurance policies Marito had taken out on Olga María. I told him these aren’t things decent people go around talking about, every respectable family of course has life insurance policies. Please, do me a favor. That Deputy Chief Handal is a boor—instead of looking for the murderer, he spends his time digging into Olga María’s family life. I told him: Don’t be so vile! What, I said to him, are you trying to insinuate that Mario hired somebody to kill Olga María so he could get her life insurance? What a vile insinuation—and I, for one, wasn’t going to put up with it. He said I shouldn’t misunderstand, he was only trying to verify information he’d gotten elsewhere and he wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination suggesting that Mr. Trabanino had hired somebody to kill his wife. That’s what that cretin said: “Mr. Trabanino.” Then he really threw me for a loop. You know what he asked me? If I knew what kind of relationship there’d been between Olga María and Gastón Berrenechea, the lawyer. Now, why would he ask me that? We were in the reception room at the funeral home, it was almost empty, but everyone must have heard me shouting at him to stop being so impertinent, show some respect for the dead, get out of here immediately unless he wanted me to get Olga María’s relatives to throw him out. Can you imagine such an outrage? I bet he was a terrorist, or something like it, during the war. Well, with this new police force they put together after they signed that peace treaty with the communists, you never know. I am absolutely positive that Handal is working with Yuca’s enemies. You’ve got to be very careful with people of that ilk. Can you imagine the scandal if the press got wind of Yuca’s affaire with Olga María! I get chills just thinking about it: it would be the end of his entire political career. What a weird route the driver of that hearse is taking. I would have turned left here: it makes more sense— why does he want to go all the way through Colonia San Francisco?

From THE SHE- DEVIL IN THE MIRROR, By Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated by Katherine Silver, copyright ©2000 by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translation copyright ©2009 by Katherine Silver. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing.

Entierro

¿Qué tan caliente fue horrible en esa iglesia, muchacha. No sé por qué vinieron a la misa fúnebre tan temprano. Deberían poner aire acondicionado en lasiglesias. No piense que esto es la primera vez que pienso: yo te aseguro que si los sacerdotes pondría un acondicionador de aire con mayor frecuencia. Esta última vez le dije a mi mamá y puso una cara como si hubiera sido la maldición. Por suerte estamos en el coche y me fui estacionado en la sombra. Por un momento sentí que el maquillaje se me empiezan a correr con tanto sudor. Y lo que un sacerdote para hablar, muchacha. Pero ahora esperamos que este acondicionador de aire se enfría rápidamente. Sudaba tanto que en vez de seguir la procesión me dan ganas de ir en una carrera a la casa para echar una ducha. Voy a ir después de Sergio y Cuca. ¡Qué bonito coche de color Sergio, me encanta ese color morado y quería que fuera la mía, pero el BMW no tiene ese color, sólo las marcas Toyota, así que he preferido al blanco, porque se combina con todo y no va a cambiar sólo porque las marcas de coches no había lila.

Hay gente que no me importa, Alberto, mi ex-marido, lo es. Tengo como sólo tengo doce años de BMW, ya que mi papá me dio mi primer coche, cuando tenía dieciocho años y se fue a la universidad. Recuerdo que lo celebramos con Olga María. Un buen día en el comienzo y el final niña amarga. En la mañana después del baile de graduación el coche estaba aparcado fuera de la casa. Fue una sorpresa. Yo no podía de la alegría. Llamé a todos los compañeros de la escuela para decirles, porque ellos vinieron a verlo. Era un BMW, último modelo, de un rojo carmesí. Pasé todo el día arriba y abajo, con Olga María y otros estudiantes. Mi padre me advirtió que no se ejecutan a gran velocidad, pero una vez que decidió ir al puerto que se utiliza para acelerar en el camino.Pobre Olga María, tan feliz que estábamos entonces, y ahora mira a ella, luego en el coche fúnebre. No puedo creer. Esa noche se estrenó mi BMW también estuvo cerca de la muerte, así que accedí. No te puedes imaginar lo horrible experiencia. Fuimos a la Zona Rosa, unas cervezas y charlar con los amigos. ¿Y qué te parece? Habíamos dejado sólo el Chili’s, caminamos alrededor de la esquina, hacia el lugar donde había dejado mi coche, cuando de repente comenzó un tiroteo terrible.

Era como el infierno. Los terroristas llegaron a conocer el lugar y comenzaron a disparar a unos gringos que estaban en la terraza del restaurante Mediterráneo. Visto lo que el pánico. Todo el mundo se dejó caer al suelo, gritando, porque el rodaje parecía eterna. Rompí una nueva marca de jeans hasta las rodillas, y Olga María casi se rompe la muñeca. Fue horrible. Cuando cesaron los disparos, se produjo un silencio de muerte y todo el mundo que nos acercábamos lentamente al lugar donde los gringos puré. Habían matado a todos los que eran como diez, tirado en el piso, desangrado. macabra niña terrible ».No hemos tenido ni un minuto había pasado con ellos. Lo increíble verdad, entonces no éramos nada y ahora Olga María viene a morir de esta manera. Te lo juro casi nos da un ataque de nervios. No sé cómo llegamos al coche y salir. Dos de estos gringos fueron magníficos. Tengo por lo que esta la forma en que estaban viendo cuando vamos a Olga María junto a su mesa. Y hemos tratado antes de que, créanlo o no, incluso si parece mi invento, que lo que los papás eran un par de gringos, cuando de pronto comenzaron los disparos.

No me gusta conducir en los funerales. La gente odia a uno, son los principales cuellos de botella. Me siento como si estuviera en exhibición. Si no fuera tan amigo de Olga María me hubiera ido directamente al cementerio, sin seguir el cortejo es lo que suelo hacer cuando la gente no está tan cerca.Llegar a la cinta Miguel Bosé. Daddy. Me encanta. Ya enfriado con aire acondicionado, buena.Yo no sé por qué el entrenador se va tan despacio. Casi no hay progreso. ¿Qué pasará?Quizás es porque somos demasiados coches. Les aseguro que esta es una de las procesiones más numerosas en los últimos tiempos. Los familiares de Olga María y Marita son tan inmensamente popular, así que, bueno, en realidad más de Olga María. Por cierto, ¿has visto lo bonita que es Diana? Olga se parece tanto a María es como la fotocopia. el clima de Miami ha sentado muy bien. Un bronceado y me gustaría tener. Pero este sol aquí es muy duro: los lugares en llamas, como el camarón y un bronceado no dura nada.

Él está haciendo REQUETEBIÉN Diana allí en Miami. Estuvimos hablando largamente esta mañana. Le dije cómo los eventos que había sucedido. Ella sospecha que hay algo oculto. Dijo que no cree que una pausa, que incluso está dispuesto a contratar a un detective para que los gringos vienen a investigar, no tiene confianza en esta policía. Yo tampoco, peor que el comisionado de Handal, un verdadero imbécil. ¿No te dije que hoy al mediodía comenzó a interrogarme? Estúpido.¿Quieres revelar las intimidades de Olga María de confirmar sus sospechas sucio. Incluso me amenazó con que si no cooperaba con él, yo haría una convocatoria oficial. Hazme un favor. Le dije una vez y me preguntó qué quería saber, pero le advirtió de que respondería solamente lo que quería. ”¿Y sabes lo que te pedí? Si usted sabe de un seguro de vida Olga Marito había comprado para María. Le dije que las cosas que la gente decente que no están diciendo que anda y el seguro por lo general son familiares para cualquier familia que tiene un sentido. Hágame un favor. Un cafre cierto que mamital comisionado Handal.

En vez de buscar al asesino, se dedica a profundizar en la vida familiar de Olga María. Yo le dije, ese cabrón no es que lo que quería decir era que Marito había enviado a matar Olga María para cobrar el seguro, y que fue un despreciable en absoluto que yo no estaba dispuesto a tolerar. Él dijo que no mal entendida, que nada más se confirma la información y de ninguna manera se sugiere que el Sr. Trabanino había ordenado el asesinato de su esposa. Así dice el tonto: “Sr. Trabanino. Y después me vienen con patada. ¿Sabes lo que te pedí? ¿Qué pasa si yo sabía qué clase de relación existía entre María y el abogado Gastón Olga Berrenechea. Lo que he dicho eso. Estábamos en el pasillo fuera de la funeraria y casi no hay gente. Pero todo el mundo me debe de haber escuchado cuando me gritó que no le bastardo, a respetar a los muertos y luego salir de inmediato si quería ir a buscar a la familia de Olga María para sacarlo de patadas. Imagínese lo terrible.

Esto sin duda era un terrorista o algo así. Con esta nueva fuerza de policía formado después de la firma de la paz con los comunistas y no conoce a nadie. Sin duda, la Handal esta parte de los enemigos de la yuca. Mejor tener cuidado con los sujetos de esa calaña. Te imaginas el escándalo que podía armar si se filtró a la prensa que la yuca Olga tuvo un romance con María! Me da escalofríos sólo de pensarlo: pondría fin a la carrera política de los primeros. ¡Qué extraño camino que llevó al conductor del coche fúnebre. Me hubiera doblado aquí a la izquierda es más lógico. ¿Qué quieres que pasar por todos los San Francisco?

Desde la diabla en el espejo, Por Horacio Castellanos Moya, derechos de autor © 2000 por Horacio Castellanos Moya. Reproducido con permiso del autor.

“Do you think they’ll call a state of emergency?” Rita asks.

“At least you created a story for yourself,” he says. “Not all reporters can do that.”

From DANCE WITH SNAKES, by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated by Lee Paula Springer, copyright ©1996 by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translation copyright ©2009 by Lee Paula Springer. Reprinted by permission of Biblioasis.

One of the most interesting aspects for me as a translator of the complex and multifaceted novel Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya, is its exploration of how syntax, specifically syntactic distortion, subverts—or perverts—the internal coherence of the individual psyche.

The narrator of this concise, breathless novel has been hired by the Catholic Church in an unnamed Central American country to copyedit a report about the massacres of the indigenous communities by the armed forces. As he slogs through the one-thousand-one-hundred page text, he becomes obsessed by snippets of testimonies by traumatized non-native survivors, testimonies that describe horrific brutality and violence. The narrator is fascinated by the idiosyncratic syntax of these sentences, experiencing them as both poetic—even reminiscent of the great Peruvian poet, César Vallejo—and indicative of the speakers’ trauma. As the book progresses and he becomes more and more paranoid about being the target of those who would like to silence such voices, his own syntax—that of the narrative—gets infected—distorted—by these utterances. At first glance, the reader might suspect that the narrator, and the author, is aestheticizing the testimony, thereby pushing away the ethical and political issues involved, as well as emotionally cutting himself from the violence and its implications; the fact that he ultimately takes on the syntax implies a much more intimate identification with the victim: getting under their skins and climbing into their minds invokes a different process altogether.

Part of the challenge and the joy of translating this text was finding a way to re-create this almost imperceptible process in English without sounding contrived or falling into the cliché of stilted, broken English phrasing. I was also aware that by translating the novel into English, introducing it into the cultural and linguistic context of the United States, I was adding yet another layer—much as the narrator does when he copies the phrases into his notebook. The Spanish text, infected by the distorted syntax of the native languages of the victims, moves into English, thereby infecting English with a distorted syntax from another subordinated language, namely Spanish. The language of the conquered subverts the conquering language through a syntax that undermines the sanity of the narrator (and the society?). Then the text is translated into English, the language that has colonized and continues to—as we speak and translate—the original colonizing language itself.

When the novel begins, the narrator pretends to maintain that distance between himself and the utterances that so enthrall him, as well as the brutality and violence they convey. In the text, these sentences are italicized to emphasize the fact that they have been taken from another source, quoted, decontextualized. When the narrator copies them down in his little notebook and obsessively reads them to himself or, mostly inappropriately, shares them with others, they take one further step out of their contexts. This again reflects back on the act of translation, for what do we translators do if not lift texts out of their own worlds and dump them into new and often inhospitable ones?

The first of these italicized phrases the narrator lifts from the report—and the first sentence of the book—spoken by an indigenous man whose family has been slaughtered in front of him, is:  “I am not complete in the mind.”

Here is a sampling of others:

“The houses they were sad because no people were inside them.”

“Because for me the sorrow is to not bury him myself.”

“While the cadavers they were burning, everyone clapped and they began to eat”

“If I die I know not who will bury me.”

Then, toward the end:

“We all know who are the assassins!”

In the last several chapters, we have lost the italics, and the boundaries. The narrator has taken on the sp (and the trauma?) of the victims:

“As if free of fear I awoke that first morning in my assigned room at the spiritual retreat center . . .”

And then the next paragraph on the next page begins:

“As if free of nightmares I awoke that first morning in that austere room with white walls, lying in my bunk where I enjoyed contemplating, through the glass door that faced the large lawn and the pine forest beyond, the fog drifting by on the breeze.”

One perspective on the narrator’s state of mind is that his subjectivity has been layered over that of the text he is editing, thereby creating a mind confused by other, multiple, subjectivities. This layering, or dialogue, if you will, is eerily similar to what a translator engages in, a process in both cases that suggests great intimacy, a deep unveiling. Anecdotally, there were moments when the translator’s sanity was challenged by the text (the novel) that spoke of a different text (the report) that was challenging the narrator’s sanity. In one scene, the narrator is describing the testimony of a particularly horrific torture session involving a young woman. He says he felt so terrible reading it that he flung open the door to his office and took a walk around the palace grounds where he was working. Each time I revised that scene, I experienced the same feeling of suffocation, the same need to see something in front of my eyes besides the images invoked and the pain recounted; I would step outside my office door and into my garden.

Herein lies a rather brutal instance of a common occupational hazard for translators: our minds take on the mind of the writer of the text we are translating. In the jargon of the psychology of human relationships, we translators, like our paranoid and poetically sensitive narrator, sometimes have boundary issues.

CLICK HERE to read Silver’s bio.

CLICK HERE to buy a copy of Silver’s translation of Senselessness.

MORE BY KATHERINE SILVER

Literary Translation of Subversion

The Erotic Place of Translation

A novel translated by Lee Paula Springer

As El Salvador returns to peace after more than a decade of civil war, Eduardo Sosa, an unemployed sociologist, becomes fascinated by a homeless man who lives in a beat-up yellow Chevrolet parked across the street from his sister’s apartment. An unexpected turn of events causes Sosa to assume the other man’s identity. When he becomes the driver of the mysterious yellow Chevrolet, Sosa discovers that it is home to four poisonous snakes. With the snakes as accomplices, Sosa unleashes a reign of terror on the city of San Salvador. Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Dance With Snakes is a macabre high-speed romp, in which violence and comedy become almost indistinguishable. The non-stop action raises provocative questions about social exclusion and the role of the media, but this novel also evokes the tenderness of relations among those on society’s margins.

READ AN EXCERPT OF DANCE WITH SNAKES

CLICK HERE to buy a copy of Dance with Snakes

A novel translated by Katherine Silver

“How could such a tragedy have happened, my dear,” begins Laura Rivera’s desultory, breathless stream-of-consciousness narration of events surrounding the murder of her best friend, Olga María. Nobody knows who pulled the trigger, but Laura will not rest until she finds out. As The She-Devil in the Mirror progresses, Laura’s theory of the murder becomes increasingly complex and incredible. She also treats the reader to the sordid details of Olga’s love affairs, childhood memories of the two friends, and her own self-obsessed musings.

A detective story that takes its reader through the social, political, economic, and sexual chaos of post-civil war San Salvador, The She-Devil in the Mirror is a reminder that justice and truth often are illusive. Horacio Castellanos Moya’s relentless, obsessive narrator—rich, paranoid, wonderfully perceptive, and, in the end, fabulously unreliable—paints, in spite of her seeming frivolousness, a profound portrait of a society in a state of collapse.

READ AN EXCERPT OF THE SHE-DEVIL IN THE MIRROR

LEA EL MISMO CAPÍTULO DE LA DIABLA EN EL ESPEJO EN ESPAÑOL

CLICK HERE to buy a copy of The She-Devil in the Mirror

A novel translated by Paul Vincent

Originally published in Flemish in 1947,  My Little War is a fictionalized account of Louis Paul Boon’s experiences during World War II. After serving a mere three days on the frontlines, he was captured and sent to a German prison camp. After his release, he returned to his village in German-occupied Belgium, where much of the novel is set.

This structurally innovative novel consists of short vignettes, each introducing a new character, followed by italicized notes in which Boon comments on the anecdote, reflects on the role of the writer, and even castigates himself for trying to capture the complexities of human experience. Many of these enigmatic episodes were taken from newspaper accounts, overheard conversations, and other sources. Boon resists traditional fictional techniques such as plot and character development (many characters are simply known as “what’s-his-name”) while presenting a compelling portrait of a community under siege.

This is first English translation of My Little War.

READ AN EXCERPT OF MY LITTLE WAR

This excerpt from Louis Paul Boon’s My Little War appears by permission of Dalkey Archive Press, copyright 2010.

CLICK HERE to buy a copy of My Little War