The Axis of Literature

By Joshua Glenn, Globe Staff, 9/28/2003

LAST WEDNESDAY, in a UMass-Boston conference room overlooking a body of water she has described as a "sea of indifference/glazed with salt," the noted poet and essayist Adrienne Rich hailed the launch of an online magazine of international literature in translation that will, she said, help reconnect America with the rest of the world. Rich then read her own poem "The Art of Translation," which laments that because a radical poet of her acquaintance is unknown to English-speaking readers, he can't even get arrested in this country: "neither as terrorist nor as genius would they detain you." The standing-room-only crowd burst into applause.

Words Without Borders (www.wordswithoutborders.org), whose far-flung network of consulting litterateurs includes the Nigerian-born Chinua Achebe and the Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, is predicated on the idea that translation is as thrill-charged as smuggling. "Not knowing what the rest of the world is thinking and writing is both dangerous and boring," claims founding editor Alane Mason, who is also a senior editor at the publishing house W.W. Norton.

To the terrorists who struck on 9/11, Mason said at the UMass event, the people who worked inside the World Trade Center may have merely been abstractions, "but the posters hung up around Manhattan afterward, describing those New Yorkers who were missing, were poems. They reminded us that the only way to fight against abstraction is through particularity." What we need now, she added, "isn't a war on the so-called Axis of Evil -- another abstraction -- but a war on abstraction. For that, we need literature."

Appropriately enough, Words Without Borders, which is based at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., went online this month with a focus on "Literature from the Axis of Evil," including fiction by writers from Iran and North Korea and an essay on the Pakistani writer Saadat Hasan Manto. Coming up in October, according to the site's homepage: writing from pre-liberation Iraq.