Volume 10 • Issue 4 • 2020 • Fall
Issue in Internet Archive.
When we were publishing our Summer 2020 issue, we imagined that by the fall issue we’d be done with the pandemic and all its themes. Not so. In Buenos Aires, Carlos Gamerro surveys the “pleasures of the pestilence” in a sweep of literary and cinematic manifestation and finds them wanting. His essay is followed by two more creative non-fictions: an imaginative document of a Rohingya trucker and jade trader in the China-Burma borderlands, and an excerpt from Jacqueline Goldberg’s remarkable autofiction about writing in, with, a body in permanent motion.
The poems speak for themselves, each with their original language humming under the English translation. Two of the poets made their first contact with their translator in IWP’s translation workshop in the fall of 2019; a different wind brought us the combative poem from Romania.
Hajar Bali’s story gently renders kafkaesque a domestic scene in Algiers. And the storyteller in Djarah Kan’s ”My Father, the Scafista” maps the brutal traffic across the Mediterranean, from Libya to Italy, as a descriptor and as a headspace.
To conclude, a review of a just-out volume covering the history of the Neustadt Prize for International Literature, awarded every October-- right around now.
—The Editors
Iowa City, October 2020