Blog / 10 Questions

10 Questions for Ryan Choi

August 12, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

As the sharpened sword beheads the two-headed
               serpent,
I shun the crude laughter and gossip of the mortal
               world.
Thousands of autumns of virtue and vice are buried
               in the yellow of the earth,
Under the sunny skies that forever shine on good
               and evil the same.
The slightest breeze rumples the moon’s portrait on
               the lake,
The faintest drizzle snatches the blooming flowers
               from their branches.
...

10 Questions for Will Howard

August 5, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

We always wanted to have a bar.
We always wanted to have a music bar.
We always wanted to have a music bar and call it “The 67”
and fill it with album covers
from that oh-so-glorious year
for western pop music,
call it “The 67” and put it on an enormous sign
next to Warhol’s banana.
—from Pablo Texón's "The 67," Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
When I was in high school, I translated an excerpt of Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus in an English class. I’m sure my translation was awful, but I enjoyed the part of the assignment where we had to write a one-page reflection on the...

10 Questions for Lisa Schantl

July 30, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

“hello”

i say to my reflection.
at the level of spittelau i see it. my reflection.
recognize it, but not myself in it.

these are days on which i believe i’ve forgotten how to walk.

on the way back from heiligenstadt i put one foot in front of the
other, but it feels so ridiculous that i stop every few meters to watch
other people taking their steps.
—translated from Maë Schwinghammer's "Hello," Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
I remember that it was a gray and heavy winter day, packed with dust and gloom and the occasional flickering streetlamp, and I had the shared student apartment to myself. A few...

10 Questions for Katherine Vondy

July 22, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

At first just one or two people watched the bears. Then they shared the bears with some of their friends and the friends started watching the bears. The friends told other friends who told other friends, and friendly acquaintances, and even strangers. These people told other people. After a while, everybody was watching the bears.

The bears were not really there. Or actually they were, but only if “there” was Alaska. Not the city where all the bear-watching was happening, which was many of thousands of miles away. The people in the faraway city watched the bears via a webcam that live-streamed a salmon-filled river 24/7. Because there were so many salmon, there were also bears. The bears feasted on the salmon.
—...

10 Questions for noam keim

July 15, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

Late spring and early summer belongs to the delicate smell of lindens in bloom, covering the stench of violence and death in the city of Philadelphia. Every year, as the temperatures rise, so does the litany of guns at night, the refrain of a city intent on breaking your heart. Never enough branches and trunks to cover all the cries.

In the dramatic sun of a Philadelphia spring morning, I walk one mile east from my home to my office without the shade of a tree. My body hasn’t adjusted yet to the cruelty of their absence; I grew up under the cover of linden trees lining up our boulevards and populating the parks of my childhood. Trees I have always known as tilleul in my French home. In this new life, under the canopy of the...