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Words Without Borders is an online magazine which seeks "to promote international communication through translation of the world's best writing—selected and translated by a distinguished group of writers, translators, and publishing professionals—and publishing and promoting these works (or excerpts) on the web," as well acting as "an advocacy organization for literature in translation." Their cause is a noble one, and seriously underfunded; you should consider sending them a check.

I say that even though the anthology just published with their imprimatur—Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers (Anchor Books)—is a disaster. The trouble begins right off the bat, with the introduction by Andre Dubus III, who recalls how Americans responded to the 1979 embassy takeover in Tehran and again after 9/11 with orgies of violence against immigrants. (You don't remember it happening quite that way? Maybe this book isn't for you.) The publicity material for the anthology features a helpful interview comparing censorship in Iran and North Korea with censorship in the United States. (You always wondered why so many people in airports are toting blockbusters by James Patterson and his ilk, and so few are carrying novels from Iran? Now you know.) Over the project there hovers the notion that reading literature in translation is a quasi-political act. You want to strike a blow against American fascism? Read a novel from the Hungarian and accrue virtue, distinguishing yourself from your dreadfully provincial fellow Americans.

The selections themselves—by 27 writers from all around the world—struck me as largely mediocre, despite the luster of their distinguished "recommenders" (a number of whom are writers I admire). I say that not with satisfaction but with disappointment, as a reader with a healthy appetite for a lot of different kinds of writing. (Of course, this judgment is in part no doubt simply a matter of taste, but taste aside, the batting average is below the Mendoza Line.) The mini-introductions to the selections, done by the recommenders, are uneven: some are shrewd or winsome, others take pratfalls.

Consider novelist Heidi Julavits' intro to a story by a Norwegian writer, Johan Harstad, which Julavits describes as "so stripped down and steely that it almost reads like the work of Philip K. Dick." PKD, stripped down and steely? She was thinking perhaps of the passage in Clans of the Alphane Moon when the chatty, telepathic Ganymedean slime mold Lord Running Clam makes its first appearance, flowing under the protagonist's door and gathering itself "into the heap of small globes which comprised its physical being." No, that won't do. Either Heidi Julavits has never actually read a page of Philip K. Dick (she saw the movies, maybe), or she wrote this under the influence of Chew-Z.

But never mind. Let a thousand flowers bloom. May wwb flourish, and translations abound at Costco. Nan Talese, I'm glad to see, under her imprint at Doubleday, has inaugurated a series called International Fiction, with six titles debuting between January and April of this year. (Four of the novels are translated; two were written in English but nevertheless fit the rubric.) And there are, as always, some books by established writers on the way: Peter Handke's Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, which I have been itching to read, is due in July from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, translated from the German by Krishna Winston. Also coming from fsg, by the late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano, is The Savage Detectives, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, a massive book to set next to the stack of Bolano translations over the last several years from New Directions, one of the publishers most consistently dedicated to literature in translation. University of California Press has just published a magnificent volume, The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo: A Bilingual Edition, edited and translated by Clayton Eshelman. And Harvard University Press (in their Harvard East Asian Monographs series) has issued another volume by the preternaturally gifted scholar Stephen Owen, The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century, a critical study which is chock-full of Owen's translations from the period. From Transaction, you can get the second volume of John Taylor's Paths to Contemporary French Literature; Taylor's short pieces on a huge range of writers are the literary equivalent of a superb travel guide. (Look for more on all of these titles in due course in Books & Culture.)

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