Words Without Borders: An Interview with Nadia Kalman

Could you explain a bit about Words Without Borders and how it came to be?

 

Words Without Borders is an online magazine of international literature that started more than 20 years ago, but the organization itself is also more than that. It publishes, promotes and publicizes contemporary literature from all over the world online for free so that people can access it as directly as possible. It's also an organization that supports translation and literary translators. We do think that [translators] can render texts in ways that AI never will. We try to make translation more visible, both in the classroom and to general readers. When I was going to school, we did read some books in translation that were on our reading list, but we never talked about the translation aspect of it. We just talked about it as if we were reading them in English. I never realized how many choices translators make and how that impacts what we see when we read books. That's a really interesting dimension of literature that I think students, especially students who speak a language other than English in their homes, would find really interesting and be able to discuss it at a pretty complex level.

 

Is there anything particularly interesting that you've learned about translating literature?

 

I would say to look at our interviews with translators because we always ask them what is difficult to translate—what is difficult to render in English, in particular. Sometimes it's not a particular word or phrase. Sometimes it's a way of telling stories that can strike the Anglophone reader as strange. When I was speaking with a translator of Chinese literature, who's also a nonfiction writer in English, he was saying that he likes to skip back and forth in time, and that that's sort of a normal way of telling stories. You maybe start off in the middle, and then you go back to something way before that impacts what's going on now, and readers can sort of flow with you. But he said that Anglophone readers need more support with that. So as a translator, he tries to add more transitions to those stories so that more people can follow them who aren't used to that style.

 

How did you first get involved with this organization?

 

I was a classroom teacher and a fiction writer, and I didn't feel like I could balance full-time classroom teaching and writing, so I was sort of trying to figure out what I could do after coming back from a two-year writing fellowship. I applied for this job, and it seemed to combine a lot of things that I was interested in: literature, education, translation, and international culture. I was hired first as a contractor…seeing what we could do with this literature and if we could put it into a form where students would be able to access it. Not just students who are really academically ahead, but students who could really benefit from it—students who might not be that interested in reading and writing in the classroom yet, but if they get something that is culturally relevant to them, was written recently, and they can bring the things that they already know from their heritage culture to bear in understanding that literature, maybe they would get more into it. That is what we started to see from the early days when we were piloting this, and from there, the project expanded. I've been here for more than a decade now.

 

How do you think WWB has evolved since then?

 

I think we've gotten bigger. We got some grants that allowed us to do more. I think [in] the larger world also, people know more about international literature and literature in translation than they did when we started. There are sometimes still questions like, “Why would we teach literature from another part of the world in an English class?” But it happens a lot more rarely than it did when I was first starting off.

 

What's your favorite memory from working at Words Without Borders, or favorite thing that you all have accomplished?

 

Every year, through a grant from New York City, we're able to bring an author who writes in a language other than English to New York to run workshops in classrooms and also [at] the public library with adults. These workshops are in the language that students have as a heritage language. For the past couple years, it's been Spanish, and so the idea is you're going to school in the US, but that doesn't mean that all the writing you do in school has to be in English. You have this linguistic asset, and you can do writing in in another language too.

 

We go along with the writers sometimes and watch their interactions with students. I was at a school in Borough Park, and it was a virtual visit because it was still during the pandemic era. A student was moved to stand up in the classroom and say to the writer, “You inspire me.” This was a high school student, and they try to be cool, but that had all fallen away because they were so enthusiastic. Then a little later, from that same series of visits, a girl in one of the other classes said to the author [Rodrigo Fuentes], “Well, as you know, most of us here are very serious about becoming writers ourselves.” I am pretty sure that they weren't very serious about all becoming writers themselves before he started visiting, but they saw that it was a possibility. [Fuentes] was from Guatemala…and the students said that, as people of Central American heritage, it was really exciting to see someone like themselves who had become a professional.

 

How do you develop these programs?

 

[We’ve been running] this particular program with author visits for five years now. To talk very practically, we have a really, really long work plan. It's very detailed, and we leave very little to chance because there are so many moving parts. They are classrooms and schools and different school policies and writers who sometimes have a lot of experience in classrooms, and sometimes not so much. So, we do a lot of planning beforehand. We meet with teachers to talk about how they're going to prepare students. If they haven't really been reading things of this complexity, they need to be ready to spend time with it and break it down and find ways to connect students to it…We look for, or conduct ourselves, interviews with writers, where we ask them about their origins and they maybe read a little bit from what they've written. Then, in terms of references in the stories that students might not know, we try to find a lot of resources for that.

 

The teachers work really hard to prepare their students. When we bring an author to the classroom, often the classroom is decorated with elements from the author's writing and life, and students have questions prepared. The author also has a very clear plan of what they're going to do that we go through with them and with the teachers. It's a lot of planning, but I think it's worth it for the effects that we see on students.

 

How can kids or educators best take advantage of the resources Words Without Borders offers?

 

We have a couple hundred different pieces of literature on the site, freely accessible, full text, bilingual whenever we can. You can access that literature, and you'll find a lot of [multimedia] tools…and lesson plan ideas and connections to standards. It can sort of feel like a lot, so we also have a “Contact Us” page. If you get in touch with us there, we can provide more individualized support, whether it's making the case to the administration about why you're bringing this literature to your classes, or just taking a lesson plan we have and adapting it for your students, or finding readings that are particularly good fits for students.

 

In terms of students, usually they go to look at the literature which they either select themselves for independent reading projects or research projects, or the teacher guides them to it. We provide a lot of choice in terms of the materials that you might look at, to give you ways into the literature. If you like art, there's often art that's related to the text that's posted next to it. If you like music, the same [applies]. Although only a couple of them have contacted us, students should feel free to ask any follow up questions.

 

In terms of arranging these kinds of author visits, we have financial support for the program just inside New York City, but we can connect teachers and classrooms to different authors a lot of the time. They're contemporary; we have their email addresses. A lot of them are very accessible, and via zoom you can arrange it for not very much cost. We can provide support with that.

 

Is there anything specific that you've discovered about stories or about education through the work you do?

 

I think generally, it's been reinforced to me that students are so much more capable and multifaceted than I think traditional education systems give them credit for. We've had just regular New York City or New Jersey middle schools accessing Tang Dynasty era Chinese poetry and an ESL class in New York City analyzing Russian short stories. So, from a culture that none of the students shared, since they were mostly Spanish-speaking. [But] they understood the culture. They analyzed the story. I think that the role of enthusiasm in terms of what students can do is underestimated. I think that's wonderful.

 

What's your favorite story Words Without Borders has published?

 

I definitely can't reduce it at all, but I can give you a couple of examples. There's a really beautiful Egyptian short story called "The Guest" by Miral Al-Tahawy, and that's about a girl and her grandmother. It's just fantastic—it's one of my favorites…There's [also] a very funny story that we've been working on called “Swimming Upstream” from Cuba, so that is funny and fantastical. There's also a kind of devastating allegory of migration called "Nothing to Declare", also from Cuba. I can't really narrow it down. There are a lot of interesting Japanese ghost stories. There's South African graphic fiction about kids that I think is very easy to relate to.

 

When you say you're putting together these collections, how does that work?

 

That's a really good question. The magazine has a very similar model to this. We, on staff, are not experts in every world culture, obviously. I have a little bit of expertise in a couple countries, and we rely a lot on people who do have deep expertise. Our next collection is literature from India, and I'm already talking to scholars and translators to get suggestions for what we should include and where there might be gaps…where something's not represented. We continue to work with scholars, authors, and translators through the process of looking through Words Without Borders archives for literature that we think might be particularly engaging to students, and also is across all genres.

 

As I mentioned, we can't really be comprehensive because we're taking everything from a single magazine, but we try to be at least as representative as possible, given what we have in our archives. We look through it, and we review it with these experts and as a staff. Then for every individual piece of literature, we look at it and think about what will interest a US student about this, and where might a student who doesn't know much about this particular culture need some help. We use that to write teaching ideas and lesson plans and also to research resources…We also have a database of resources that we trust and that we use over and over again. We do a lot of research, and we then review those resources internally and with experts, because often the experts know about biases that we might not be aware of, even in reputable news organizations. Just as an example, the BBC might have a borough where people have a particular bias about the place where they're stationed, and we wouldn't know that. Then we upload, we do a lot of testing, we pilot it in classrooms, and then we publicize it more broadly.

 

Finally, why is diverse, international literature important to you?

 

As a student who who came to the the US as an immigrant, and was the first immigrant that my school had ever had there, I guess I feel a particular drive to make sure that everyone who's coming into our schools as a newcomer has a chance of finding some literature and culture that connects with with their heritage. Also, I've seen how this literature motivates students from all different backgrounds. It's just interesting to learn about other parts of the world that aren't your corner of the world. I think we could get a lot more students into reading and writing and thinking critically through this literature. Of course, this being election season, it's also kind of related for me with questions about democracy and making sure we keep our rights and that we select leaders who respect our rights. So yeah, that is what I'm thinking right now.

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