By Illia Ponomarenko
Morning comes to Kyiv again. That was indeed a dramatic night. Not only in the sense of a giant death army standing at the gate.
a journal of research & art
By Illia Ponomarenko
Morning comes to Kyiv again. That was indeed a dramatic night. Not only in the sense of a giant death army standing at the gate.
Translated by Zenia Tompkins and Nina Murray
I faced a very tall man, dressed in camo and holding an AK‑47. He grabbed me by the neck and held me up against the wall while closing the door with his other hand. He was so massive that I wondered why he bothered with the machine gun at all.
By Ani Gjika
In Albania in the nineties … men in their twenties and thirties are hungry to align themselves with what they perceive as power … harassing girls and women wherever…
By Christopher Miller
We passed several colorful messages now scrawled across the traffic signs. One appealed to the enemy’s humanity: “Russian soldier, stop! How will you look into your children’s eyes? Leave!”
Translated by Julia Conrad
For a Sicilian, understanding Sicily means understanding oneself. It means choosing to be absolved or condemned. And it means resolving the fundamental tension that plagues us, the oscillation between claustrophobia and claustrophilia, between a hatred and love of seclusion.
Translated by Nina Bogin
In immense rooms, straw mattresses are spread out on the floor. There are collective showers and a vast dining hall.
Translated by Lytton Smith
I went out to the Kringilsárrani reserve while it still existed and was able to experience firsthand this magical world Helgi wrote about.
Translated by Sasha Dugdale
I must have been about twelve. I was hunting around for some-thing interesting to look at. There was plenty of interesting stuff: with every death a pile of new objects appeared in our apartment, deposited just as they were, trapped in a sudden end state, because their previous owner, the only person who could have freed them, was no longer among the living.
Translated by Stephen Twilley
They move slowly, lazily; move their arms or turn their back by swiveling their chest, their head immobile, with the lazy litheness of reptiles.
Translated by Angela Rodel
We danced through the Videnov financial Crisis as well, the protests, the harsh hyperinflation that bled our parents dry.
Translated by Paul Wilson
And sure enough, Blackie stopped paying attention to me, and then she began clawing at me and I had to take a rag, and then a blanket, and hold her down.
Translated by Tsipi Keller
A pointless day in Brindisi. A terrible fatigue. Pain in my gut, and I fear that I’ll be sick throughout the trip. I’m now sitting in a restaurant…
By Mark Chu
Art has a substantially higher engagement in meaning, and another term for this transfer of meaning is communication, perhaps art’s chief purpose.
Translated by Adriana Hunter
My stepfather respected every form of authority… and it so happens he also obeyed my mother. Weak with the strong, he was quite naturally strong with the weak.
Translated by Layla Benitez-James
Africa, our old and beloved continent, is an ancestral land, just like her inhabitants. Africa is the beginning of everything.
Translated by Celia Hawkesworth and Ellen Elias-Bursac
My mother collects other people’s deaths, rattling them mournfully like coins in a piggy bank. “Did you know Petrović died?” asks Mother over the phone.
Translated by Susanna Nied
When I was nine years old, the world too was nine years old. At least there was no difference between us, no opposition, no distance. We just tumbled around from sunrise to sunset, earth and body as like as two pennies. And there was never a harsh word between us, for the simple reason that there were no words at all between us; we never uttered a word to each other, the world and I.
By Layla Benitez-James
I wanted to unequivocally condemn police violence while simultaneously feeling a knee jerk aversion to any movement working under a shared idea of nationalism.
Translated by Meg Matich
The most preposterous figure in Icelandic folklore is the indomitable wife of My Dear Jon who travels to the kingdom of heaven with the soul of her husband in a sack, to smuggle him into Paradise; she’s a woman who slings insults at the saints and slut shames the Virgin Mary before Jesus Christ himself arrives at the gates of heaven to bid her, with ceremonious tact, to get lost.
By Joshua Kleinberg
It’s not the threat of violence. It’s the questions I’m expected to answer before the violence that bother me. All stemming from premises I don’t agree with, but what are you going to get into a debate with a man who just caught you making out with his “domestic partner?”
Translated by Ekaterina Petrova
Zhoro “the Bird” was a Bulgarian immigrant in Melbourne. He was born in a village near the town of Plovdiv, where, going off in pursuit of his entire family’s happiness, he had left behind a wife and a daughter.
By Christopher Impiglia
For my great-grandparents, as it was for most immigrants of their generation, the past was a hindrance. It was all about the future. A new life with new appliances and new cars and new names. Nothing old, as the old carried with it the weight of oppressive regimes, poverty, and social immobility.
By Mina Hamedi
I saw him walking, black hair in knots and a bottle with the cap open held by his side. Leaning over the top, he brought his bottle, took a sip and stared at us.
By Theophilus Kwek
Now that we live in the same house, it sits on a glass shelf in the hallway, a dark lens winking when the lights come on. A cataract of dust, invisible except at certain angles…
Translated by James McFarlane and Kathleen McFarlane
On a calm winter morning, on 4th January, 1761, a company of five men, clad for a journey, were rowed out from the Tollbooth into the shipping roads off Copenhagen.
Translated by Frederika Randall
They caught her because she made a mistake. For months she had sailed right through their nets with her false passport, her bleached hair, her little heart-shaped medal reworked as a cross, her Polish spoken like a Pole and even her school-taught German spoken badly as only the Poles in Slesia did.
Translated by Sean Bye
It was right before the war, and we’d put all the poverty and deprivation of the Great Depression behind us. The whole economy was doing better, hardly anyone was unemployed, they’d get jobs building the Autobahn or could get permits to work abroad. The craftspeople in town got plenty of commissions.
By
I was a sort of upstairs-downstairs person in the crew. My role as journalist and anthropologist afforded me precious access to both worlds.
By Elena Lappin
No one except my brother seemed to be concerned about how this bombshell was affecting me. My parents were the core, I was the periphery. Whose story was this, really?
By Leonora Carrington
Various events were taking place in the outside world: the collapse of Belgium, the entry of the Germans in France. All of this interested me very little and I had no fear whatsoever.
Translated by Julia Sanches
She continues to divine the future—more so than the past, which she has almost completely forgotten. She has herself turned into Linka, the gypsy from Debrecen. Her Jewishness is a mixture of faith and superstition; a religion she has partly invented herself.
Translated by André Naffis-Sahely
Venice multiplies itself and refracts, like light bounces off the shards of a mirror that has broken into a thousand pieces.