Like sailing into new ports of call, "Strange Harbors" suggests that reading the world's literature can ignite affinities across languages and literary traditions - and that the art of translation can distil familiar experiences from disparate lands. Featuring a special focus on Turkish poetry and a preview of Edith Grossman's latest work, "Strange Harbors" ferries poetry and fiction from eighteen languages and twenty-three countries to English readers.It's highlights include: a crime story that unravels in Franco's Spain involving a student on the run from police, the attic of a country estate, and a lost masterpiece by an obscure poet; a Catalonian twist on painter Edward Hopper's "noir Americana"; poems by a man who barely escaped the political terror in El Salvador that deprived him of home and family; a Romanian story about a bizarre contest at a communist beach resort where the top prize is a paddleboat ride in the Black Sea with a teen beauty queen; and, a story about the devastating legacy of Agent Orange on the people and culture of Vietnam.
Placed in context by the translators themselves, each selection in "Strange Harbors" features commentary on the singular challenges and discomfiting pleasures of mediating the shift from language to language.For fifteen years "Two Lines" has served as a unique portal into the translator's art by collecting a vivid cross-section of global voices and presenting them in an annual anthology of world writing. John Biguenet is the author of "The Torturer's Apprentice: Stories" and the novel "Oyster". His Pulitzer Prize-nominated play "Rising Water" won the National New Plays Network Commission Award for 2006. An O. Henry award winner and "New York Times" guest columnist, Biguenet is the Robert Hunter Distinguished Professor at Loyola University in New Orleans. Sidney Wade is a recent president of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs and is currently a professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she teaches poetry and translation. Wade is the author of five collections of poetry: "Stroke", "Celestial Bodies", "Empty Sleeves", "Green", and "Istanbul'dan/From Istanbul".