“I realized that no translation is inevitable — the same text can look very different when refracted through a different translator.”
— Noh Anothai, in BOMB Magazine
In Conversation
BOMB Magazine · November 2025
Noh Anothai, Wendy Call, Öykü Tekten, and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún in conversation with Nadine Santoro
In a roundtable published in BOMB Magazine, writer and literary publicist Nadine Santoro sat down with the four series co-editors to discuss the vision behind Best Literary Translations and the art of translation itself. The conversation ranges across the anthology's selection process, the challenges and joys of curating work across dozens of languages, and what it means to build a genuinely global literary community from within the United States.
The co-editors describe combing literary journals by region, each reading all nominated works from their respective geographic areas before a collective review process. They reflect on translation as collaboration — increasingly a dialogue among authors, translators, and editors — and on the political stakes of the work: building bridges against cultural insularity and the erosion of endangered languages.
Noh Anothai reflects on what drew him to the project during the pandemic, when he was studying for his qualifying exams as a PhD student: "I also really needed validation for the years I'd spent studying and working on translations — I wanted to prove that this wasn't just a pastime or a hobby, but a serious endeavor." Five years on, he describes the anthology as a vital intellectual and creative community beyond academia.
Read the Full Interview at BOMB ↗I realized that no translation is inevitable — the same text can look very different when refracted through a different translator.
— Noh Anothai
What emerges is a portrait of translation not as a shadow of the original, but as its own creative act — one that lets us hear voices we might never otherwise encounter, speaking in ways that surprise and transform us.
— BOMB Magazine
On the Selection Process
Each co-editor reads all nominated works from their region first, then selects pieces for collective review. A longlist of around eighty works goes to the guest editor, who makes the final selections. The editors read nominations from Europe together, dividing them among the four. Their goal: to reach one thousand nominations a year — "editors and translators, send us those translations you have published!"