Ilya Kaminsky’s “Reading Dante in Ukraine” makes an impassioned case for the crucial role of art amid the horrors of war. What we need, as Dante’s journey shows us, is to defend ourselves with it: a tune to walk to, even in the underworld, as long as one still walks. In Miklós Vámos’s “Electric Train,” translated by Ági Bori‚ the question-answer format gives the piece levity and rhythm, and the counterpoint of the humor interplaying with the troubled relationships brings it powerful depth. I found wisdom in the wry humor of Jaime Barrios Carrillo’s poems in David Unger’s translation. I love the image of angels spending the evening in their hotel rooms, ironing their enormous white wings.
—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor
The masterful language in Ági Bori’s translation, as though hand-holding the reader through a children’s story, and the simple act of gifting a present in the story belie the depth and complexity of emotional turmoil that wash over Miklós Vámos’s characters in “Electric Train,” a turmoil that seemingly hits out of nowhere like a wave yet in fact stems from a deep brewing well of built up memories and tensions. The contrast highlights all the more the challenges, and perhaps even limits, of recognizing and understanding another’s intentions, experiences, and feelings.
Rage, sorrow, resilience, helplessness, hope, a hunger for life and love and connection, grief, a numbing screaming despair: it is difficult to put into words the sensations that ran through me as I read Samer Abu Hawwash’s “My People” in Huda J. Fakhreddine’s translation. It cannot possibly compare to the feelings and thoughts of Samer Abu Hawwash and the Palestinian people, to the reality of having each day and moment narrow down to dried bread and tear tracks.
I was intrigued by Laura Garmeson’s discussion, in her review of Brazilian author Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow, of the tongue as “both creator and destroyer. It has the power to make and unmake worlds.” It is a through line in Crooked Plow that reminds us of the power and possibilities of language and story to shape our lives. Garmeson’s review, in a way, is also a fire that kindles awareness of Itamar Vieira Junior’s work and the legacies, realities, and possible futures for Afro-Brazilian communities. The tongue as symbol also feels like a through line between these pieces in their rumination on what is gained and lost and pushed aside in the choices we make of what, how, and when we say (or write) things, or not.
—Julie Shi, Senior Executive Assistant
I love the “fractal complexity” of theories, related to translation or not, layered throughout Raluca Tănăsescu and Chris Tănăsescu’s interview with Michael Cronin. Cronin’s insight into the lasting imperialisms inherent in certain modes of translation, as well as his expansion of the translating act towards spatial theory, posthumanism and ecology, generates endless invitation to reflection.
Kaminsky’s reading of The Divine Comedy in Ukraine put me in mind of Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” written to the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Paris. Just as Weil affirms that the power of literature lies in de-mythologising, de-glorifying violence, Kaminsky’s essay is a scream for poetry as a synchronic and diachronic force, in the particular Russo-Ukrainian war just as in the eternal human struggle to live.
I adore Garro’s transcendental style and her subversion of conventions in the story “The Week of Colors,” translated by Christine Legros. Metaphor and simile gorgeously convey light-propelled transformations of the physical and psychic landscapes. The tangible structures of light and color bleed into vivid reality.
Translator Antonella Lettieri’s taste in fiction and nonfiction alike is superb (see War of the Murazzi from the Summer 2023 edition), and her eye for image-heavy, evocative, near-synesthetic texts in Maria Grazia Calandrone’s Your Little Matter color the two black and white photographs of the speaker’s mother. The poetics of genealogical imagination and psychic recreation recall Claudia Durastanti’s Strangers I Know, as do the politics of motherly love across languages of sign and silence. Calandrone’s textual clarity and kindness smooth out the waters of living.
—Michelle Chan Schmidt, Assistant Editor (Fiction)
I’ve been learning Vietnamese for more than three years now, and the excerpt from Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, a title I greatly anticipate‚ makes my teacher’s voice resound in my mind with its emphasis on the language’s fundamental tonal features: “Give us each day our diacritics.” I’m cynical, usually, of literary attempts at poeticising homonyms in tonal languages like Chinese and Vietnamese, but how strategic that Le here enacts the violent entanglements inextricable from that poetry, the ghostly histories of war and imperialism that trail behind the image, or the sound, of one’s address to a mother (tongue): “Now grave your voice”. What if we read ‘grave’ as a verb?
Samer Abu Hawwash’s “My People”, translated by Huda J. Fakhreddine, feels written for our devastating historical moment of Israel’s genocide against Gaza’s people, but also trains its gaze on the wreckage. I feel the force of his negative mythology, the layered clauses declaring ignorance, forgetting, absence, oblivion, nowhere and everywhere. There isn’t a sense of the agent of violence, but in that passivity one might discern a subtle admonishment of all the encrusted idioms of news and media reporting, diminishing the value of Palestinian lives.
The sections from Maria Grazia Calandrone’s Your Little Matter, so compact and beautiful in their fragmented form, compel me to read the whole text when it’s out in Antonella Lettieri’s translation. With its lists, its indented sections, its sinuous lines and breaks, I feel like we follow the shape of the narrator’s imagination, her desire to excavate and conjure, against the placidity and inaccessibility of the photographs she holds.
Juan Forn’s “Swimming at Home,” translated by Keith A. Carr, struck me with its sparseness and mystery. Forn evokes a vivid sense of the present moment even while gesturing to a world beyond it. And there’s something so poignant about the fact that it ends with the beginning of another story, untold, unread.
Noh Anothai’s translation of Anusorn Tipayanon’s “The Snow Girl” revealed to me possible lines of connection and filiation between Thailand and romanticised images of Japan, which I’d never thought about.
—Alex Tan, Assistant Managing Editor
My favorite piece from this issue is Elena Garro’s “The Week of Colors”—such a fun, whimsical read, filled with cultural uniqueness. Translator Christine Legros did a stellar job capturing Garro’s humor and wordplay.
Naturally, I’ve been reading lots about Palestine lately, and I appreciate Samer Abu Hawwash’s timely, urgent, and devastating poem “My People” in Huda J. Fakhreddine’s translation. It’s full of life and unparalleled intensity—laced with nostalgia and sadness, yes, but also hope and courage.
I enjoyed and was enormously moved by the honest depiction of how war in an authoritarian regime affects people’s lives in Холод’s Their Mother’s Principles (tr. Lindsay Munford). I didn’t know about Irina’s case but it reminded me of countless Latin American and Guatemalan journalists who have faced similar intimidation. If Garro’s piece is my favorite, artistically speaking, Холод‘s is my favorite, in terms of historical relevance, because it shows the power of testimony.
I’m always drawn to migration issues and pieces that show a culture that’s different from mine, and Emmanuela Carbé’s “Three Mothers” (tr. Isabella Livorni) is filled with the type of details I appreciate as a reader and try to replicate as a writer: family dynamics, different takes on religion, food, etc. It also reminded me of Scholastique Mukasonga’s The Barefoot Woman.
—José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large for Guatemala
I found Kristen Vego’s piece an elegant and touching coming-of-age story about what it means to grow up and discover the secrets adults keep from us. The interview with Gertrudis Rivalta Oliva is a timely comment on intertextuality and interracial identity in a renewed era of Russian expansionism. Choy Ping Clarke-Ng‘s work explores Hong Kong identity and its diaspora though a range of different media, showing its diversity of influences and languages.
—Anna Rumsby, Educational Arm Assistant
The interview with Cronin was quietly revelatory, connecting threads between seemingly apparent relationships amidst notions of translation and difference, coexistence and species to illustrate the power of translation, and how it can be wielded in ways beneficial and harmful. Mafalda Bellido Monterde’s drama The Earth-Eaters (tr. William Gregory) was such an interesting concept—allowing readers to step into the shoes of people undergoing a mass burial.
—Bridget Peak, Digital Editor
From the Special Feature themed on coexistence, Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem was deeply moving in its subject and enjoyably experimental in its form. Martin Piñol’s “Push | Pull” examines the ends of relationships with poetic prose that creates relatable images and left me with a lot to think about. Patricio Ferrari’s Mud Songs plays with language, and I enjoyed the interweaving of Italian and English and the attention drawn to words and their various meanings. Song of Return To The Promised Land beautifully captures Manuel Rueda’s subject, the division and union between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
—Mia Manns, Senior Copy Editor
*****
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