There’s plenty to discover in our Spring 2025 issue, with work from twenty-four countries and eighteen languages, including a new Korean literature feature; icons like Chekhov and Pushkin; and the additions of Guyana Creolese and Sesotho into our language archives. Here, our blog editors highlight their favourites from this teeming array, including an immersive, linguistically deft tale of adolescent awakening, and an epistolary insight into one of literary history’s great love stories.
A few weeks ago, I watched The Eternal Feminine, a film on the life of the great Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos. The narrative itself was tepid, overly reliant on the tired trope of the overworked woman genius and her jealous partner, carrying on the tradition of the biopic’s privileging of unidimensional emotion—but still a numinous glimmer came from actress Karina Gidi’s forceful, steady delivery of Castellanos’s words, through which we are granted the strange tension of a mind that is both deeply interconnected and stoically isolated: “I love you, dear Ricardo, as far as the eye can see—and keep in mind that I stand facing the sea.”
As always with the public exhibition of letters, there is the pleasant shiver of the eavesdrop, and the thrill of the temporal override. Through Nancy Ross Jean’s flowing, intuitive translation of Castellano’s Letters to Ricardo, there is a sense of what makes the traditional biography so ill-suited for intimacy. In the display of a supposedly whole story, the audience is never given the dynamics and mysteries of possibility—but of someone else’s love, we should only ever admit to having a glimpse. The facts of context and consequence enable us to proffer our own judgments on the rights and wrongs of a romance, but has that ever mattered to those enraptured within the feeling? Despite knowing that the love story will come to a devastating end, the letter—a souvenir, a relic—transports us momentarily to a state of oblivion, a moment of urgency wherein reality is constituted from desire: the absolution of living in a body that desires. “I love you, and this lends a specific meaning to my desire, a desire only you can satisfy. I don’t want anybody or anything to come between us and this new reality that for me is so rich and important.” There’s something extraordinarily powerful in that line, which reaches out to our voyeurism and dismisses our retrospect; this reality belongs to her.
Hope is something that we surrender to the future, but letters make me consider the casting of hope toward the past—that in the long timeline of events that unfold and unfold, one is hoping that certain moments and certain selves are more overwhelming in their vividity than in their finality. In Castellanos’s letter we are given the absolute completeness of an individual in love, who has no use for the years that will come, who has said her piece and remains waiting for a response. As Walter Benjamin said: “The past carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its resurrection.” Is there anything more prone to resurrection than a letter which begins and ends with names, the whole unknowability of their reality still harboured in-between?
Also commendable in this magical issue are Dong Li’s translations of the poet Liu Ligan. The handling of Chinese-language verse requires tremendous delicacy and fearlessness; one must not be intimidated by deeply layered historicisms and culture-specific references, which could easily be allowed to dominate the English-language work with bevies of clauses, glosses, and unmusical turns of phrase—yet this vertical aspect must nevertheless be embedded. Li is one of the more sensitive translators working today, which speaks to the complexities and visual/sonic interlaces operating in his own work, and he does great justice to Liu’s impressionistic pieces, which travels over a densely populated vista of the living, the ghostly, and that which is on the verse of disappearing.
Liu’s language is utterly contemporary, prone to orature and peripatetic in its attention. What results is the sensation of vision passing over a long, unfurling scroll of cinematic action, wherein every object and individual has a role in curating the larger scene. Li keeps this pace expertly, seldom compromising on the flourishing of detail, despite the considerable pace by which Liu dispenses them, travelling between observance and omniscience:
It is June, and hydrangeas bloom,
the auditorium somber, and at midnight,
the delayed melancholic whistle of a steamer.
An empty-headed boarder
comes this way, The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann under his arm,
cold coffee grounds and the cheers of a stadium
churning in his stomach.
With the transportive capacities of postcards and the rivulet effect of an individual amidst the urban current, these poems lace memory effortlessly into the landscape.
—Xiao Yue Shan
Marie Luise Kaschnitz’s “Long Shadows,” translated by Jennifer Busch and Audrey Delphendahl, follows Rosie Walter, a girl on vacation with her family. The run-on sentences mirror the frenetic boredom that characterizes so much of youth, as Rosie chafes against what seems to her to be the overbearing presence of her family. She then sets out on her own, ostensibly to buy postcards for friends, and in reality, to test the bounds of a burgeoning independence. “Being alone,” writes Kaschnitz, “makes everything big and strange and gives a sense of sole ownership: my street, my mangy black cat, my dead bird, disgusting, eaten away at by ants, but that simply must be picked up, mine.” Rosie’s newfound sense of self-possession is expansive; she thinks she owns the world.
But she meets a young boy, only twelve years old, in town. This boy, this “snotty-nosed brat whose mother boxes his ears when she catches him with his hand in the jam jar,” follows Rosie, and he takes on an aura both ridiculous and menacing, as he “cannot assume the same lordly act as the big boys who wave drolly and clamour, ah, bella; now that he is with the girl, the first who smiled at him and lured his dog to her, he wants to try his luck.” He corners Rosie against a cliff, where they are completely alone. There is, here, another question of ownership, the boy imagining he has a right to Rosie’s body, the voices of older boys echoing in his head:
Just wait, my boy, in two years, or three years, a girl will come for you too, walking across the market square, you’re at the window and she smiles up at you. Then go after her, boy, don’t be shy, grab her, what’s that you say, she doesn’t want to, well she’s only pretending, she does want to.
But he doesn’t want to wait. There is, throughout the story, for Rosie and the boy both, a sense of wanting now what the future promises; what’ll never be as good as it had once been imagined (“the great love-and-summer serenade of winter,” as Kaschnitz describes it, is the song of childhood, too).
The threat of sexual violence recalls Rosie to the comforts of childhood; she thinks of her parents, of the school friends she dismissed earlier, of “her classroom, so cosily dark in November.” Rosie, finally, recalls her father’s advice for dealing with danger. She “grows out of her child-shoulders and looks the boy fiercely, squarely in the eye, many seconds pass, she doesn’t blink even once and she doesn’t move a muscle.” Her stare repels him, her self-possession reassured, but on her walk back along the beach, towards her parents, away from independence, something has changed. Her stare fixes the boy, and Rosie, both, in childhood a bit longer. A threshold is not crossed. But their shadows, the specter of adulthood, have grown longer.
—Meghan Racklin
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