Slippage

From the Editors

Dear Friends of Ancient Exchanges,

As we move from this year to the next, from cool to cold, and from work to play, the theme of this issue – “Slippage” – seems more pertinent by the hour. Slippage, for all its onomatopoeic evocativeness, is a tricky word to pin down. Literally an act of slipping, the term speaks to the loss in the transference of power. Those of you more automotively inclined (or fans of Marisa Tomei) might be thinking, “Ah yes, the limited-slip differential…and what about it?”, but our thoughts are not quite so practical. The loss of power we are concerned with is that between author and text, between text and translator.

Things fall through the cracks – like the water that erodes the rocks as the ice melts and refreezes in Iowa City this time of year, like the emails that get lost in the end-of-year shuffle, and the inevitable loss of sense, of meaning, of culture, of poetry in the act of translation. There is a strange kind of beauty in the slip of translation – something all of our contributors in this issue pay careful attention to. While translators of ancient texts must always attempt to bridge the temporal gap between antiquity and modernity, Samantha Reilly’s “Flirtations: A Translation of A 7874” must reckon with literal gaps in her lacunose Akkadian source tablet. Chen Zhongzhi brings together the work of 5 different Classical Chinese poets to life in charming conversation with each other and Anna Jackson’s translation of Catullus 64 slips between reality and fantasy in real time with the original text.

Before you slip off to read these and the other translations in this issue, let us slip into something a little more business appropriate. The AX podcast, Translator’s Note 2.0, will be releasing episodes every month going forward. Those episodes will feature previous and potential contributors to the journal, as well as persons of interest in the wider translation community. You can find new episodes on Spotify.

We are continuing to work on migrating pieces from the issues hosted on our former, now-defunct site, to the new one here. For this issue we have chosen 3 pieces to feature from past publications.

We hope you all enjoy this issue and keep an eye out for our spring call for submissions!

Stay warm and keep slipping,

The AX Team