From the Editors
Dear Friends of Exchanges,
In this issue, we are pleased to present translations by John Poch, Carol Rose Little, Charlotte Milholland Friedman, Kaitlin Rees, Matt Reeck, Will Washburn, Sowmya V.B., Suneela Mubayi, Aaron Sayne, Maja and Steven Teref, Pinyu Hwang, Shawn Hoo, and Jane Mikkelson.
We realized the body in these pieces after the fact of acceptance, in editing, in the way our bodies are sometimes recalled to us, all at once, by the weight of our clothes. And once felt, it's hard to shake an awareness of what abrades habit, the presence of bodies by the marks they leave or carry, by the things within or beyond their reach, in what keeps them moving, immobile, aroused, repressed; in how, and why, by whom, they’re born or killed.
This is the body in the works of these writers. Obvious enough. Where is the body, though, in translation?
To ask is to beg the question, in one sense. While a text can be a single unit fixed along a path of versions, translation as such can’t be. Like writing, and as writing, it isn’t a body but the transformation of a body, uncaught between exposures.
Instead we might read the question in the nominal sense and consider translated language about the body. The body, after all, provides many of our tropes of cognition: we say that we see and feel what other people mean, that we find texts smooth, weighty, hard, or light; we talk of uncomfortable books and how we grasp them, or fail to. And as some of these meanings are catachresic, a sense of the body is crucial in our line of work. Without the unlinking and relinking of the corporal metaphor these phrases would not be, for lack of a better one, near at hand.
So as translators—negotiators of linguistic habit—we should be interested in how other languages involve the body semantically and how that involvement is rendered in English. The risk and reward is the same: an estrangement from transparency and cliché, from rhetorical muscle memory, that can raise our awareness both of the contortion meaning needs to explicate itself and of the translator’s perpetual quandary—how strange to make this? How far to bring the reader back to a consciousness of language, to the skin beneath the weekday lexis?
Our reliance on the body in moments of greatest semantic need reflects something else of the nature of translation, in that both make better vehicles than tenors. To describe them, frequently and sometimes frustratingly, we are forced to reach only for all the things that they are like. Today let translation be a body, moving.
With gratitude for the time and work that made this issue,
Reid Dempsey
***
Each piece in this issue talks about a body: a living body, body of a ship, body of water, body of work. We know these bodies. We know that in their interacting, they are created and redefined, constantly. We know that when they change form, they are really exchanging form with their surroundings.
In these pieces, we love how the experience of reading everything that indicates what a body feels echoes and reflects what is felt inside it: cold hands, the pace of the chest in its rising and falling, dry eyes, opened eyes. Bodies signify their opposites and their pairs. The emphasis on writing a living body constructs the image of a dead one so vividly in the mind.
And so, our Body took form as each pieces began to interact and influence the meaning of the other, accompanied by Frida Maureen Hultberg’s artwork that so perfectly expands each text. Her works speak to the foreign world and take the body to those foreign lands.
Shene Mohammed
Iowa City
May, 2022