Letter From The Editor

I translated — 

            to put down again, what was outside the book and isn’t a word. 

                                                                      — André du Bouchet 

The Norwegians have a specific word for the translation of poetry: gjendiktning (pronounced YEN-dikt -ning). The general word for translation in Norwegian is oversettelse, which corresponds roughly to the Latin roots of the English translation (trans-latio, or carrying-across). Gjendiktning, on the other hand, combines gjen- (again) with diktning (to create poetry), resulting in a word that means something like “recreating the poem” in a new tongue. In opposition to the abstract function implied by traditional translation, gjendiktning foregrounds the translator’s agency, creativity, and freedom. It also raises the translation from its subordinate position, placing it on equal footing with the original. 

With our latest issue, Iterations, we hope to call attention to translation as an endless series of variations on an original. This is vividly captured in the poem “Repetition” by André du Bouchet, which proclaims, in Eric Fishman's translation: “EVERYTHING HAS BEEN SAID / BUT MUST BE CEASELESSLY REPEATED / like breathing.” Later in the same poem, we find that “there’s nothing but this huge lid of glass / this cloud-blurred eye.” The “cloud-blurred eye” finds its counterpart in the artwork of Lachlan Hinwood, in which windows do not remain neutral reflectors of reality, but take a prominent role in shaping it. These images are a fitting backdrop to Iterations and the pieces within it, like Red Tide by Rosabetty Muñoz and its "cities shining on the island’s hills / like burning reflections of desire.” 

In this issue—the first in Exchanges’ 30th year of existence—we’ve tried to curate a collection of prose pieces and poems that take chances, that refuse ready interpretation or reduction to easy categories. Whether it be the Filipino writer Enrique S. Villasis’s “silence after / The torn singing of migratory birds—reviving our devastated world;” Kazakh writer Saghadat Ordasheva’s “book in the mirror;" or Spanish poet Azahara Palomeque’s character Ana, who “cries inside her smile like an infection from the weather,” these writers have the power to shock us with their brazen imagery, compelling us to read again and again. And it is this latter form of iteration, dear reader, that we invite you to enjoy.