From the Editors

A landmark is a point that helps us orient ourselves: a rock formation, a tall building, an oddly-shaped tree, a colorful mural. We count on landmarks to remain fixed, immutable, but all landscapes are subject to change, whether over millennia or overnight. In fact, when we speak metaphorically of a landmark event, we mean a change: a turning point in the course of a life or of history.

 

The nine translations in this issue deal with landmarks and the search for them; they present us with characters navigating inner and outer worlds in flux. Ilze Duarte, Josh Dunn, Sabrina Fountain, Tyler Schroeder, Yeshua G.B. Tolle, and V. Vijaysree bring us stories of landmark events big and small: some unfortunate and some serendipitous; some long-awaited and some that never arrive. In poetry translations by Eric Abalajon, Michael Favala Goldman, and Kingshuk Sarkar, we are invited to contemplate boundary lines—spatial and societal, natural and constructed—which flicker, move, and dissolve in the shifting light of the poem.

 

As translators, we want to question the imposition of borders between peoples, languages, and cultures. The translations in this issue, as they move between two or more languages, find ways to complicate existing landmarks and to create new ones. Above all, they embrace the flux in which they travel. 

 

Thank you to our contributors; and thank you to our featured artist, Brian Palmieri, whose landscapes beautifully evoke bearings lost and found.

 

Thank you to all the editors of this Spring 2023 issue of Exchanges: Madi Beauchamp, Abigail Haber, Ara Javaheri, Ani Jilavyan, Nicky Nenkov, Jack Rockwell, Milena Sanabria Contreras, Nadhif Sanubari, and Muhua Yang.

 

Anna Magavern and Khaled Rajeh

May, 2023