This issue marks some big changes in the journey of our nearly-five-year-old translation collective. It features a tighter editorial team and a tighter collection of deeply introspective works. The eight authors in Issue 3 put eight different languages into play: Altai, BCMS (Croatian), Uzbek, and five distinct Russians. Just as with its variety of Russians, the issue stumbled upon an emphasis on life-writing. Art by Hanna Priemetzhofer.

We experienced for ourselves how a journal’s second issue could be so different from its inaugural one—from the submissions stage all the way through to publication. The twelve works that comprise this issue put forth a very distinct picture of Turkic and Slavic literatures than that offered by the first issue: different languages, time periods, forms—and a much greater emphasis on poetry. The second issue features fourteen authors, twelve translators, and eleven languages. Art by Tim Peters.

We present the contents of our inaugural issue. With the help of Eylul Doganay from the University of Iowa as guest poetry editor, we selected eight prose and three poetry translations. The prose translations include two from BCMS (one Yugoslav, one Croatian), one from Macedonian, two from Polish, one from Russian (via Azerbaijan), one from Turkish, and one from Uzbek. The poetry translations include two from BCMS (one Bosnian, one Montenegrin) and one from Russian (via Uzbekistan).