Editor’s Note: Translation and Transition
Translation and transition are two overlapping activities that describe the constant flux of the natural world and all life, creating new possibilities and insights, previously unimagined experiences, and new lexicons for our common and uncommon human experiences—as we continue on together, despite everything, on our one, precious, irreplaceable planet. We include Katrina Robert’s visual interview with Martha Silano about her loving tribute to Earth, This One We Call Ours, with deep gratitude to Martha for granting us what might be one of her final interviews.
In the human world, in the intangible world of ideas, and the sensual world of language, translation, of course, is the most intense and profound kind of travel, allowing us to converse with people we would never otherwise meet, across geography and time. The fourteen (14!) languages represented in this issue include endangered indigenous ones, such as the Tsotsil of Chiapas, K’iche’ of Guatemala, and Faroese; Romanesco, a dialect of Italian; the medieval Occitan; the landless Yiddish; as well as French, Bulgarian, Spanish, Filipino, Turkish, Polish, Swedish, and Portuguese.
Translation transitions the original into new lives in other languages, and in the multiple individual readers. As Auden says in the famous elegy to Yeats, the words of the dead (or, in our cause, translated) are “modified in the guts of the living.”
This issue also brings you English-language works that play with the themes of transition and translation. Daisy Fried’s poem “New Deal Photography 7” captures an America in flux, through the lens of Jack Delano’s 1940s photography. The prose works in this issue tell stories of transitions from life to death, gender transitions, ceremonial rites of passage, and coming of age. Olga Livshin creates a hybrid of translation and witness poetry in her collage of excerpts from Facebook posts by the Ukrainian poet Julia Musakovska.
We wish Vivian Cohen-Leisorek a fond farewell and thank her for her astute work as prose/CNF editor these past few issues. We are endlessly grateful to our amazing guest editors—Jeremy Paden and Patty Seyburn (poetry) and Taylor Johnston-Levy (fiction)—and to guest associate fiction editor Ronit Eitan. Without them, and without you, dear readers, this issue would not exist.
—Marcela Sulak, Managing Editor
March, 2025
Table of Contents for Translation and Transition