Witness Trans/lation Issue

Black Mountain Institute’s print issue of Witness, Spring 2015, begins with the Editor’s Comment on the theme of translation: “We always expect our themes to expand and change and present themselves in unexpected ways as we read submissions, but the theme for this issue – ‘Trans/lation’ – made itself felt everywhere. Seen broadly and metaphorically enough, any written work can be considered a translation, from a thought or an experience into a piece of writing, and so, a few times, we had to stop and refocus our intentions. We began with the roots of the word itself, which draw from actions like ‘to carry across’ or ‘to bring across,’ as well as the knowledge that translations are really transformations, new versions that are faithful to the original in many different ways.”

Along with other content, specific works of translation (or about translation) in this issue include:

Poetry
Dario Bellezza, from Nothingness, Glamour, Farewell; from Notes for a Novel in Verse. Translated from the Italian by Peter Covino.
Arthur Rimbaud, “Seven-Year-Old Poets.” Translated from the French by Donald Revell.
Maia Circe, “The Unfinished Spell”; “The Smallest Predictions”; “TV.” Translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval.

Fiction
Hossein M. Abkenar, “Classmates.” Translated from the Persian by Sara Khalili
Christos Chartomatsidis, “Alicia the Fat Witch.” Translated from the Bulgarian by Velina Minkoff, Rayna Rossenova, and Borislava Velkova.

Nonfiction
Douglas Unger, “Strange Voices, Subversions, Killer Tomatoes: Literature in Translation.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard, from My Struggle: Book Four. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett.

Witness makes some works available in full text on their website.