You will notice some changes with this issue of eXchanges, perhaps the most important being the addition of Emily Weirich as co-editor. By starting an overlapping system of editors (next year Emily will choose a new co-editor, and so on and so forth…), we hope that eXchanges will maintain the mix of innovation and continuity introduced by my colleagues Nicky Agate, Tegan Raleigh, and Jamie Richards when they restarted eXchanges in its online incarnation in 2003.

We also have a new web designer, Ben Basan, and he brings a somewhat changed web design. One of the most frequent comments we’ve received about eXchanges is that as a Flash document, it was not searchable. Ben has retained our signature Flash opening, but has designed these pages in HTML, which we hope you will find a bit friendlier.

At a panel about poets translating poets at this year’s American Literary Translators Association conference, Tony Barnstone drew some parallels between translators and photocopiers. His point was that good translator refuses to improve on the original only if he or she is a photocopier. I realize that this statement brings up all kinds of controversy, and I don’t think it should be applied to all literary translation. But what the pieces we’ve selected for this issue have in common is the magic they perform on the English language. Each translator, while aware of the loss involved when moving out of their source language, have written with remarkable control English, rendering translations that sing.. With this issue, we are pleased to continue the art of translation, not photocopying.

Enough from me—like any good translator, I try to know when to take a backseat. Emily Weirich is a thoughtful editor, careful translator, and has been a generous collaborator—and improver—in this endeavor, and you should hear from her.

Becka Mara McKay

C.H. Brewitt-Taylor spent much of his adult life in old Shanghai serving the British Empire, but he was also a translator—an important translator.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that we don’t know much about him. All that exists is a short obituary with a mysterious sentence that reads, “He was in Peking during the siege of the Legations in the Boxer rising of 1900, when his translation of a long Chinese novel was destroyed and had subsequently to be rewritten.”  

Not much for the first translator to take on the Sangui zhi, titled in his translation Romance of the Three Kingdom, a historical novel in 120 chapters, important not only in China but also in all of East Asia. Not much for two volumes of work that had to be done not once but twice, and which was the only English version, until Moss Robert’s translation appeared in 1991.

At the American Literary Translators Association conference in Seattle this fall, Becka sat on a panel devoted to magazines that publish literary translations. After the presentations, a man in the audience raised his hand and asked, “But where do you publish the translator’s name? Does it appear on the title page? Next to the author?….”

The answers were varied but similar (the translators’ names come second or not at all), except in our publication, where the translators’ names come first.
This is an issue with a lot of firsts, but also with a lot of continuity. We are translators, and in this publication the art of the translation comes first.

Emily Weirich

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