I have three bird feeders outside my window. I mention this because I have sat for hours beside this particular window over the past few months preparing for my PhD comp exams; poetry and birds have been my constant companions. My focus has been on twentieth-century French poetry of witness, biblical allusion in modern Hebrew poetry, and the history of translation. (These are three separate topics, not some wildly obscure academic project.) In the course of my preparations a line from the Robert Desnos poem “Arte poétique” comes back to me again and again: Je suis le vers témoin du souffle de mon maître. I am the verse witness of my master’s breath. This line haunts me not only because I think that it actually sounds even better in English than it does in French, but also because of the deep truths it contains: This line says more about the necessity of poetry than I could in a thousand letters from the editor.
The time that I have spent working on eXchanges over the last three years has been deeply rewarding. I have received support and inspiration from friends and colleagues too numerous to mention. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to introduce the world to so much great literature: Within the last four issues we’ve published our first pieces translated from Arabic, Estonian, Urdu, Latvian, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian, Ukrainian, and Korean—bringing the total number of languages that have appeared in eXchanges up to nearly two dozen.
I could use the rest of my letter-from-the-editor space to make a case for the continuing importance of translation in today’s world, but I believe the pieces in this issue make that case all by themselves. So I’ll return to French and Hebrew poetry, and the finches and grackles jockeying for position outside my window, and leave eXchanges in the more than capable hands of Diana Thow and Emily Weirich.Becka Mara McKay
A few weeks ago, just as the weather was beginning to turn, my fiancé Brian decided he needed to read Gerard Manly Hopkins before he went to sleep, and as Hopkins is meant to be read aloud (Hopkins himself called his poetry “oratorical”), I had the cozy pleasure of being read to, tucked in bed. After a foray through his bookshelves and a flutter of pages, Brian settled on “Pied Beauty,” a poem about the beauty of (as Hopkins might have put it, being a deeply religious man) God’s creations. It begins: “Glory be to God for dappled things – / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.” Eyes closed, head on the pillow, I imagined Hopkins “dappled things” and thawing fields, what a “brinded cow” might look like, and our giant Iowa sky.
“All things counter, original, spare, strange;” Brain continued, “Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) / With soft, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim….“ I sat up.
“Sweet and sour? That’s the theme of this eXchanges issue!”
Becka and I chose “Sweet & Sour” for this issue’s theme because it embraces a lot, and because it’s fun. It made us imagine past loves, and present ones, jellybeans, and, of course, Chinese takeout. But as I read through the selections for this issue, I was astounded, as I always am, at how literature takes us beyond any category. These pieces have their share of sweet and sour, but they also contain the bitter and the bittersweet, the smooth and the lumpy, all in beautiful prose and – in nine languages!
I went to sleep thinking how serendipitous it was that Brian had chosen “Pied Beauty,” because, like Hopkins’ poem, these translations take us beyond take-out boxes and jellybeans, they take us to an appreciation of what it means to be in this world.
With that in mind, I’d like to finish by thanking Becka Mara McKay, who will be leaving eXchanges after this issue. She’s been the heart and soul of the magazine since 2004, and her poetic eye, insightful thoughts and passion for beautiful literature in translation will be missed. We wish her all the very, very best!
Emily Weirich