Living in Languages

April Schmidt presents an English translation of Venezuelan poet Hanni Ossott’s “Del país de la pena.” Written as an extended stream-of-consciousness meditation, the poem moves through grief, memory, landscape, and bodily experience as its speaker repeatedly asks, “Who am I?” The English translation appears alongside Ossott’s Spanish original.

Yuan Tao introduces and translates Lan Du’s “The Feather of Sister Zandan,” a fable-like story shaped by magical realism, surreal imagery, and Mongolian cultural specificity. Through Zaan’s attachment to his sister and to the mysterious feather that comes to represent her, the story explores longing, freedom, family, and the unstable boundary between reality and imagination.

Christopher J. Monier presents the first English translation of Jean Giono’s “Possession des richesses,” published in Vogue Paris in 1935. The story moves from a lyrical encounter with the landscape of the Trièves to violent conflict over possession of a spring, revealing sharply different ways of understanding land, ownership, and humanity’s relation to the physical world.

Drawing on his translation of Taiwanese writer Naomi Sím’s Emerald Orchid Love Letter, Will Buckingham explores the relationship between translation and divination. Through Taiwanese linguistic history, temple practices, and encounters with Má-chó͘, the essay considers translation as a practice shaped by constraint, uncertainty, interpretation, play, and the possibility of writing unexpected futures.

Mu. Metha’s nine-part poem belongs to the Tamil Pudukavithai, or New Poetry, tradition. Addressing Gandhi as the Father of the Nation, the poem moves between homage and political disillusionment, confronting poverty, corruption, inequality, and the erosion of post-Independence ideals. Denish Raja Durai’s translation preserves the poem’s collision of lament, political metaphor, and direct critique.

Rumi Coller-Takahashi reads Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed through its scenes of multilingual encounter. Focusing on translation, temporality, and the novel’s recurring idea of “return,” the essay argues that translation offers a model of relation capable of preserving difference while creating connection across languages, political systems, and worlds.