Only a few months in and the year 2026 has already provided memorable moments for our conversation about language and identity. After winning multiple Grammy Awards, a Puerto Rican musician, Bad Bunny, performed almost entirely in Spanish at the national stage of the Super Bowl halftime show. It was a moment of celebration for many people, but at the same time it presented division in yet another form, as a separate show was planned and branded as the “All-American Halftime Show” by Turning Point USA. These stages of music and sports industries invoked the questions of national identity through languages, informed not only by history and cultural pride but also by misinformation and misperceptions about how to define who we are, what the nation is, what the nation speaks.1
The mixed responses to the fame of the Puerto Rican artist challenge a simple assumption that there is a clear and straightforward relationship between what we speak and how we belong: the conversation about language, identity, and belonging requires a nuanced and attentive engagement with a variety of linguistic experiences that defy a simple categorization and boundaries.
As a case in point, my writing classrooms of undergraduate students not only speak diverse languages but also share various relationships with languages. Students use their languages to talk about their culture and educate each other, while some students question their belonging to a certain culture, as they do not speak their grandparents’ language. Bilingual students take on extra duties as a “translator” in their household, and meanwhile monolingual students find it necessary to code-switch so that they can navigate themselves in “academic” and “professional” contexts.
The variety of experiences with languages then becomes a creative moment for a new way of living and belonging. Students who do not speak their ancestor’s language define their way of belonging in their own way: by learning, by opening up their immediate experience and knowledge to a more active engagement with the past and future. Code-switching and code-meshing weave an intricate richness of sounds and rhythm, while “standardized,” “academic” or “professional” ways of speaking go under a recurring examination of what they mean for both monolingual and multilingual writers from various backgrounds. Under such a series of creation and engagement by each individual, languages are untethered from an assumed boundary and relationality, because we are living in languages, beyond the illusion of “possessing” or “mastering” language.
Our journal’s focus on “translation” is informed by these varied and formative experiences of “living in languages.” That we are living “in languages” can mean that we live by speaking multiple languages—and the subjects of “living” are suspended, ready to invoke unnamed agents but also marking their absence—whereas it connotes a more immersive status that our living occurs in languages. In such a status, the attempt to define “translation” raises multiple questions about our relationship with languages. When we “translate,” immersed in multiple languages and freeing ourselves from the preoccupation with the immediacy, mastery, or possession of language, where does the locus of agency reside in translation? What accountability does a translator have? To what extent does the translator’s own linguistic experiences inform/inhibit the process of freeing language from their control? If we let languages go beyond our control of meaning-making, how do we let them speak without being tamed by the oppressive forces of colonialism?
This volume features four translation works and two critical essays that help us explore these questions from various aspects. English translations of poems and short stories from Spanish, French, Chinese, and Tamil draw our attention to less known works and genres by the writers, while critical essays examine the process of “translation” as something beyond the rational, linear meaning-making. Collectively, these works provide us with an opportunity to explore languages through the lens of a flowing sense of identity, surrealistic entanglement, the locus of divinity, and revolutionary force.
April Schmidt translates “Del país de la pena” by a Venezuelan poet, Hanni Ossott, and presents complex and multiple iterations of “pena” in Spanish and English, as framed by the poem’s recurring question, “Who am I?,” in a stream-of-conscious style. Yuan Tao explores a similar terrain of the protagonist’s self through his memories and desire in her translation of a surrealistic story, “The Feather of Sister Zandan,” by Du Lan. These translations expose us to the languages unleashed from linear and orderly progression and challenge us to plunge into the depth where the mental and physical worlds meet.
Whereas Tao’s translation accentuates the implicative ambience of magical realism with the ethnic specificity of Mongolia, Christopher J. Monier takes us to the rural, mountainous region of France with his translation of Jean Giono’s “Possession des richesses.” His translation investigates the divine beauty of nature as emerging from physical, relational, and agential dynamics, in contrast to chaos and violence erupting in a village. The question of divinity is also raised by one of the critical essays. Will Buckingham reflects on his work as a co-translator of Naomi Sím’s short story, “Emerald Orchid Love Letter.” As the story hinges on an intriguing question, “What languages do the gods speak?,” Buckingham’s essay investigates the colonization of Taiwanese language through the interaction between the practice of divination and translation.
The thematic resonance between translation work and a critical essay also emerges in relation to the question of political function of language. K. Denish Raja Durai translates “A Street Singer’s Homage to a Father of the Nation” by Mu. Metha, a Tamil poet. As the poem invokes disillusionment after national independence with the images of past leaders merging their bodies into the land of India, the poem repeats its “unfinished” status to signal its future orientation. My essay on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed similarly investigates how translation marks a moment when political changes of “revolution” assume a new temporality to move beyond the simple subversion of hierarchy. In a subtle image of “perfect translation” that introduces an identical sentence as presented in different languages, Le Guin’s multilingual world offers the possibility of new relationships and new political structures based on the status of dispossession that can be encouraged by the practice of translation.
Overlapping with each other, the translations and critical essays keep rippling through our experience by bringing together various genres and languages. The result is the multiplying engagement with our lived experiences, brought together with a shared commitment to translation as a form of navigating through affective, surreal, divine, and oppressive worlds of languages. This volume will offer a multilingual journey through the inner world, idyllic beauty and chaotic violence, divine presence and linguistic colonialism, class hierarchy on the streets and fictional planets. Through the journey arises the invitation to challenge our own linguistic experiences and positionality on the constantly shifting terrain of human experiences.