International Literary Quarterly: November Issue
The is consistently good, but I think will be of extra special interest to Three Percent readers:
Volta: A Multilingual Anthology
This unusual anthology contains seventy-five poems in seventy-five languages. Seventy-four of these poems are translations of one poem, the seventy-fifth. As Richard Berengarten writes in his introduction, this project is 鈥渁 celebration of multiculturalism and diversity鈥. Apart from invoking the pleasure of learning about different languages, the anthology opens up many questions. For example: How many languages could this project extend to? Is translatability a universal feature of language itself? What does 鈥榦riginality鈥 actually mean? What difference is there between writing and translating a poem? And could the fact that these poems come from all over the world bear out Octavio Paz鈥檚 claim: 鈥淔or the first time in our history, we are contemporaries of all humanity鈥?
The project itself is really interesting, as is Definitely worth checking out if for no other reason than to see the myriad languages this poem is translated into . . .

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