fwriction

fwrictionreview:

I’m trying to tell him what it was like.

My brothers played foosball. In my mother’s closet among party dresses suffocating in bags I’d hide while in the basement rods spun and missed. Sometimes I’d carry a jar of olives, but usually I kept my hands free in case the KKK should happen to hop the porch and catch the wink of chrome on our doorpost and torch it all down to reach me. 

That’s reasonable. The Ku Klux Klan in suburban New Jersey, he says, toothpaste foaming. 

I vow to try harder. 

It was a game, I insist.

He spits.

You mean Jehovah’s Witness, he says, coming out of the bathroom. I had a classmate once who wouldn’t stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Wore burgundy bloomers and smelled like canned spaghetti; now, there’s a home life.

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It gives me great delight to announce fwriction : review’s call for submissions for our new Translation section. I hope everyone read and enjoyed this week’s issue, an excerpt from Erwin Uhrmann’s novel, The War Beyond, translated by Shelley Frisch, as it marks our launch into publishing works of translation. 

World Literature is a style of writing that I have long admired. I remember in college reading a deteriorating copy of Asylum Arts’ Echoes of Baudelaire, with the original rhymed French printed on the left and its English translation on the right. I remember trying to decode “L’Invitation au voyage’s” precise meaning, my eyes darting from left to right to left again. 

In addition to publishing the English translation, to supplement the reading experience I will be asking each translator three questions pertinent both to the text and the art of translation, called the Translator Trio. Shelley Frisch, fwriction : review’s first translator, kick-starts this section, providing a unique insight into her process of translating The War Beyond. With the Trio, we want to call attention to the work and art and presence of the translator, an imperative in making these texts understood and known.

It also seems appropriate to announce our launch of translated writing on the heels of the PEN World Voices festival last week and my interview with the Chair of the PEN Translation Committee, Susan Bernofsky. It is with the same energy I found at PEN, in introducing foreign authors and advocating for their writing, that we welcome World Literature to our fwriction : review home.

Please review our new guidelines on translations before submitting. Any questions you may have, feel free to email me directly. We ask you to please spread this good news, and to please keep on reading.