Editor’s Note
Like most literary work, translation only happens if enough people care about it. This is striking because what translation offers is essential, like air or water: bracing encounters with fresh points of view, stories and images that expand what can presently be said and imagined.
I’m glad to be joining the Adroit staff as Senior Editor for Translation at what feels like an especially necessary moment for cultural celebration and exchange. I’m writing from New York, where, later today, I’ll join thousands of New Yorkers to protest. These protests are fuelled by the idea that our society could be not just different, but a whole lot more caring. We could, and should, take better care of each other.
Literature has a role to play here, as a space to explore these forms of care. This issue of Adroit brims with thought-provoking, inspiring explorations of care—who cares, for what, how, and why.
Take 2025 Veasna So Scholar in Fiction Elisa Luna Ady’s “¡Sueltame!,” for instance. Ady’s story centers on Paola who, while lovingly looking after her friend’s children, finds a way to love that friend even without reciprocation of that love. In Guadalupe Nettel’s “A Forest Under the Earth,” translated by Rosalind Harvey, the narrator is prompted, in caring for an ailing backyard tree, to consider its role in her own family’s history, so that the roots of that tree “formed an intricate labyrinth, invisible but real, a kind of subterranean forest that connected us all.”
One complexity of care is how much it hurts, sometimes simply because care involves being called to witness the pain of people for whom we care. In Lie Ford’s “On God and Responsibility,” the narrator is first on the scene when her beloved grandmother is gravely injured in a car wreck. “It was us she called, not an ambulance,” she reflects. “She prayed before she drove, but it was us she called.”
Akhim Yuseff Cabey’s elegaic “When a Black Girl is Killed” centers on a girl’s graceful binding of a boy’s wound, “how she spat/in her hand then took the needful from her scalp to mend him.” Her killing sharpens this moment in memory. Perhaps the moment has a double edge, as suggested by the Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus, in a poem translated by Alan Zhukovski, who—despite his world collapsing around him—nevertheless hopes that “the light we keep inside our memories/will be enough.”
What else might be enough? Nothing less than the world itself, as suggested by Giovannai Rosa’s gorgeous “Miami Pastoral.” Rosa offers the blossoming riot of a Florida backyard—poinciana, saw palmetto, palm and mango trees in bloom. Our bodies bloom, too: Francisco Márquez’s “The Bulge” offers a glimpse of early adolescence, a warm day, a shirtless man met in passing who provides the occasion for unexpected sexual awakening. A boy laid open to desire compares it to Moses accepting the Ten Commandments “knowing well all the pain/they would bring. Maybe faith,” he concludes, “is the risk to know you are/ but an instrument.”
Learning to love and accept one’s self—and those around us—is a critical underpinning of a caring society. I hope you’ll find as much essential sustenance and caring inspiration in these pages as I have.
Diane Josefowicz
Senior Editor, Translations