At an airport shop, I stand dumbfounded before a wall of shelves brimming with roasted nuts in miniature packaging sporting inflated prices when a toddler grabs my attention with their directed giggling. I become utterly disarmed in the face of a good session of peek-a-boo.
It strikes me how fundamentally fascinated we are with visibility. Now you see me; now you don’t. Now you see me. Now you—don’t. And this human fascination with visibility is fully on display in the new series published by Deep Vellum called Best Literary Translations, which places translators (thirty-eight of them) and editors (five) center stage—alongside the fifty-two journals who nominated a combined five hundred pieces for consideration. (Let me also point out another occasionally overlooked narrative voice of a book: the copyright page, where it will be clear to you, if it wasn’t already, once you get to the line “used by permission of Metallica,” that you’re in for a treat.)
The ambitions of Best Literary Translations 2024, the series debut, are immediately evident in its dedication to the memory of translator Edith Grossman, who died in 2023 after a prolific career translating from Spanish. It seems appropriate to honor her work by including more translations out of various Spanishes than any other language group (Arabic comes second). The coeditors outline their own personal goals for the series in their introduction: to create “an enduring platform for translation to be appreciated as an artform in its own right”; and for this platform to be “a curative to parochial thinking” by “present[ing] voices from around the world, paying special attention to lesser-known literatures and languages” (15).
The collection celebrates the multiplicity of artforms and languages. Here is Old Egyptian, and Chinese, and Italian, and Tigrinya, and Kurdish, and Burmese, and Greek, and Russian. I could fill the page with the languages of the collection. It is refreshing to see all these languages within the same covers. Let me air a bias: Inclined to search for any variation of Serbo-Croatian, Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, or Serbian, etc., in the table of contents, I sadly came up short. As an editor, I can understand how selections are determined in large part by submissions—but perhaps this can serve as a friendly nudge/witch’s spell for submitters sending their entries for Best Literary Translations 2025.
The collection’s interventions don’t stop there: the pieces are formally diverse as well. You’ll find poems, essays, short stories, and other pieces more difficult to describe generically. Gala Pushkarenko’s poem “Water_Miniatures,” translated from Russian by Dmitri Manin and originally published in AzonaL, opens: “1. / Object: It seems to me important to know that we can’t speak / It seems to me important to realize that you can’t say: snow” (142). In Rolla Barraq’s poem “We Will Survive,” translated from Arabic by Muntather Alsawad and Jeffrey Clapp and first appearing in MAYDAY, there’s a line that speaks to two themes of the collection—grief and futures: “The children will go to school. / They will read ‘Home’ or ‘The boy planted a rose’ or ‘The girl fed a cat.’ / They will draw houses with large open doors and no fences” (41). And still other related themes—of the respite offered by strength, as in Vito Apüshana’s “Bird-women,” translated from Spanish and Wayuu by Maurice Rodriguez and first appearing in ANMLY: “And since then, I have been discovering the hidden feathers / of the women who shelter us” (176). And lines in prose that, taken out of context, take the guise of poetry: “I’m the corpse of a Libyan citizen dumped on Zeit Street”—from “The Reeling City” by Najwa Bin Shatwan, translated from Arabic by Mona Zaki and first published in the Michigan Quarterly Review.
Unique to this “best” series are the translators’ notes that follow each piece. At their best, the notes implicitly witness the enormous disservice imperial and/or nationalized language names do to the complexity of the writers’ and translators’ work. In that sense, counting the languages in this debut misses the point. For example, you might learn for the first time that, in the words of translator Edith Adams, the poetics of Daniela Catrileo “reflects on the contours and multiplicities of Mapuche identity in the wake of exile, migration, and colonization, both historical and ongoing” (36). You might learn for the first time that, in translating Behçet Necatigil, Neil P. Doherty set out to “develop a ‘Necatigil language’ within English” (99). You might learn for the first time, through translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid, of the North Macedonian context of Najwan Darwish’s poem “Near the Shrine of Saint Naum.”
The coeditors succinctly attend to the falsity of supposed singular equivalences between languages: “Single words are broken into constellations of potential meanings” (11). So it is with languages themselves. This is not to say that language names need makeovers (they do), but that a mainstreamed understanding of the histories of linguistic relationships and the art of translation could use the care and nuance found in the best translators’ notes.
Were I tasked with entertaining the art of suggestion (I’m convinced all Yugoslavs know this art—of “prijedlog”—well), I could say I would have liked to see an inclusion, excerpted or whole, of the source texts. I would have loved to dip, for however long, into the world of decisions each translator made in their interpretive performance, and to have those decisions acknowledged in more sustained translators’ notes. Perhaps especially in light of the editors’ goal for the collection to be a curative to parochialism, some readers would take to more guidance. Because sometimes, even in their most visible moments, translators run offstage.
Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-born writer and co-founder of Turkoslavia, a translation collective and journal. Her work has appeared in the Periodical of the Modern Language Association, Words Without Borders, Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today, among others, and has received support from the American Literary Translators Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis. You can learn more about her work at turkoslavia.com.