In this issue, we are introducing poems from Asia, South America, and Europe and dedicate it to sound. The most obvious implication of the theme is through a broad spectrum of perspectives. After putting the poems altogether, we realized that two common threads can be highlighted. First, sound gives life to poetry, evolves with it, and ultimately has the power to silence it. Second, sound’s permanent presence in poetry ultimately mirrors its constancy in life, playing a crucial part in the exploration of existence at its different stages.
Readers will encounter how sound in Portuguese is both corporeal and emotional, as a way to channel one’s concerns on pregnancy, motherhood, love, and fear. Whereas in Italian, sound represents the collective memory of people joined by traditions, landscapes, and a common history of memory and dialects. Similarly – yet from a completely different angle – sound in Peruvian Spanish also becomes a question of identity and a reiteration of an origin to be found through emotions. From an opposite starting point, sound in India paradoxically explores its own denial: the sound of the inanimate world; while sound in Colombian Spanish is also raised as the concern of its own destruction: what happens after silence?
On the other, some of the poems in this issue also explore the importance of sound as an inextricable formal aspect of poetry and, therefore, as an exploration of one’s own language. In Bulgarian, sound as the legacy of Symbolism becomes a synonym of repetition, memory, and meaning; while in Russian the tradition and evolution of an entire language is traced through the significance of rhyme.
Finally, this issue also proposes another interpretation of sound in poetry, with two homophonic translations from Catalan and Portuguese into Spanish and English as a way to explore the relationship between sound and meaning as well as the limits of a poem’s territory, that is, the paradox that a text’s own borders -it’s own words- are also the gaps which allow a never-ending process of rewriting.
As usual, we publish work in both the original language as well as the English translation. As we have done in previous issues, we have brought work from well-known classic writers as well as unpublished poetry from the new generations of writers across many languages. We believe that the fewer the editorial boundaries, the richer the exchange, and in order to truly become a space of pure poetry (that is, regardless of language, origin, or time), the work of young poets must be put in contact with that of classic or more traditional authors from other cultures.
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