An Editorial Aside...

I misremembered the concept false cognate, shifting between languages in conversation a while back, and what came out was not false but fake cognate. Then I over-thought that, and it began to seem like a weird sort of key to the entire discipline. Explaining what I mean will be one of the projects here.

Translated literary texts of whatever form are of course the main feature for this sort of thing. But the discipline is much broader than that, and space will be afforded to other modes and the issues they present, especially philosophy, broadly speaking.

What I brought to the table as editor at other journals was a focus on critical writing with an emphasis on interviews. That will continue here, and hopefully expand in the general direction of both critical theory and journalism related to the discipline. Numerous issues relevant to translators deserve attention, from automation technologies to copyright law issues to where the money comes from and where it goes. And numerous questions merit asking, especially about the political realities of the practice.

The general editorial standpoint, being my own, is Marxist. And while this is not an explicitly party-political project, that is certainly the primary critical lens through which I view the discipline, my role in it, and my own work. The more precise articulation of which is another of the projects here.

The plan is to open for submissions as soon as feasible, but I will be curating for the time being. This mostly as a way to regulate the work flow, while editorial systems come into place to sustain it. In time I hope this looks like a free literary journal with a theoretical journal/trade publication for translators alongside it, the latter being behind a very modest paywall.

For now, as a way to test drive the design and announce the project, we soft launch with two selections from my own work. A story by the Peruvian writer Gastón Fernández, whose poems I recently published with World Poetry Books, and two short poems by Osvaldo Lamborghini, who I have been translating with Garrett Phelps. I have one or two more things of my own I plan to share, and am gathering material from others, so new things will appear on the site roughly every two weeks or so, and my own contributions will soon become purely editorial.

Comments, critiques and old colleagues will find me at karlcascia @ gmail or @kmcascia on bluesky.

-km