We're delighted to announce that we'll be publishing a special issue in Spring/Summer 2022 focusing on Taiwan fiction and poetry. For this issue, we're teaming up with the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing, with the generous support of Spotlight Taiwan.

The difference between writing and translation is that in writing, the membrane stands between a single personal, mental world and the culture at large. In the case of translation, the membrane is between the Russian cultural world, for which the story was written, and the target culture.

Leśmian’s poetry has been described as virtually untranslatable on account of his use of Polish words and phrases which cannot be translated into English in such as way as to accurately convey the power and the imagery of the original.

As someone who thinks of myself primarily as a writer, I first became interested in translation three years ago when I started working on a novel inspired by the tropes of wuxia (martial arts fantasy) fiction in English.

The biggest challenge for us in translating classical Chinese is connected to the issue of suggestiveness. Suggestiveness is ultimately the ideal of Chinese art, including literary art.

Umberto Eco once pessimistically said that “translation is the art of failure”. In contrast, I say that this precious craft is the art of success because without literary translation, we are all separate dots in an ocean of failures.