Editor’s Note
What is the shape of a language, and do multiple languages fail to create mirror images of each other—even existing in the same consciousness? This is a question I’ve been wondering in the past few months of studying translation. While converting words from one etymology into their supposed approximations, I found a universe of give and take in the possibilities that arose. 青, my mother tells me, is the color blue, even though for the past eighteen years of C-drama viewership I always thought it was the color green. Blue-green, she conceded—color of Song porcelain, some jades, and young grass. In the end I settled on “spring-green,” but even that, somehow, felt excessive and inadequate at the same time.
A very similar question is framed in different words by Lydia H. Liu in her Translingual Practice: are languages incommensurate? Like currency, may we exchange one linguistic unit for its exact equivalent in another time and place, or is such exchange impossible under the subjectivity of human experience attached to every expression as it exists and is used today? Is language fixed, or is it circumstantial? Does it melt while passing through your mouth?
As a magazine that focuses not on the absolutes of translation but the crossing-spaces of literary exploration, Pollux Journal allows for two or more languages to speak in conversation with each other, just as they might in the minds of those for whom their edges are blurred, and their boundaries disputed. The theme of our fourth issue is “asymmetry,” considered in both a literary and linguistic context. When exact conversion fails to tide us over into meaning, what stories may we discover in the middle ground? In a way, this collection of writing is as much about the concept of translingualism—in which new identities, histories, and ways of expression are born from the friction of colliding planets—as it is about multilingualism, or the coexistence of many languages in the same galactic system. If unbridgeable gaps do remain between the tongues and the alphabets that we are born with—as well as those that stake their ground spontaneously, or those we only acquire after several years’ worth of conscious effort—then our contributors this season consider those gaps to be productive, if greatly uncomfortable.
In Anuva Chowdhury’s “at dawn, i pretend i don’t regret you”, the visual asymmetry of two languages partaking in the same poem creates a message of longing that is greater than the sum of its parts. Anna Martino’s “And That a Kelson of Creation Is Love” reflects on the power of words in their precise and original form, one that forbids careless substitution and necessitates the profession of storyteller even in a sandy, uncertain future. Sometimes a lack of fluency speaks more of the shared humanity between individuals than any wealth of words, as Kevin Browne observes in “Afternoon visit”, and sometimes the ravines that divvy up our own individual selves result in voicelessness, as in Katie Hong’s “on being lost (in translation) again”. But then, perhaps the transition is not always so steep: F. J. Bergmann allows two languages to bleed into one in “French Letters” and “Legerdemain”, where the sounds and sayings of English and French are uttered in a single breath, becoming almost indistinguishable.
Thank you so much for your patience in the process of putting together this issue. We’re so glad to return with a fresh batch of thoughts on the plurality of language, and we hope you’ll stay with us for more to come.
Warm wishes,
Aria Miao / Editor in Chief