Editorial

The issue of 91st Meridian in front of you is anchored by four essays which take on the ethics implied in the selection of texts a translator makes. Andrea Labinger writes on her decision to translate against the grain of current Argentinean historiography, Jonathan Cohen on translating Ernesto Cardenas' poetry as a pathway into the fraught US-Nicaraguan terrain in the 1980s, and Martha Collins on learning Vietnamese as a debt repayment of sorts for the ravaging US war. Finally Russell Valentino ponders the core matter of trust between a translator and his or her author.

Five poems by one of the most prominent figures in contemporary Polish poetry, Ewa Lipska, are introduced by her English-language translators Robin Davidson and Ewa Nowakowska. And a new, intense voice, that of the German novelist Jan Peter Bremer, is here brought to the Anglophone scene by the young translator Eugene Sampson.

Though it is now frigid and bone-dry in Iowa, heat and humidity seep through Stratis Haviaras' "Letter from a Greek Sharecropper," in which he meditates on sharing a garden with assorted others, first on the Peloponnesos and then again in Massachusetts. Ania Spyra's three postcards from Romania, plus two hot links to new projects of IWP's Chinese alumni send this issue off.