Summer 2023 vol 12 no 1

Editorial

In this yet another hot summer 2023, it seems quite appropriate to start off with a story of some fields being set on fire in Jalisco over a century ago. Its tone is unapologetic and exuberant, achieved in part by the fabled Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo’s revolutionary, rural gusto, which then resonates in John White’s crafty translation of Rulfo’s Spanish into a distinctly regional English.

As a sensory contrast, that story is followed by two pieces in which a shark takes the reader deep. In Florence Sunnen’s “Bone Sharks/Ossicles” one dives in via an acoustic, haptic, grammatical even, disorientation.  In “Shark Friends,” a profound lifelong attraction hovers, never letting go. Its author, Ao Omae, and its translator Emily Balistrieri participated jointly in Japan’s very first writers’ residency, held in Kyoto in the fall of 2022.  Kyoko Yoshida, who directed it, describes this novel undertaking for a Japanese audience.

Bookending the issue is poet and translator Sara Gilmore’s informed and meticulous review essay of Castilian Blues, a recent English-language collection of the work of the remarkable Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda.

A coda: we planned this issue in the traditional summer pleasure-reading mode. Then, on June 27, a Russian missile aimed at a civilian target in the Ukrainian town of Kramatorsk killed 14 people and wounded 60+. Among those dead was a colleague and a friend, the novelist and human rights activist Victoria Amelina.

Victoria collaborated with IWP in the past year as an instructor, co-teaching an on-line course on speculative writing to Ukrainian students titled—bitter irony in retrospect—"Crafting the Future.” And in November of 2022, she was among the handful of Ukrainian writers who joined a group of IWP’s international alums for a symposium entitled "Home/Land/s." In those four days at a remote location, the listening was as intense as the debates. Some, though far from all that intensity is reflected in the 12 post-symposium essays, Victoria’s among them. Of all those present, she was living closest to the war’s edge, redirecting her literary energies to serve her country by turning from fiction to war crime documentation. But formal language was with her everywhere: this much she says in a poem dated May 2022. Its Polish translation, by Aneta Kamińska, was reworked into English by poet and translator Krystyna Dąbrowska. We are grateful to the estate of Victoria Amelina, and to her agent, for permission to publish.

--The Editors

Iowa City, July 2023

Juan Rulfo, "The Fields on Fire"; translated from the Spanish by John White

Florence Sunnen, “Bone Sharks/Ossicles”

Ao О̄mae, "Shark Friends";  translated from the Japanese by Emily Balistrieri

Kyoko Yoshida, "The First Kyoto Writers' Residency." Translated from the Japanese by Laurel Taylor

"Drawing Words from a Well: Antonio Gamoneda’s Castilian Blues": a review essay by Sara Gilmore

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Victoria Amelina, "Не поезія"/ "Niepoezja"/ "Not Poetry"; translated from the Ukrainian by Aneta Kamińska and from the Polish by Krystyna Dąbrowska