By ALBERTO DE LACERDA
Translated by MARIA DE CALDAS ANTÃO
To John McEwan
The architecture of the sleeves—
White—
As she composes her response
To a letter
(On the marble floor
The seal
Jumps
From the crumpled letter)
By MOISEI FISHBEIN
Translated by JOHN HENNESSY and OSTAP KIN
Kol Nidre
And damp dust between stars will vanish,
and nothing will ever move or shine,
and as you look up at the sky at midday
the slanted rays will cross your sight.
By VIKTOR NEBORAK
Translated by JOHN HENNESSY and OSTAP KIN
The rusty hollows inside the old mosquito
reduce his soprano to dust. Down the pipe
of his fragile beak, the pumps are already weak.
And his blood flows through fossilized riverbeds.
His gas tanks empty, song silenced, not a drop
of compassion in him… Running on coal fumes,
the rusted engines deliver him to drill
one last buzz through the ears of the crowd.
A kamikaze who would have dropped heavenly tons
on these civilians as on military echelons
and then been posthumously awarded
the highest orders! his name on honor lists!
banners! trumpets! salutes! obelisks!
… if my slap hadn’t smashed him dead.
Viktor Neborak is a poet, writer, literary scholar, and critic. He is also a founding member (along with Yuri Andrukhovych and Oleksandr Irvanets) of the Bu-Ba-Bu literary performance group. His collection The Flying Head and Other Poems appeared in English translation in 2005.
John Hennessy’s most recent books are Exit Garden State, a collection of poems, and Set Change, selected poems by Yuri Andrukhovych co-translated with Ostap Kin.
Ostap Kin is the editor of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond and New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City. With John Hennessy, he translated Set Change by Yuri Andrukhovych, and A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan.
By ANNA MALIHON
Translated by OLENA JENNINGS
YLANG-YLANG
in the thick halo of insects, the lamp resembles
a mature dandelion
the girl as pale as bandages incessantly conjures spells
I can’t make out the words
I am still there where there is roaring and how…
…ling
unbridled nature has undone me thoroughly
I lay like a stunned fish in the lord’s hand
and a thought about water fills a warm sea
bordering the land’s illuminated wounds
that the worms, animals and feathered messengers
visited while searching for sustenance
and instead of my arm a bamboo shoot hangs out
gathering strength
and in my hand someone has placed
the globe of this complicated world
exhaling: live
I don’t have enough strength to close my eyes in shame
or scream get away from me, I’m alone
alone I’m alone, give me back my hand
how now to overcome the grand piano’s mouth of silence
and toss a baby up to the sun
the bamboo will only be good for a flute
but I lack enough breath even for that
a tall girl with a gaze like the Mother of God
murmurs seeds of words upon the tiles
the mocking moon peeks through a hole burnt
in the tulle: time to go
and now in the cottony silence, a yellow
melody of resurrection pushes its way through
like a ylang-ylang flower
and a damaged airplane like a lost petal
returns to the sky
and the little boy with my hands embroiders the collected sounds
I exhale so loudly that the dandelion’s
circle of insects dissipates
dawn…
[IT FELT LIKE BLOOD]
It felt like blood
on the floor of the subway car,
like sticky patterns of footprints—my new identity…
It felt like someone had turned me into
a bucket of strawberries,
and forgotten about it…
And the platform like a safe haven
and the—red beginnings of love—
between heart and throat.
I woke up as if no one was shooting,
only boys wander in
one stands nearby with a pistol,
and—bang-bang!—into the void…
But suddenly not just a crater—
But a black pit in the chest.
And tiny red droplets.
I am eating one strawberry—for the sick brother,
another, smaller one—for the son,
I am eating the slightly crushed one for him
who crushed my heart over the years.
And the last one—the biggest, the shiniest—
for my father who was never a father to me.
Put down your toy death.
Go, return the sun’s face
to the longest night for me.
Here are peonies and June,
and soldiers tightly standing.
And never,
never will anyone leave you again…
[THE POEMS BETWEEN US GREW SHORTER]
The poems between us grew shorter
until everything unwound into a single letter
with a period
which you turned on its head
because you liked exclamatory endings…
Finally, everything went quiet.
I became still as a white shell in the Paleozoic era.
I wish I hadn’t written words, biting my lip.
I wish I hadn’t written on the water with my fingertips.
I wish I hadn’t turned circles into a delicate zero…
You destroyed my Universe, flipped, abandoned
Forgot the address
Forgot the lanterns with flames in the window
Only letters
gnaw at memory
like mice gnaw at last year’s feed sack.
Short poems come with freedom for the blind.
Long poems come with a cage for those with sight.
Anna Malihon is an award-winning Ukrainian poet and the author of six books of poetry and a novel. Her work has been published in numerous Ukrainian literary journals and translated into Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, Georgian, Armenian, and French. In 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion forced her to leave Ukraine. She lives in Paris, France.
Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection The Age of Secrets, the chapbook Memory Project, and the novel Temporary Shelter. She is a translator of collections by Ukrainian poets Kateryna Kalytko (co-translated with Oksana Lutsyshyna), Iryna Shuvalova, Vasyl Makhno, Yuliya Musakovska, and Anna Malihon. She lives in Queens, New York.
By PEDRO POITEVIN
Translated by PHILIP NIKOLAYEV
I am myself a member of myself
and every time I search within I find
another me, mysteriously aligned,
and in that replica wherein I delve
there dwells another, and another yet,
ellipsis dots: a mammoth nesting doll
that both contains itself, containing all,
and self-inhabits, the set of all sets.
I am the madness of the grand design,
I am the limit of where reason goes,
I am the science behind metascience.
The endless universe of sets is mine,
and this includes the cheeky set of those
denying my existence in defiance.
Pedro Poitevin, a bilingual poet, translator, and mathematician originally from Guatemala, is the author of six books of poetry. His work has appeared in Rattle, River Styx, The Mathematical Intelligencer, and Nimrod, among other publications. In 2022, he received the Juana Goergen Poetry Prize, and in 2025, the Premio Internacional de Literatura Palindrómica Rever.
Philip Nikolayev is a poet living in Boston, raised in Moldova. He translates poetry from French, Romanian, Ukrainian, Hindi, Urdu, and Sanskrit. His collections include Monkey Time and Letters from Aldenderry. His collection of poems in Spanish translation by Willy Ramírez and Pedro Poitevin, Un poeta desde el balcón, has been published in Latin America.
By TERAO TETSUYA
Translated by KEVIN WANG
The piece appears below in both English and the original Chinese.
Translator’s Note
“Some Kind of Corporate Retreat” is collected in Terao Tetsuya’s Spent Bullets (HarperVia, 2025), a book of nine linked short stories about Taiwanese prodigies turned disillusioned Big Tech engineers. In official American narratives, immigrant experiences often become flattened into palatable arcs of resilience. But this story insists on being wounded, unresolved, and playfully deviant in its exploration of hollow relationships and a simmering desire for destruction.
Translated from the German by MELODY MAKEDA LEDWON
Translator’s Note
“I need you to translate my book. You’re the person I would ask,” Simoné said to me as we sat on a panel about intersectionality and translation at the Translationale Berlin in the winter of 2023. We laughed briefly at how she had managed to weave this translation proposal into her response to a question about challenges in the German translation industry. Honored, intrigued, a bit nervous, I accepted.
Messer, Zungen, written primarily in German, explores how the erasure of Black people and people of color from the culture of remembrance within the Cape Coloured community in South Africa, also known as Camissa, is intimately tied to their displacement from ancestral lands and historic communal sites. Resisting racial violence, reclaiming memory, history and language therefore involves both returning to lost places and being resilient in hostile spaces. I found the role of language in this context particularly fascinating. The characters speak, remember, and experience their worlds in multiple languages, including Sesotho, English and Afrikaans, creating a mosaic of languages. In my initial draft of “Choir” and “Motherness,” I focused on how to recreate this rich tapestry of language in translation. As I began to revise, and consult with SGL and several colleagues, I concluded that it was most important to respect the characters’ language choices. Above all, I sought to capture the commonplace reality of multilingual worlds and communities. SGL adeptly portrays these realities in her novel without explaining them or making them more palatable to an imagined external audience. In contrast to the original, where passages written in English stand out, in the translation they seamlessly blend into the main language of the text, resulting in a new language mosaic.
—Melody Makeda Ledwon
Translated from the Spanish by JACK ROCKWELL
Piece appears below in English and the original Spanish.
Translator’s Note
Translating several of Bellolio’s stories, but especially this one, I’ve found that the hardest part has been the beginning. By the time the text hits its stride, somewhere in the second or third pages, it has swept me along with it, and it feels almost effortless—nearly as much so as Bellolio’s painstaking craft makes her own writing seem—to bob and weave with her sentences, to bunch up and then uncoil with the tense spools of her thought. But once I wrap back around to the beginning, I read the first few sentences I’ve translated and am shocked to find what feels like a jerky, uneven mess.
Bellolio rigorously calibrates the motions of her prose, and the elegance of her language applies some serious heft to the felt necessity of her narrator’s thought. This thought, and the careful patterning that structures it, are absolutely essential to this digressive, contemplative story. In the first long paragraph of “River Landscape,” a compassionate investigation of the interior life of a murderer fleeing his crime, a series of repetitions in the text mimics the destructive return of his victim’s face to his mind’s eye. While these repetitions spread out as the story progresses, in the beginning they are stacked thickly on top of one another. Finding the right rock and sway to carry the reader through this dense opening passage took some obsessive tinkering. I’m still not completely satisfied with it, but it’ll have to do for now. There was much going back and forth between alternatives, and much friendly (and incredibly patient) advice given by friends and colleagues, such as Jan Steyn, Emily Graham, Miharu Yano, and Dabin Jeong. I’m very grateful to all of them, and especially to Dabin, who introduced me to Bellolio’s work.
—Jack Rockwell
By ANNA MALIHON
Translated from the Ukrainian by OLENA JENNINGS
From Girl with a Bullet, forthcoming October 2025
Presented in Olena Jennings’ seamless translation, Anna Malihon’s new collection, Girl with a Bullet, is one of the most important books of the year for those with an interest in the fate of Ukraine, a gift to Anglophone readers.
—John Hennessy, poetry editor
Table of Contents:
[The girl with a bullet in her stomach]
[Don’t go into that home]
[Now the only thing that you can do for her, Christ,]
[Unfold and dive into me, to my very bone,]
Translated by OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK, MAX ROSOCHINSKY, and the author
Piece appears below in English and the original Russian and Ukrainian.
Translators’ Note
Alex Averbuch authored Talks with the Besieged on the basis of his engagement with group chats on Telegram and other public IM platforms by Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. The present selection is excerpted from this larger work that explores the relentless and evolving nature of the occupation, capturing the initial bewilderment and disorientation experienced by those who stayed behind. These brief, fragmented exchanges reflect civilians navigating the chaos of war in real time. Oscillating between found poetry, a digital archive, and virtual testimony, the text presents the fears, anxieties, aspirations, and dreams of the community enduring liminality and existential uncertainty. In translating these dispatches, we’ve attempted to approximate the casual, matter-of-fact tone of participants, their poignant attempts to lighten the mood, encourage each other, and offer reassurance and consolation.While Telegram and many other IM platforms offer automatic capitalization for each new comment, we decided to use lowercase letters instead, capitalizing only toponyms and proper names. We have also removed the names of the original contributors, blurring the distinctions between them and obscuring where one utterance ends and another begins. We hope that these decisions help render the text as a continuous uninterrupted expression of hope and terror and create an impression of a living chorus, a droning and wailing unbroken human voice.
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