qarrtsiluni

The editors invite submissions of poetry, short fiction, essays, visual poetry, photography, artwork and video for a translation-themed issue. The deadline is December 6 December 31, and the issue will begin to appear online after the New Year. All submissions must be made via qarrtsiluni’s new submissions manager.

In addition to work translated into English, we encourage a universal interpretation, including though not limited to movement between and within cultural fields and from signifier (code, symbol, signal) to signified (message, meaning, transcription). Translation being inherent in all acts of writing/reading, both semantic and non-verbal, we are interested in short, non-academic essays relevant to such readings and mis-readings. Please also send adaptations, definitions, conversions, and homophonic translations. Text submissions should not exceed three poems or short prose pieces, or some combination thereof, for a maximum of three single-spaced pages in .doc or .rtf format.

For translations, include originals, permission status, and a bio for the original author as well as your own. Translations from any language are welcome. We look forward to reading or viewing your work.

—Nick Admussen, Nathalie Boisard-Beudin, Nick Carbó, Alex Cigale, and Ayesha Saldanha

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Nick Admussen is a Ph. D. candidate in Chinese literature at Princeton University, preparing a dissertation on contemporary Chinese prose poetry.  His translations are forthcoming in Renditions, and have appeared in Cha magazine; his original poetry has appeared in magazines like the Boston Review and the Kenyon Review Online, and his first chapbook is due out this winter from Epiphany Editions.

Nathalie Boisard-Beudin is a middle aged French woman living in Rome, Italy. She has more hobbies than spare time, alas — reading, cooking, writing, painting and photography — so hopes that her technical colleagues at the European Space Agency will soon come up with a solution to that problem by stretching the fabric of time. Either that or send her up to write about the travels and trials of the International Space Station, the way this was done for the exploratory missions of old. Clearly the woman is a dreamer.

Nick Carbó is the author of El Grupo McDonald’s (1995), Secret Asian Man (2000), which won the Asian American Literary Award, and Andalusian Dawn (2004). He is the editor of three anthologies of Filipino literature: Pinoy Poetics (2004), Babaylan (2000), and Returning a Borrowed Tongue (1995).

Alex Cigale‘s poems recently appeared in The Cafe, Colorado, Global City, Green Mountains, and North American reviews, Gargoyle, Hanging Loose, Redactions, Tar River Poetry, 32 Poems, and Zoland Poetry, online in Contrary, Drunken Boat, H_ngm_n, McSweeney’s, and are forthcoming in Many Mountains Moving and St. Petersburg Review. His translations from the Russian can be found in Crossing Centuries: the New Generation in Russian Poetry, in The Manhattan, St. Ann’s, and Yellow Medicine reviews, online in OffCourse, Danse Macabre and Fiera Lingue, and forthcoming in Crab Creek Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. He was born in Chernovsty, Ukraine and lives in New York City.

Ayesha Saldanha is a writer and translator based in Bahrain. She has translated a wide range of Bahraini fiction and poetry. Some of her translations of Gulf poets will appear in Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry to be published by Garnet Publishing/Ithaca Press in 2011. She blogs as Bint Battuta.

Editors’ names link to their work in qarrtsiluni, where applicable.

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This issue is a first for us in three respects: it will represent qarrtsiluni’s very first foray into publishing translations; it’s the first we’ve tried to work with a team of more than two issue editors; and it’s our first experiment with a real submissions management system. If you’ve submitted to other publications that use the same system, Submishmash, you’ll need to log in with the same username and password. Otherwise, you’ll create a new account as part of the submission process. Most of our general guidelines remain the same, and are included on the submissions page.

Please let us know via email (qarrtsiluni [at] gmail.com) if you experience any problems with the new system. We’re cautiously optimistic that it will help us keep better track of submissions, and we’re pretty certain that contributors will appreciate the ability to log on and see how their submissions are doing, but we’ll see how it goes. For more about the service, check out this interview with one of the lead developers.

We hope this call for submissions will prompt some imaginative responses from past contributors and expose us to the work of new authors and artists as well. Best of luck to all.

—Beth and Dave