The topic for this issue was Cecilia Vicuña’s idea originally. And it was she who brought us to the word "translucinación," a word made up by Andrés Ajens to describe how translation is a form of reading and writing that creates new work, new conversations. Translucinación is, like dialogue (the topic of Chain 9), a cross-cultural encounter loaded with hope and yet always in danger of going wrong. While translation, post-Walter Benjamin, is no longer presumed to contain or clarify another language (or its accompanying culture), what interested us was the relentless utopian drive within any act of translation. For no matter what translation does, it still represents the need for one culture to speak and learn about another through the other culture’s words.
As we edited this issue, we thought about these issues: What happens to a language when it is brought into English (or any other tongue)? What gets lost and what is added? How can a translation present its alterations with consciousness? How can a translation be shown as the creation of something new rather than a distortion of an original? Can translation be an act of dialogue rather than an act of imperialistic plunder?