Before there was something called English literature, translation was not cut off from the act of writing. Poets wrote in the vernacular, but the sources of their inspiration were often from other tongues and times. No one thought but to prospect outside the bounds of English for sensation and expression venerable enough to make art of verse.

Now that the English language itself is thought to be sufficiently venerable, fully equipped for all forms of human expression, the activity of translating is considered to have lost its importance and its urgency. In times past translators carried writing down from the great classical languages into the vernacular. Now translation is said to bring writing up into English; it is accused of importing writing the way the tourist brings home cheap rugs and cunning little flea circuses. This sort of activity is regarded by critics in fields like cultural studies with suspicion. It bears the taint of colonialism, and of the religious mission.

We would be lying if we said we had no sense of mission. We think translation is important, urgent work. Language which is venerable is language which has lost the ability to refresh itself. The success that writing from Latin America and Eastern Europe has found in North America in the past decade says something about the thirst here for new stories, and new ways of telling them.

The paradox is that through the process of translation these infusions must lose much of their potential to renew. Translators have no choice but to secure the work they translate as firmly as possible into the new language, to make it palatable to an audience that does not tolerate a great deal of deviation from the venerable, or the native. (One of our favorite cartoons: a translator says pettishly to his author, "Do you not be happy with me as the translator of the books of you?") Not that the translators are not part of the audience as well. Inevitably, the translator's own ideas about what literature should sound like operate on the translation with no little power.

Yet we translate.

In our experience as researchers who translate, we find that, for the most part, the academy ignores the act of translation itself. Translations appear in monographs and essays, but the form rarely allows for an examination of the process. We wanted to make a place for translation in which the act of translating was central. We wanted to share our work in a place where the contradictions and frustrations of translation were part of the ground rules. We wanted a place for translators from every possible discipline and regional area to share new work with each other.

We also wanted to think past the kinds of writing we always thought about when we thought about writing. We asked for submissions about battlefields, real or imagined. We read letters and recollections, prayers and complaints and newspaper reports. Some battles were purely ceremonial. Some were so real we felt we had to look away. Some were fought within a single heart, with no outward sign at all.

To have called for submissions and to have discovered that so many people understood instinctively what TWO LINES was trying to be about was a great and unexpected satisfaction. We hope that the magazine serves as a kind of reference or marker for the reader's own work–for we are rash enough to imagine that you would not be reading this if you were not interested in translation yourself–and our warmest hope is that some of the readers of this issue will become contributors to the next.