About Ghosts

ancestors, apparitions, delusions, demons,
genies, haunts, holy spirit, illusions,
impressions, memories, phantoms, shadows,
specters, traces, umbras, visitations

We chose the theme for this issue in July, 2001, before we knew what was coming. We were thinking, back then, of many kinds of hauntings: visitations of historical demons, personal phantoms, possible futures, holy spirits and traditional Òghosts,Ó on the one hand, but also of the special ghosts of literary translationÑthe long shadows of authors that hover as translators spirit away their cherished words and ideas, the souls of the original texts that, if skillfully coaxed, come to inhabit and animate the translations. We were thinking, too, about how we, as humans, cope with our manifold ghosts by writing about them. While our 2001 issue, Cells, focused on the beginning of a new millennium, with this issue we wanted to look at what lingers from the last.

And then came the events of September 11th and its aftermath. What to say of these? Ghosts too numerous to name and hauntings at so many levels and in so many places around the world.

So much has been written about the tragedies of 2001 that we will, here, add only our respectful silence. Instead, we will let the literature of the world speak.

This issue has remarkable breadth. We visit with people who, uprooted and exiled, live like apparitions in a world totally foreign to them; with people who wander their own streets lost and hopeless in the shadow of war; we listen in on a phantom love affair through the thinnest of walls, and we revel in the memory of youthful lust; we confront the demons of genocide from Kigali to Srebenica, of oppression and silence from Romania to Uruguay; we reckon with the powerful spirits who bring salvation to a population plagued by natural disaster; we discover an Ahtna Athabaskan man who is trying to save his peopleÕs dying oral language from extinction by writing in itÑand translating out of it; we sit by the &Mac222;reside for a few classic tales of ghosts (both benign and terrifying) who love, kill, and despair; we follow the journey of a poem read in translation by an American poet, misremembered and transformed years later into a powerful new poem that is here reunited with its original inspiration. And, inevitably, inescapably, we meet the specter of death.

TWO LINES aims to address the world but also to listen to it, to engage in conversation across languages. As the submissions arrived for this issue, we were struck by all that the world has to say about what haunts usÑabout spirits too ephemeral for us to grasp and phantoms we cannot escape.