Introduction by Olivia E. Sears

In our first issue, Battlefields, we were reminded of the conflicts among cultures that translation could expose, create and remedy. We were aware of the ambivalence of this reporting from the front. That is, bringing other cultures into our living rooms: there are the dangers of voyeurism, exploitation and appropriation, alongside the potential to inform, to create a bridge. In choosing Tracks, we were interested in exploring movement, change, and the impressions that motion leaves behind. Here the tracks of movement are at least as important as either the journey or the arrival. Tracks may lead to their maker; they may entirely trace a journey. They could even be fallen remnants, as after a conversation across a dinner table when we discover what is left behind on the table: the messages we sent -- messages never received on the other side.

In this issue we read about the tracks left by a memory, an animal, a word, a coat, a reflection, a sweating body, a loom; tracks left in the earth, on silk, in language, on poetry, within our minds and hearts and souls.

We see translation as a model for cultural interpretation. A wise translator once advised his colleagues to view language not as a prison from which we are always trying to escape to some linguistic no-man's-land, but rather as a window. And the translator's view always will include the frame. Translation involves the reflections left in the mind of the translator -- the traces of a reading.

The phenomenon of perceiving through traces is not limited to language. Sometimes effects are all we are given. A great medievalist used to compare medieval descriptions of angels with the contemporary definition of a quark: both admit the possibility of never identifying the thing in itself. (Sadly, he was overcome by a virus which may find a place in this analogy.)

For this issue we ventured onto the Internet. Our first encounter was prickly. We explored without a translator or interpreter. We were uninformed about cultural norms. We never consulted a guide book and immediately breached net-iquette. Rather than whispering a rumor of our existence to the language groups of the Internet, as we had intended, we inadvertently broadcast our message. We were loud. We were tourists abroad speaking ever louder to get through to the uncomprehending waiter. Eventually, we were both rudely chastised and gently advised of our cultural offense against the good citizens of the Internet. The subject heading of one response read, "Re: the Imminent Death of the Internet" and pointed to the upraised dagger in our hands.

This encounter with translators near and far was also wondrous. Many translators ignored our transgression (or forgave us). We were flooded with submissions. There are always benefits and dangers inherent in the attempt to communicate. Preparation and consideration are two parts of the equation: what about the tracks?

As expressed in the inaugural issue, we hope that the journal serves as a kind of reference or marker for the reader's own work and our warmest hope is that some of the readers of this issue will become contributors to the next.