XIV

XIV
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Introduction

Did you notice? TWO LINES is a bit different this year. The tag after the colon no longer reads: A Journal of Translation. Now it says: World Writing in Translation. Why the change? We're finally coming out. For years we've been telling ourselves we're a magazine, but secretly we've wondered. Why are we so… thick, so blocky? Now it's time to face facts: We're a book! We told our friends, and to our relief, they aren't really surprised. They say they knew it all along.

But actually, admitting that we are a book has opened up a wonderful new collaboration for us. TWO LINES is pleased to announce that we are now a publishing partner of the University of Washington Press. We're honored to be part of their catalog of fine books and to be distributed by them.

The other change is that this is the first TWO LINES that doesn't have a theme. Several reasons for this. One is that our founding editor, Olivia E. Sears, used up a lot of the best themes, from Battlefields to Ghosts to Bodies, in the annual issues that appeared starting in 1994.

But the other reason is that TWO LINES has always championed the translator. We are the only literary magazine where the translator's name comes before the author in the table of contents. We do that not to be ornery (actually, we are a bit ornery!), but to highlight the work of the extremely knowledgeable and skillful people who bring us the best writers from all over the world. By omitting the theme, we are relying on translators to be our ears and eyes in every region of the globe, to tell us what works are the most urgent for readers to see.

Among those works in this edition is Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali's "Revenge," translated by the troika of Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin, a moving commentary on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Also in this year's TWO LINES is Robert Hass's skillful rendering of a poem by the great Swedish writer Tomas Tranströmer. Ellen Elias-Bursac won the 2006 American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) award for the best translation of the year for her powerful English version of the novel Gotz and Meyer by Serbian writer David Albahari, and in this TWO LINES she translates a magical short story by the same author. Thanks to translator Olga Berg, this edition also contains the English-language debut of Natalia Tolstaya, a prize-winning Russian fiction writer who is making a name for herself as a hilarious and biting satirist of post-Soviet society.

And those are only a few samples of TWO LINES XIV, a collection of the most electric writing you're likely to find in any magazine—sorry, in any annual anthology.

—Zack Rogow