New Year

Dear all,

A very happy new year to you all. I thought this might be of interest for those of you who may be looking for an outlet to bring a non-English-language writer to a wider audience:

Call for submissions: Massachusetts Review
University of Massachusetts Amherst

In our fifty-first year of publication, the editors of The Massachusetts Review (www.massreview.org) plan to dramatically increase the amount of fiction, poetry and socially-engaged nonfiction which they publish in translation. MR is a general-audience journal of literature, arts and public affairs, with a particularly strong history of civil rights and feminist publication. Today we see a great need for US literary journals to internationalize – to open their ears, and their pages, to voices from outside the United States, and to writers in languages other than English. MR believes we have a real opportunity for synergy with friends and colleagues from local institutions, given the strength of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst programs in translation, of the locally-based translation studies journal Metamorphoses, as well as of the American Studies Diploma Program at Smith College (a one-year graduate program exclusively for international students). But we will of course also need the help of colleagues and translators from across
the globe. To that end, we plan to announce in our upcoming issue the Jules Chametzky Prize for Literary Translation, to be awarded annually to the best poem and prose translations published within our pages. To put it as simply as possibly, our goal is to publish great writing from across the globe, from writers we haven’t yet heard of. The Voice of America has been broadcasting non-stop ever since the early days of the Cold War. MR believes that our country instead needs to sit down, take some time, and listen.

Edwin Gentzler, with Ellen Watson, has been named translation co-editor for the journal.

Please forward to interested parties. For questions please contact Jim Hicks, editor, Massachusetts Review, at jhicks@smith.edu.