Introduction

Contemporary Works in Translation: A Multilingual Anthology is the first volume of the annual print journal from OOMPH! Press. Prior to this publication, we released a pamphlet for a bilingual reading at The Letters Festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Atlanta, GA (POÉTICA TRANSNACIONAL, 2014), an all-female, Spanish-language zine for Atlanta Zine Fest 2015: Girls in DIY (OOMPH! Volume 1, 2015) and a booklet for the Literature is Alive reading series at Emory University (Language is Alive, 2015). All of our collections, which are now available on our website, have featured side-by-side translations with original language texts in Spanish, French and Portuguese, written by authors from North America, South America and Europe.

In an effort to continually expand our geographic reach and widen our linguistic scope, we have curated this collection to showcase work in German, Swedish, Arabic, Hebrew and Croatian, along with the more familiar languages of Spanish, French and Portuguese. The authors are from all over, including France, Austria, Colombia, Sweden, Chile, Gaza, Israel, Argentina, Croatia and Bolivia. While most of the translators are from the United States, many of them are living outside of the country, working within the languages and cultures of the texts that they’re translating.

Whether you’re an expert in translation studies or an avid reader interested in peering into the world of non-English-language literature, we hope that this collection can serve as a small sample of the good work being done on the front lines.