A Letter from the Editors

We are ecstatic to publish our second volume of OOMPH! Contemporary Works in Translation: A Multilingual Anthology. This year’s collection showcases work translated from Italian, French, and Spanish, with authors from Italy, Switzerland, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Canada, Morocco, and the United States. This year’s submissions arrived from Belgium, Switzerland, France, Italy, the United States, and Germany, among other countries in the Americas and Europe. Although our linguistic scope may be slight compared to Volume I, we believe what this volume lacks in breadth has been gained in depth.

In these pages you will find works of poetry and short prose appearing in their original language and in English. Since our beginning, we have been committed to publishing every piece that we select in a bilingual, side-by-side format, so that the reader can engage with the translation as much as possible. With the original on the left and the translation on the right, one can simply “cross the gutter” to compare the words in their native language to those presented by the translator. This, we believe, for many reasons, is crucial to developing a deeper understanding of an author and their work; for no language exists in a vacuum, and no translation can be either objectively or completely accurate, either in its form or its meaning. A multilingual approach, then, provides readers with the opportunity to follow the movement between languages and cultures, similar to the processes used by the translators themselves. It is this implicit potential for exchange, which lies in engaging with languages and cultures other than one’s own, that embodies the OOMPH! mission and philosophy of translation, detailed in the following section.

It is with great pleasure that we present to you OOMPH! Contemporary Works in Translation: A Multilingual Anthology Vol II. As you make your way through its pages, we encourage you to treat the space that separates the work from its translation as a river dividing a city in two, a mountain range partitioning a country into regions, an ocean lying between continents—and forge that river, cross those mountains, and sail across the waters, to hear the voices on the other side.

Thank you for supporting small press publishing and literature in translation.

Alex Gregor & Daniel Beauregard
Founding Editors