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Order The OOMPH! Press Flight of Books – a discounted book bundle – to help support our mission to publish new literature written in countries around the world and encourage cross-cultural & -linguistic exchange.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Contributors

Introduction

We are proud to present OOMPH! Contemporary Works (vol. 3): A Multilingual Anthology. For those of you who have been with us from the start, you will notice some departures from our previous journals as you flip through these pages: for the first time ever, we have decided to publish not only work in translation, but original work written in English as well; we have also decided to publish not only text, but visual art and hybrid work, too.

Our larger mission as a press is to encourage cross-cultural and -linguistic exchange. In an attempt to reach this goal, we have published more than 10 texts over the past 8 years, showcasing contemporary poetry and short prose in translation from around the world. But going forward, we’ve decided that widening our scope to include original work written in English, along with visual art and hybrid work, will help us to further achieve our aim——after all, what better way to introduce an English language readership to work in translation than to serve it all up together for a feast?

If you’re reading this: thank you. For those of you who contributed work to this volume, thank you for your patience and trust; for those who have contributed work to previous OOMPH! publications, thank you for sticking around to see what we’re up to in the year 2022. We would also like to thank anyone who has collaborated with us over the years, providing us with opportunities to learn and grow.

We hope you all enjoy what’s waiting for you in these pages. If you do, we invite you to go read more by our contributors online, and also check out our catalog found in the final pages of this book.

To our readers: thank you for supporting independent press publishing.

Alex Gregor & Daniel Beauregard

Founding Editors

ANTHOLOGIES

[print & digital editions available]

Contemporary Works in Translation: A Multilingual Anthology (Vol II)

2018

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

Contemporary Works in Translation: A Multilingual Anthology (Vol I)

2016

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.

PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS

OOMPH! Press & Emory University present: 

LANGUAGE IS ALIVE

an evening of poetry & translation

A collection of side-by-side translations into English from contemporary Spanish-language authors from Argentina, Chile, Colombia & Spain (2015).

Out of print.

OOMPH! Press presents:

OOMPH! VOL 1 (ZINE)

A collection of translations into English from contemporary female authors from Argentina, Brazil, France, Mexico & Spain. Includes French, Portuguese & Spanish (2015).

Out of print.

Order The OOMPH! Press Flight of Books – a discounted book bundle – to help support our mission to publish new literature written in countries around the world and encourage cross-cultural & -linguistic exchange.