This morning the horse ranch across the way from my new home was wrapped in fog. This is something of an unusual occurrence for me these days. When I was growing up in Northern California, we often had these sorts of winter mornings—mornings when fog would settle into the valley of my little town and the air would grow so opaque that walks to school meant passing one foot blindly in front of the other, the road ahead uncertain. I don’t get that kind of scenery much now. Here in the Deep South the winter is often unnervingly warm and bright—as I write this it is nearly seventy degrees in February, and across campus flowers are already threatening to bloom.
It was amidst this unseasonable warmth that the winter issue of The Southern Review arrived at our offices. This issue is the first I have acquired material for as the new prose editor, and I’m honored and excited to share these stories and essays with all of you. The writers in this issue are all fiercely talented, some familiar, but many new to The Southern Review. I’m excited about all of them, and as a translator myself, I’m especially delighted to begin my tenure here by highlighting work in translation—something I plan to do more and more of in the future. It seems to me that the best way to help advance literature—in my mind, the lofty goal of literary magazines—is to expose ourselves to new styles, narratives, and ways of seeing. As an editor and as a reader, I think translation is perhaps the most immediate way to open ourselves to these new experiences, to increase the range of voices in our pantheon. It’s my hope that this first effort spells out my intention to do just that. It includes, for instance, a story from the Japanese writer Aoko Matsuda, an uncommon talent new to our pages. Aoko’s stories are striking to me in her unusual perspective—while reading her fiction I often find myself disoriented, suddenly looking at a thing I thought I understood from a new vantage that transforms it entirely. In this issue’s contribution, “Starry Night,” she pens a missive from the village within Van Gogh’s eponymous painting, and while the piece is filled with early morning calm and even a childlike joy, it also finishes with a moment shot through with a melody of impending loss. This is all rendered in exact and graceful translation by Polly Barton, who reads the piece for our audio gallery here.
This issue also includes Mariana Enriquez’ “The Well,” a story about curses and familial betrayal in contemporary Argentina, and the lead prose piece for this issue. Mariana’s work is both mysterious and harrowing, and this is the sort of story that kept my eyes glued to the page from start to finish. Megan McDowell translates the piece, and you’ll be able to read her thoughts on the story—and the process of translation—in our “A Writer’s Insight” interview series later this winter.
This only marks the beginning of our travels. In this issue alone, our globetrotting continues with work from Polish poet Krystyna Dąbrowska as translated by Karen Kovacik, Chloe Honum’s poetry about her native New Zealand, and Dennis James Sweeney’s investigation into the collapse of a beloved Maltese landmark, before finally settling in the American West with Joshua Wheeler’s “The Troubling of Hummingbirds”—an essay in the very fun form of a time-traveling letter to Billy the Kid. You can listen to Josh read from his piece for the audio gallery, too, in addition to readings from poets Jeanne Foster and Orlando Ricardo Menes, emerging writer Celia Bell, and many more.
The rest of this year already promises to be a busy one. The spring and summer issues are well underway, and the itinerary is hefty. More stories, poems, and essays will soon take us to Thailand, Russia, and Iraq. Others will return us to Argentina, to Japan, and across America—to New England and the South and California and more. It should make for a good trip, even as at this moment we continue to put one foot in front of the other. I hope you’ll come along with us.
— Sacha Idell, Coeditor and Prose Editor