In 2019, when we started to envision coediting a translation portfolio, Jennifer had just wrapped up editing Tzveta Sofronieva’s Multiverse: New and Selected Poems, originally written in German, Bulgarian, and English, and Shuchi was judging the National Book Award in Translated Literature. While we were considering topics, AGNI’s ninetieth issue came to print and we both read Sven Birkerts’s introductory essay, “I Write This as the Amazon Burns.” Our work together had found its focus. Birkerts writes, “Even the merely dire (what an expression!) is a prospect to be grieved. So many things will no longer exist, either at all or as we knew them. But how intensely will we mourn? . . . The prospect of collaboration is one sliver of light, but how much will that avail?” With this portfolio, we begin to ponder his questions and our own.
As coeditors, we chose to write this introduction together in the first person plural; but to do so, we needed to break apart our “sliver of light,” the “we” of our collaboration, to understand why we took translated literature as our project. Our lives and commitments have always been rich with languages beyond English. We are diasporic women living in the United States with families in Germany, India, and the Republic of Korea; and looking at our contexts as a shared experience, we embody its peculiarities in ways that diverge as well as converge. . . .