Letter from the Editor, Issue 27

30 October 2026.

I write this from Pune. I have lived here too long without knowing the type of soil under my feet. It’s mostly weathered Deccan basalt rock. I have lived too long in this apartment without knowing the name of the tree that I see outside my window. It’s a type of guava. Learning a name is only one way of knowing something.

There are other types of knowing, of course. Like Qabbani ‘knows’ Damascus in Taşyakan’s translation, through the city’s specificities, its corner doves— “I enter the courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque / greeting all those who cross my path, / corner to corner, tile upon tile, dove after dove.” Or like the poem translated by Brancaleoni where Montale ‘knows’ the quotidian environmental facticity through the evental space of a strike— “I wonder what will become of production. / Even spring is somewhat late in being produced.” And the knowing doubles and recedes and deepens and walks peripheral. In Fauzi’s self-translation of connected microfictions, for example, the corporate office becomes a space of ecological exploration— “A Human Resources Manager resigns from being human. Because his application for sick leave was not approved.” fatima abby tall imagines the dimension of the textual coexisting with the graphic, mixes the computerised image with the cellular and the oceanic in her visual translation; and Ana Villalpando brings it back to the corporeal, human and ecological, evoking the overlaps of experience between human subjectivity and a geological one. The knowing arrives, unfolds and illuminates through the process of comparison, dialectic and translation. Ayar translates Müldür’s poem that echoes Abelard and Heloise and creates atmospheric spaces blurring the mythic and the real— “still as a water-lily…Heloise… / when a light beaming from her violet eyes / bound her to her past, / the room was soldered with seven sapphire sigils.” Suttee translates Mandi’s fantastical tale that explores the relationship between myths and natural wonders through the lens of the love between a warrior and a witch— “Zusgape handed the woman the binoculars so she could observe the Eridanus. Etched into the towering hull of the ship was an astonishing image: the Bahamut—a bull with five hundred eyes. Its green eye performed photosynthesis, made oxygen for the world. The blue eye rained. The red eye made blood.”

Each translation in this issue gives us a different way of knowing ecologies.

I know the bird well even if I don’t know its name. I would have seen the tree grow even if I had not looked up its name. Addressing by name is a practice of politeness. But my country is not a land of politeness. We believe in overfamiliarity, intimacy and an appalling lack of regulation.

As I write this, the Raigad forest is being felled without due permits and notices. So are all the gliricidia on Vetal tekdi without any promise or guarantee of when the native replacements will be planted. To prioritise hydropower projects and other ventures that are seemingly necessary for citizen welfare, the inherent citizenship and rights of ecologies is repeatedly neglected and thwarted.

At a reading held in Libélula Books in San Diego last year, poet Alexis N. Garcia, mentioned the importance of imagining futures that carry our values of love, communion, peace. The poet reminded us that the technocrats and fascist leaders are not putting any barriers on what they are imagining for this world and that therefore we too must imagine, without restraint and with fierceness, what we want for this world.

It becomes crucial to indulge in and create ecological imaginaries in order to examine the times we live in and develop a future to go towards. It is the stuff of time travel, magic, politics, translation, and requires a courageous overcoming of nihilism to take part in something that is not about the current moment or the individual life.

As my second and last issue of Alchemy as Editor-in-Chief, I cannot help but read a thread of love and longing through all the different translations that make this issue. The fact of the existence of these original works and the fact of the existence of their translations, both speak to an underlying undeniable love for the world and a desire to know it and save it, politely or intimately.

My heartfelt thanks to the editorial team—Bahar Abdi, Camellia Azzi, Camille Uglow, and Fiona Martinez, translator consultants—Adriana Nordin Manan, Ana Martins, Baris Ozkuzey, Baris Tasyakan and Professor Jody Blanco, and thank you to Professor Amelia Glaser and the Board of Editors for their support.

It has been my honour to work on this issue and the previous one and it is my pleasure to welcome my friend and colleague, Bahar Abdi, as the next Editor in Chief of Alchemy.

May none of our forests be felled. May our anxieties give us the strength to fulfil our wildering imaginations for our future.
Warmly,
Kimaya Kulkarni