Letter from the Editor: Issue 25
April 12, 2025
I write to you about our Machines issue from a moment in which my own relationship with technology is deeply enmeshed in news of the construction and deployment of weapons against our most vulnerable, and a daily fear of increased state surveillance impacting my communities. In the wake of ICE’s abduction of activist Mahmoud Khalil, and in the midst of a mass wave of kidnapping and deportation of students across the U.S., I ask: in what ways are we—our bodies, voices, even our abilities to imagine—entangled in machines that make possible the visceral pressures of systems of power, and the transformation of life and death on the ground? I think that any archive of translations can itself become a machine, one which carries with it relations that exist between author, translator, and reader. As I read through the contributions to this issue, I was moved and challenged by the myriad ways machines translate knowledge differently depending on who controls the machines, and by the ways they reflect the violence of our own systems of power right back to us. I think of Salar Mameni’s writing on the scientific community’s failure to differentiate those who produced and enabled the Anthropocene from those who continue to be impacted by the waste, exhaust and destruction of life as results of dispossession, colonialism and warfare (i.). Mameni writes, “Some were building weapons while others were dying or surviving their explosions… Such disparities in the environment were the result of different histories of power and domination, different stories of the cosmos and different imaginings of being human” (14). The machines around us impact us differently, depending on our proximities to empire, they write different stories, they mark and map land and water ways; they extract and bomb them. Many machines ascribe humanness according to their understandings of humanness, which are deeply bound in the Eurowestern image and story. In the case of social media, they determine who can continue speaking; and whose online life can swiftly be denied and/or surveilled.
Still, to write about the denial of life without writing about resistance and refusal to be silenced produces yet another layer of erasure, another obstacle in the ongoing process of translation. Perhaps a fruitful reading of the machine turn in translation requires, as Mameni offers, a decentering of dominant “stories of the cosmos” and dominant ways of conceiving of “machines.” In other words, the resistance carries with it a set of machines, worlds of knowledge, and makes its own translations. I recall, now, Cecilia Vicuña’s discussion of the agency of language—language wants to continue beyond the parameters of its body/vehicle, in the same way wax moves between bees: a bee chews a piece of wax then passes it along to another bee who chews it, and that is how it becomes honey (ii.). This is to say, while putting together this issue, I was pushed to think of the ways language carries its own agency, despite (and perhaps even through) the machine and beings who machine.
Technologies of empire have been challenged in tangible ways, from the destruction of carceral apparata to the occupation of corporate infrastructure that prioritizes profit over people. The translations in this issue speak to this repertoire of resistance tactics, beginning with Ruha Nasheeta’s depiction of Rachel Corrie, an American activist who placed her own body in front of Samir Nasrallah’s home in Rafah in 2003, and was murdered by an IDF soldier operating a Caterpillar D9R. “Alt text: Woman standing in front of bulldozer wearing orange jacket and carrying bullhorn” draws attention to the U.S. manufacturer Caterpillar Inc. (CAT), critiquing the U.S.’s ongoing production and shipment of weapons used in the Israeli occupation of Rafah and Palestine at large.
Across this collection, translators also show us practices of care and love in translation that diverge entirely from empire’s machines. Svetlana Cârstean’s translation from the Romanian, of an excerpt from Claudia Serea’s I Am Another rejects the idea that empathy, or inhabiting another’s point of view, can create change—“to find sadness is not an act of bravery / to say, How sad, is not a contribution.” Serea’s work centers the speaker’s relationship with place not through nationhood or the war that unfolds on the street, but through the speaker’s senses: “my country is itself / a country / for which I don’t raise any flag / I only inhale / its air and / the mixed scent of tanner sumac and nettles.”
Omama Zaier’s “Scissors” too shapes a world by taking a pair of scissors to cloth. Zaier’s speaker—gendered as woman—cathartically creates her own narrative by cutting not just fabric but “the poet’s dream, his tongue, and his fingers” and restructures time itself to make space for her story. While the poem can certainly be read as an extended metaphor, a more literal reading fills us with hope for a tangible cutting up of dominant narratives. And A Hua’s poetry, translated by Xuelan Su, reflects on the nonhuman relationship to machines of so-called “progress” which uproot both human and nonhuman worlds. Hua pushes back against the erasure of wetland egrets through insistent repetition, “Now an interstate’s built there. Each waterway / Nibbled to nothing. The scarlet seep weeds and reeds of the marsh / Are also no more. Those white egrets are really gone. / They’re really gone. Those who leapt and played / with nimble grace. / They’re really gone.”
Other works in this issue challenge the machinery of translation itself. Lyra and David Montoya use translation to speculate on a journal their grandmother Emiko kept during “a return visit to Japan for her mother’s funeral in 1982.” The Montoyas write in their translator’s note that “Emiko chose to write this journal in English” in order to connect and communicate with her family, and that their “attempt to translate this journal into Japanese is a similar attempt to connect and communicate back with her.” The translators’ “fictive retranslation” of Emiko’s carefully calculated funeral expense ledger and experience laying down her mother’s ashes, operates through love and connection rather than transmission of information, resisting systems of translation that can be easily archived under national, linguistic, or “diasporic” categories. The translators write, “We knowingly present an anachronistic translation of her diary as we are incapable of doing otherwise”—What exists within this “incapability”? In what ways can incapability, or negative capability in translation, be protective and caring in a way that capability is not? I continue to sit with these questions.
Similarly, Fiona Martinez’s auto-translation, “To put straight the long-lingering sunshine” disrupts the dominance of clarity in translation. The original poem undergoes several layers of transmutation, from handwriting to photography, across text and image. Martinez writes, “I, on the ceiling, find my sky has north limit, / but use it sparryly anyway,” not only translating language, but also the flaws of language. The multimedia project lays bare movement more than meaning, often engaging with words that become unrecognizable or illegible in transit, and thus resist capture in this way.
And Leo Grossman asks whether machine translation can ever even begin to convey liberation. He writes about the connection between genocide and the erasure of imagined liberation in “Refrain,” a back and forth between translator and OpenAI’s image generation program. Grossman writes, “I feed OpenAI… the following prompt: ‘imagine Jabalia camp liberated.’ And the machine produces a black and white image of a Jabalia camp destroyed by Israeli occupation, in ruins. Later, he criticizes the machine’s extraction of Palestinian nature imagery, which takes place alongside the extraction settlers carry out on the ground.
Other pieces across this collection interpret machines as systems of power which contain people within normative structures. The anonymously translated excerpts from (Dis)orientation Zine share the university’s role in perpetuating the militarized carceral state, and ask important questions such as “What can translation add to or reveal about the shared goals of abolishing the prison, the state, and the university?” The translations relay the riot police’s violent raid of the May 2024 student encampment that called for UCSD’s divestment from the genocide of Palestinians, as well as the university’s abduction, detention and deportation of students and participation in the crimmigration system at large.
And visual arts series OnlyGANS by Jacob Riddle questions the social machines of gender, sexuality, and race, and the representation of the “normal” human body through images created by generative adversarial networks (GAN) trained on NSFW subreddits. While each piece is an amalgamation of images and body parts—a distortion, or collage, of the ‘perfect’ body—what exactly distinguishes them from “normal nudes”? Is it their collectivity? Their multiplicity? Their physical proximity to us? Riddle’s work challenges normative structures which cast some nude bodies as “normal” and others as “strange” and how these norms move between digital media and our daily lives.
Meanwhile, “push push gator,” a short film by diablo pollo and julcia cotsco speaks to the dailiness of machines which produce capital at the expense of human life. julcia cotsco translated phrases diablo pollo wanted translated into English while they worked at a traveling fair in the U.S.. The film is simultaneously a conversation, a dictionary, and a record of labor and exploitation (“in this photo, he’s putting together one of the parts of a ride, a few weeks later that same piece would fall and break his head”). The speaker’s voice in the film is layered, words overlapping, “Do you need help / You need to push harder / Do you need help with the buckle? / Push / Push / You need to push a little harder.” The mundane tasks of working at a fair are layered over the violence of machines which put pressure on human bodies to assemble and disassemble them. We move between images of fairground rides, cash held in the hands, a discarded cup labeled “CASH Express Loans,” all of which culminate in a cathartic car ride, a driving away in the night yelling “viva Mexico!” followed by laughter. All the while, diablo pollo holds agency over what is translated, and why it is translated, and these memories are preserved in the face of capitalist exploitation.
The curation of this issue was difficult in that engaging with machines and machineries of translation reminds us of how delicate, and powerful our relationship with our communities are; that how we translate, our intentions, and our attention to the relationships that the movement of language brings, can shape structures of knowledge on the ground, in real time. This issue would not have been possible without fellow editors Reem Hazboun Taşyakan, Bahar Abdi, Fiona Martinez, Kimaya Kulkarni, Julia Kott, Barışcan Özkuzey, Vyxz Vasquez, and Camille Uglow. I would also like to thank our faculty advisory board members, and the language-specific editors for this issue, Andrea Mendoza, Ping Zhu and Géraldine Fiss. And finally, I would like to express my appreciation for our faculty director, Amelia Glaser, for her dedication to preserving this journal and to making translation accessible to students and translators across global communities. As always, and in the spirit of an issue that relishes in the process, rather than progress, I know I will continue to learn from all the writers, artists and translators in this space.
In solidarity,
Nilufar Karimi
References
(i.) Mameni, Salar. Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics, Duke University Press (2023).
(ii.) Vicuña, Cecilia and David Naimon. “Cecilia Vicuña: Deer Book.” Between the Covers: Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry, Tin House Books (2024).