Letter from the Editor, Issue 26

February 17, 2026

Dear Readers,

What then is the translator’s gaze? Where does it look with its innate I/eye? How does it perceive? Incapable of turning the I/eye away from the intricacies/छटा and the minutiae/बारकावे, the translator pursues or courts the liquidness of meaning-making.  

The gaze is extra-corporeal and extra-visual, meaning it is not dependent on actual vision. It hinges itself more significantly on attitudes, biases, conditioning, perceptions. Its locus is more the cognition or the conceptual “I” than the actual bodily “eye.” 

This issue opens with Paloma Chen’s Nihao, translated from the Spanish by Julia Conner—“It’s not enough that I have your face, mamá, / no, it’s not / enough”— and we immediately enter a world of mis-perceptions that can mark childhood experiences of biraciality. 

The elusiveness of perception is further complicated through the auditory in a bomb-torn world in Blocks by Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo, translated from Tagalog by Tilde Acuña—“I don’t hear faraway bombs / where the girl doesn’t hear / for almost two days the father and child / under the rubble.”

In Eduardo Talero’s Matinal, translated from the Spanish by Tomás Mesples, the reality and dream of a working class old man is presented from the narrator’s gaze in a troubled dichotomy of socio-political possibilities— “Was that old worker, at that very moment, not a sovereign in his own right?” and later, “So the old worker was merely a sovereign in partibus. His kingdom was still found in dreams.”

Two of Krysta Lee Frost’s poems from her collection, Attachment Theory, translated from the English into Tagalog, by Natalie Pacannuayan, bring the subjective self under poetic introspection— “ginuguhò ko ang akó na nililikhâ ko at ang akó na
hinuhúbog mo” and “hanggáng sa siyémpre áking // ibunyág na kung síno akó ay siyáng akó mulâ noón pa man.”

Alejandra Pizarnik’s Ways about the Mirror, translated from the Spanish by Max Schiewe-Weliky, begins with the line—“And above all, look on with innocence. As if nothing happened, which is true”—positing the gaze foremost as a verb, the acts of looking, remembering and covering becoming synthesised within memory and the repetition of walking past reflections.

In When that fog lifts, it’ll become clear by Jitka Bret Srbová, translated from the Czech by Stephan Delbos, the nostalgia of a post-apocalyptic future harmonises the natural word into its imaginaries—“I’ll dare first, I’ll be a stream in the spring thaw / I’ll touch my claws to earth, // I’ll find out whether after this winter / we’ll return.”

Finally, “¿qué agua nos retiene la respiración? what water holds our breath?” a visual translation of Nilufar Karimi’s words by Ana Villalpando, bookends the issue and brings the watery liquidness of perception in focus, the blurred viscosity of the word and the subdued light of meaning making visible only the question it poses.

This issue has been curated and edited with care, patience and loving labour by Bariscan Ozkuzey, Camellia Azzi, Fiona Martinez, Julia Kott, Nilufar Karimi, Reem Tasyakan, and Vyxz Vasquez; with curation support from Bahar Abdi and Camille Uglow, translation counsel from Yasmín Rojas and Anastasia Burlachuk, and invaluable guidance and support from Dr Amelia Glaser and the Board of Editors. 

Chairing this issue as Chief Editor of Alchemy has given me the opportunity to bathe in language, swim in the third space created by translation, drown, without exaggeration, in magic, and be in literary kinship with the translators who are featured in and have worked on this issue. I am definitively grateful.

Thank you, readers, for looking discerningly with us. 

Perceivingly,
Kimaya Kulkarni