About Strange Harbors

We tell ourselves it's universal, storytelling. It is—except what it is a storyteller tells isn't always and everywhere the same thing. Reading stories in translation, one soon begins to wonder, "What is a story?"

One might as well ask, "What is love?" We think it universal. We think we know what others mean when they use the word. But reading translated stories about love, who can keep from asking, "Can this be love, the thing the story—if it is a story—talks about?"

We concede we do not always understand ideas. What makes us think we understand emotions any better?

So we take ship in a vessel refitted in English to some strange harbor, where we might learn, at last, the answers to such questions. We never do, of course. And we journey on to the next harbor and the next, grateful to the shipwrights who have made our hopeless voyage possible.

—John Biguenet

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Strange Harbors, indeed! I'm delighted with my coeditor John Biguenet's discovery of this theme in the submissions. My experience of reading through each and every poem in this volume, as well as so many that could not be accommodated because of space constraints, was like sailing into many strange new ports of call—acquainting myself visually and then viscerally with the unfamiliar but fetching and passing strange new forms, outlines, smells, sounds, and colors. Good mystery resonates throughout each of these poems—questions that will never be answered but whose explanations are not, finally, necessary, because the substance of each poem in English is so well-crafted and profoundly alluring. Of course most of us will never really hear or understand the full spectrum of these poems' conversations with the literature of their homelands, unless we are perfectly bi-lingual ourselves and completely familiar with the development of their cultures, but we are compensated for that lack by the fragrance and texture of the new skins in which these translations live in English. The width and depth of experience here is also a great gift—these are poems that could never have been written first in English, as their necessities so clearly reside in the soil and local waters of their native cultures. I was struck by the ubiquity of water here, in the form of rain, rivers, shores, and I felt it a great privilege to travel these roads and waterways, and I hope you derive as much pleasure from these many voices from the far corners and harbors of the world. They're brave and new and full of surprises, and never, finally, foreign.

—Sidney Wade