Transitions

The autumn issue'Transitions' will be co-edited by David and Helen Constantine, and new Editor, Sasha Dugdale. So in that obvious sense the issue will be transitional.

It will also feature contributions which will address the whole concept of transition in as many ways as possible.

First as it might be applied to the theory and practice of translation itself, the going across from one language and from one text to another, from native to foreign, to and fro.

Some translators actually strive to make their translation a thing in transition, partaking of both worlds and hovering between the foreign and the native.

Many feel translations to be always 'transitional', since most (unlike the texts being translated) date quickly, and have to be done again for new readers coming along in successive generations.

More widely: if, as Heraclitus thought, 'eveything moves and flows', no writing true to life can desire fixity, let alone achieve it; and some poets have made a virtue of the fact that everything is in flux.

The translations themselves may be the demonstration, the process. This volume celebrates movement, flux, change, the eternal (and hopeful) possibility of moving on out of forms and ways of thinking that have lost their liberating and enlivening force, and into new ones, that will work.

By its very diversity MPT always has acted against set minds. 'Transitions' will be proof and promise that we always shall.