An Editor’s Pride

Jumping into the Translations Editor seat for the Los Angeles Review gave me a lot to think about straight off the bat. First, I really had no idea how to tackle all of the rights and permissions involved with printing work translated by someone other than the original author. Thankfully, I had many mentors in the field with whom I could converse about such tricky matters, and was able to navigate my way through my first reading period.

My next challenge was to try to ensure that the languages I featured would extend beyond Spanish. Not very many literary magazines publish translated work anymore, and even fewer print anything other than Spanish translations. Though the bulk of submissions I receive are in this widely-used language, I desperately wanted to highlight other, less-known foreign languages. After hunting down and sending personal requests to some of my translation idols, I finally received wonderful pieces in Hebrew, Urdu, and of course, Spanish.

But one of my most favorite submissions came from a man named John Smelcer, who is the last person on this planet who can read and write in the Ahtna Athabaskan language, an indigenous language of Alaska. We printed three of John’s translations in LAR 6, much to my delight. It is truly my honor to be able to keep this beautiful language alive just a bit longer, and to leave a touch of its legacy in print through John.

Though the work of editing a literary magazine can be arduous with often very little payoff, it is through talented writers like John Smelcer that I get my reward; being able to preserve an endangered Alaskan language just by selecting a few poems for publication is easy enough for me to do, and the effects will be long-lasting. As an editor, I have a responsibility to provide the LAR readership with fine quality work, representative of a larger desire to keep a love for the written word alive. I consider this duty an honorable one, and am proud to think of myself as fulfilling this role in a way that the LAR readers will appreciate.

Translation Editor, Tanya Chernov

Please visit John’s online home for more information on his work and the Ahtna Athabaskan language at http://www.johnsmelcer.com.