310.1 Spring 2025

Table of Contents

FROM THE EDITORS

Al Vi, ho potenca senkorpa Mistero,
Fortego, la mondon reganta,
Al Vi, granda fonto de l’amo kaj vero
Kaj fonto de l’vivo konstanta,
Al Vi, kiun ĉiu malsame prezentas,
Sed ĉiu egale en koro Vin sentas,—
Al Vi, kiu kreas, al Vi, kiu reĝas,
Ni preĝas.

L. L. Zamenhof, “Preĝo sub la Verda Standardo,” 
North American Review, January 1907

The origin of the current rise of authoritarian nationalism and the erosion of liberal democracy in the United States can be traced to the global financial crisis of 2008. Or maybe the election of our first Black president. Or maybe growing income inequality. Or maybe federal deregulation. Or maybe cable news. Or maybe social media. Or maybe—or maybe you get the point. It’s complicated. And not unprecedented. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward, well, just us. Democratic backsliding is baked into the American Pie, from 1619 to slavery to Jim Crow to Shelby County v. Holder. (Stay tuned.) In fact, according to Zack Beauchamp, it’s one of our major global exports to far-flung places like Brazil, Hungary, and India. In his book The Reactionary Spirit (2024) he describes a distinctly American flavor of authoritarianism seasoned with democratic spices. Today’s populist demagogues always wear the mask of democracy. They don’t say elections are bad. They say elections are rigged, until, of course, they win. And when they do—and they do—they claim a mandate to continue undermining the rights of the people. It’s the American Way.

What to do? Tracing historical origins is a good start, necessary but not sufficient. Too often, we gaze upon phenomena of the past, hands on hips, self-satisfied, thinking our vision is 20/20 when actually it’s blinkered. Instead, as Robin D. G. Kelley invites us to do in his landmark study Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002), recently reissued by Beacon Press, we should envision the horizons of the past, try to see through the eyes of our activist forebears, to ask what futures they were imagining as they confronted oppression and exploitation. Then, from our present vantage we can dream toward new futures, not only to combat corruption and injustice, but also—deadliest of all—cynicism and despair. In this battle we must learn to wield a very specific, very powerful weapon, often belittled if not wholly dismissed: utopian thinking—not the kind of gritty, on-the-ground action that is also required to effect social change, but the radically open, impossibly beautiful, desperately visionary imagining that writers and artists happen to be particularly well prepared to contribute to the cause, however starry-eyed they might seem.

One such utopian dreamer was Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof. Born in 1859 into the Yiddish-speaking Jewish minority of Białystok near the border with the Russian Empire, Zamenhof grew up observing conflicts that would emerge between those who spoke different languages (Belarusian, German, Polish, Russian). If only they could understand one another, he thought, there would be peace. In 1887, to bridge these linguistic gaps, Zamenhof devised what has become the most successful artificially constructed language ever created: Esperanto.

In 1906 George Harvey, editor of the North American Review from 1899 until 1926, announced his enthusastic endorsement of Esperanto as an efficient tool to facilitate “business, travel, and communication.” Harvey advertised the NAR’s Esperanto Society in the magazine, published grammar lessons and exercises, and introduced a monthly Esperanto Notes department. In 1907, he invited Lamenhof himself to explain: “What is Esperanto?” “Esperanto is a neutral language,” he wrote, “extraordinarily easy to learn, the property of no particular nation, but belonging with equal right to the whole world.” Despite the practical benefits of the language Harvey touted, Lamenhof’s truest aims were utopian as he envisioned a future of world peace: “Esperanto is, and will always remain, the language of freedom, neutrality and international justice.”

The twentieth century, sadly, did not deliver.

Nor did Esperanto, which has never achieved its promise of international solidarity (despite an uptick in interest during the Internet Age). Critics point to the Eurocentrism and sexist grammatical constructs of the language, perhaps unfairly, but it was never going to catch on in the first place because Esperanto is not a living language. There is no culture, no dialect, no evolution. Even so, one can admire the boldness of Lamenhof’s idealism and “the spirit of universal brotherhood” at the heart of the Esperanto project.

In the meantime, let us more loudly recognize and honor the vital work of translators today, who may not offer a universal language but still connect people across national, cultural, and linguistic differences. We might as well start with Wendy Call, who has curated a trilingual folio in these pages of translations from the Didxaza (Isthmus Zapotec) into Spanish and English of six Binniza poets spanning five decades: Claudia Guerra, Macario Matus, Irma Pineda, Esteban Rios Cruz, Natalia Toledo, and Paula Ya Lopez. As Call explains in her introduction, the publication of these translations “pushes back against [the] forced extinction” of a language variant that only a hundred thousand people speak, representing a “new chapter to the Zapotec culture’s 2,500-year written history.”

Much of the prose in this issue is similarly preoccupied with language and translation: Ecuadoran writer Daniela Alcivar Bellolio’s evocative short story “Balcony on the Sea,” translated from the Spanish by Jack Rockwell, takes us in and out of dream. In an excerpt from her memoir, Moroccan writer Itto Outini takes refuge in learning English at American Language Centres in Meknes and Rabat: “English consumes all that crosses its path, swallows technologies, digests new ideas, bears traces of myriad peoples and cultures millennia old.” A man in Ben Charles Rhodes’s “Fox Tossing” defends his dead mother’s scholarly reputation against accusations that she plagiarized translated material. In Pete Stevens’s short story “The Definition of Sonder” an English language tutor attempts to track down the meaning of an invented word, eventually finding it listed in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Similarly, in her essay “Nostalgic Objects: A Personal Index, a Tracing of Affects” Madeline Spivey describes the range of meanings and emotions related to the word plunch, which she and her sister invented as children: “We made it up to describe certain objects, creating a category we hadn’t known otherwise.”

Among the finalists for the 2025 James Hearst Poetry Prize is more than one poem attentive to translation. The poet in Lisa Rosinsky’s “Midrash of the Snake” is “not from a map, I’m from a language … / I’m from any language I can feed / my tongue.” The woman in Ja’net Danielo’s “The Historical Present” remembers her body before a masectomy: “breast, bone, / the machine of me that has lived / to translate each moment into / bird or star, which, in Latin / means I make of it a metaphor.” This year’s winning poem was selected by the inimitable Stephanie Burt, who we are also thrilled to welcome to the NAR masthead as a new contributing editor: “Out of Office Reply” by Kelly Rowe, renders a nuanced scene of linguistic disconnection at a port of entry: “When the cat scratching in the courtyard speaks / more fluently than you. When the clerk can’t find / your name on her list; when you have no fingerprints … / and the smile that in your own / lost country proves that you exist.”

We don’t live in a utopia. We live in a world where too many people must still prove that they exist. The epigraph above comes from Zamenhof’s Esperanto “Prayer under the Green Banner,” addressed to the “incorporeal mystery” and “great source of love and truth … whom all people present differently … but sense alike in their hearts,” a vision of diversity and unity we can still seek out today. You don’t have to learn Esperanto to be an Esperantist, derived as it is from the Latin sperare, meaning “one who hopes.” ⬤