Editorial
The fourteenth issue of Almost Island, bridging oceans and histories:
Aditi Machado rethinks translation as a (kind of) water-diviner’s search for the prehistoric past – and latent present – of the sentence.
Claiming neither “insider” nor “outsider”, Michael Scharf explores a horizon of the everyday beyond what used to be called the “postcolonial”: the gritty-gentle language of what it means to commit.
Jee Leong Koh demonstrates a more robust haibun, firmly planted in English language, with fiction and wonderful wit.
In excerpts from his remarkable, forthcoming Pitch Lake, Andre Bagoo salts and silts his landscape, leaving space for the thoughts to rush in.
Strobed, tantalizing glimpses from Jeffrey Yang’s next book, with poems that chart different lyrical directions, in a music that’s never less than exquisite, raising the stakes for what humble language can aspire to.
Hovering, as his work often does, in the space between collection and recollection, Arun Sagar’s “A Walk on the Ridge” – from his forthcoming second book of poems – meticulously leaves the “dust visible in a column of sunlight”.
The great Bengali modernist poet Jibanananda Das is reasonably well known in English; and
still we’re more than grateful to Souradeep Roy’s ongoing and indisputably lively translations – perhaps the best thus far – that help us look at him again, and more closely.
And finally, the work of two Indian authors who deserve a lot more attention than they received in their lifetimes:
Reshma Aquil’s poems, inward looking and austere, homing in on moments of “fragility holding up against so much energy.”
And a “lost” story from the singular imagination of Vilas Sarang, his keen eye for absurdity and existential dread here trained towards the sea, that “perfect place for ghosts and demons to materialise.”