My senior year English teacher showed me the wrong movie directed by Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon. While Rashomon, a 1950 Academy Award-winning psychological classic, may bea well-assembled masterpiece that slowly reveals itself as a meditation on perspective and ultimate truth—for an insecure 17-year-old whose favorite movie was (is) Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Rashomon was a dreary, one-note, strangely acted “snooze-fest” that lacked relatability to the world I was living in.

I pricked her lips with the pin
she remained anesthetized
sleeping at my father’s side

In high school, he was one of three linebackers. All three wore good names on their backs. Sword. Seabolt. King. Strong side. Middle. Weak. Being part of a triumvirate meant something to him. They didn’t win all their games but were second in the state of Texas senior year. He got an offer to play in college—a D3 in Kansas, but still.

On a gloomy spring evening, only one chicken returned home on schedule. No need to count heads. At this point, we had just three left, the others picked off one at a time like an Agatha Christie novel. I kept calling out in my usual way.

The images in the Rolling Junkyard Series are composed by manually layering 35mm color slide film of materials found at recycling collection facilities in the South Korean countryside. Using this method, the overexposed areas of the film are then brought into proper density, and the underexposed areas create super-dense areas of color. Thus, the majority of the frames used in the project would be otherwise considered “mistakes” prior to layering

The roadside marquee caught my eye in the summer of 1979. With its black silhouette of tiny legs kicked up, it promised a break from responsibilities engulfing me. At 26, I’d recently ended a marriage launched just days after passing my driver’s license test at 16. Although by now I was a mother of two young sons, the boys had recently decided to live with their father for a while. Suddenly, a newfound sense of possibilities shimmered around the edges of my swamp of anger at an unfaithful husband yoked to a pervasive sorrow over an end to my happily-ever-after dream.

Chancey learned about the missing neighbor girl from the flyers stuffed in her mailbox. They were written in the kind of English she understood best: basic, with pictures. The girl’s name was Amal; she’d recently turned six; and, in the up-close photo, Chancey made out thick, dark eyelashes that framed enormous brown eyes. She stuck the flyer to her family’s refrigerator.

“She thought of people she had seen holding hands in movies, and why shouldn’t she and Carol?” This question, from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian romance The Price of Salt, is related from the perspective of Therese, a shopgirl and aspiring set designer who has fallen in love with the wealthy, mysterious Carol. Nearly seven decades and a social revolution later, a similar question is posed in Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed, as the novel’s narrator, Rachel, sits in a Los Angeles movie theater with her love interest, Miriam. “What about holding hands in a movie theater? Can girls hold hands in a movie theater?” Rachel asks, probing, in bad faith, the strictures of Miriam’s Orthodox Jewish religion. After an agonizingly long pause, Miriam says yes, and what follows is a sequence of actions so libidinally charged that it leaves Rachel physically sick with desire.

So much of art, if not all of it, is about love. Every movie with their lovestruck leads. Each song’s lyrical strings stemming from the heart. It is a subject as predictable as it is inevitable, especially in poetry, an artform delineated by roses that are red and comparisons to summer days. Any attempt to avoid love, be it through loneliness, politics, or an appeal to the metaphysical, finds its way back inside a speaker, a desire. In this era of rapid innovation, where difference is valued above deference, love will always thwart our attempt to quantify the ineffable— those moments that, when experienced, leave no specific conscious impression, but instead, a sensation, a feeling that lingers with us forever.

On November 2, on the eve of the 2020 Presidential Election, a tweet went viral. It was a picture of the electoral map, noting each state’s obtainable votes—though rather than shaded red or blue, they were all colored a light teal, overlaid with a photo of Fred Melamed from the film A Serious Man, flashing his quixotic grin. The caption read: “And the winner is…Sy Ableman???”

Sylvia Gindick, online poetry editor at the Columbia Journal, spoke with Spring Contest poetry judge, Hanif Addurraqib, to discuss exploratory practices of baking and poetry, the complications of memory and place, the responsibility of the witness, and a writer’s relationship to trust. Abdurraqib, a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio, is the award-winning and bestselling author of The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry 2016), Vintage Sadness (Big Lucks 2017), They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio 2017), Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas press 2019), and A Fortune For Your Disaster (Tin House 2019). In March 2021, he will release the book A Little Devil In America with Random House.

How can we look at translation as art? How can a translator develop their own relationship and mode of translation based on their aspirations? What can translation simultaneously encompass and transcend?

I knew that my fatherless happiness wouldn’t last, but I never understood why my mother chose Igor Borisovich over her other suitors. Anyone—anyone at all would have been better. Gena had his own car, Oleg wrote poetry and Misha brought me a doll in a blue satin dress from East Germany. But aside from providing little joys to brighten our 1980s Soviet existence, all those men seemed much kinder than my new stepfather.

When there was nothing else they could do and Dad was discharged, I thanked the doctors with a weak handshake. Then I went downstairs to the hospital cafeteria and stuffed my face with two servings of ravioli with tomato sauce. Mom came down a bit later and ordered a coffee, which she stirred with a spoon for what seemed like an eternity. She drank the coffee cold in a single gulp, and while signaling the waiter for the bill, she asked me to take care of the transfer arrangements. She was beyond handling things.

My mother speaks for me. I nod along as she recounts the twisted history of my illness, too weak to correct her when she trips over a detail. “I’m a doctor,” she declares, and physicians pay heed. They answer her litany of questions, tolerate the shrill panic in her voice. My mother is a medical professional, and this is my golden ticket—the only thing that will save me. I’m one of the lucky ones. Some people wait years, decades, hundreds of thousands of dollars before they arrive at a diagnosis of Lyme Disease. Mine came easy: a week after the pink rashes that colonized my skin, a variant of the classic bull’s eye. Treatment was supposed to last four weeks.

Laura opened the kitchen cupboards and threw pots and pans across the room. She dropped plants into garbage cans. In the living room she pulled drawers and dumped ballpoint pens, electrical cords, and dead batteries onto the floor. She wandered through the rooms examining things, tossing them aside. In the bedroom she opened the closet, where sweaters, T-shirts, pants, skirts, and jeans were packed together on hangers. She tugged at a blouse and all the clothes together flexed toward her and away, as if some great creature, startled to life, had begun to breathe. A shoebox at the corner of the upper shelf caught her attention. Inside, she found the bag.

Tiffany Troy, Translation Assistant Editor for Columbia Journal, spoke with poet and novelist, Joseph Fasano, to discuss world building, archetypes, and craft in A Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020). His debut novel features a man’s obsessive journey into the wilderness to confront his childhood, fatherhood, love, and belonging in the mythos. Fasano is an award-winning poet and the founder of the Poem for You series, an open space where wordsmiths join to recite their favorite poems. Twitter/ Instagram. He teaches at Manhattanville College and Columbia University.

A book. An answer. A person. A moon. Some of mine
Something of mine, mine a rhythm
Rhythm and ritual

Dad, in his white undershirt and gym shorts, asked to speak with me one night. I didn’t think much of this; he often wished me goodnight with an “I love you” and a “sweet dreams” sprinkled in for good measure. But when he entered the bedroom and closed the door behind him, my heart dropped—he never closed the door. I knew what this was about.

On January 24, 2021, Word Up Community Bookshop/Librería Comunitaria in Washington Heights hosted an open conversation about the nuts and bolts of translation contract negotiation and the critical importance of finding a community with translators Julia Sanches, and Umair Kazi ’16 (Fiction). Writer, translator, Word Up volunteer and Columbia alumna Daniella Gitlin ’12 (Nonfiction) moderated the event. Kianny Antigua and Dominican Writers Association founder Angela Abreu also participated in the conversation.