The Literary Review: Babel Fish (digital)

For those who aren’t familiar with Douglas Adams’s 1979 novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (originally conceived as a radio play for the BBC), a babel fish is a universal translator in the form of a small fish that you stick in your ear. This issue of TLR pays tribute to "difference" as meaning and "understanding" as art. Like a good fish, we translate: there are nine new translations here from seven different languages. Each, by the nature of its existence, is a defiance of language as an obstacle, the endurance of human experience as a common tongue, and a celebration of English’s vast capacity for inclusion. Love and romance splay, artfully and elusively, across these pages. History, old poems, and dead writers braid forward sinuously into the present. There is so much searching, which is what art can and must do. Here we offer a gift of alternatives to complicate, dismantle, and simplify the status quo.