Introduction

Sada Malumfashi / Guest Editor

The works gathered in intranslatable/untranslatable inhabit the charged spaces between languages, histories, bodies, and geographies, where what cannot be fully translated becomes precisely what must be spoken.

Across these poems and essays, language appears as wound and witness. A Korean adoptee searches for herself through the fractured recovery of a name. A Greek phrase unfolds into an entire philosophy of care and doubt. Hebrew, Arabic, French, Hungarian, Korean, Hausa, Persian, and English move through these works as living terrains marked by migration, colonialism, war, intimacy, and longing. Some writers interrogate inherited vocabularies of nationhood and violence; others dwell in the textures of family speech, maternal naming, or the failures of assimilation. Several pieces challenge English itself and stretch typography, syntax, sound, and form until language begins to reveal what it cannot comfortably contain.

If, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suggests, deconstruction shows “the text what it does not know,” these writers expose the unseen pressures inside language: the histories buried beneath ordinary words, the silences carried in translation, the political realities hidden inside grammar and pronunciation. They ask what survives when a mother tongue is lost, when names are mistranscribed, when homeland itself becomes contested language. 

To read these pieces is to encounter language at its threshold: unstable, intimate, haunted, and alive.