Barahm Press
Digital Folio #2
Translation as a Bridge
Barahm Press invites submissions from BIPOC diasporic writers for our next digital folio, centered on poetry in translation from any language into any language.
We are seeking unpublished translated poems that carry language across borders, generations, and geographies. We are especially drawn to work that engages migration, diaspora, memory, rupture, tenderness, and the intimate work of linguistic care. We welcome translations that feel precise, experimental, faithful, rebellious, or soft. We are curious about what happens when a poem moves from one mouth to another.
As this folio centers translation, we do not envision this as a one-time or isolated engagement with the practice. Rather, we see our relationship with translation as ongoing and evolving, one that unfolds across time, language, and community. In an ideal world, we would invite and publish work that moves between any two languages, without privileging English. At the same time, we recognize the practical limitations we hold as editors, particularly in responsibly engaging and discerning the nuances and qualities of translations across languages we may not know.
Because of this, this folio is one step in a longer inquiry. We hope to continue exploring translation as a living, relational process in future issues and projects, and to expand how we hold and support multilingual work over time.
Submissions may include:
A translated poem accompanied by the original text
A translation of a public domain poem
A contemporary translation (with documented permission from the original poet or rights holder)
A brief translator’s note reflecting on process, choice, or difficulty
We encourage submissions that hold both the original language and the translated English together on the page whenever possible. We are interested in how typography, spacing, and visual relationship between languages might create additional meaning.
Also, we will not accept translations…
“created with artificial intelligence technologies or other non-human translator…a human translator may use artificial intelligence technologies as a tool to assist in the translation, provided that the translation substantially comprises human creation and the human translator has control over, and reviews and approves, each word in the translation.”