Tamil Terrains
poems. translations. reflections
edited by Nedra Rodrigo & Geetha Sukumaran
poetry | translation | Tamil
trace: translating [x] series
What happens when a two-thousand-year-old language, rooted in a classical poetics of land, is moved, along with its peoples, through colonial and postcolonial upheavals, war and forced or voluntary migrations?
Questioning traditional concepts of time, place, labour, love, purity and gender, this prismatic collection of poems, translations and transcreations draws connections between ancient Sangam landscapes and North America’s Indigenous lands, and between classical Tamil love poems and Southeast Asian migrant labour songs – tending, with care, the wounded memories of fisher-people, plantation workers, and undocumented refugees.
Arabic, between Love and War
edited by Norah Alkharashi & Yasmine Haj
poetry | translation | Arabic
trace: translating [x] series
In Arabic, the word for love حب is one letter shorter than the word for war حرب
Here, translators gather to perform an intimate labour, moving words from Arabic into English, or reversing such direction as language dissolves into cities, landscapes, or portals that open to rubble, or only air.
River in an Ocean
essays on translation
edited by Nuzhat Abbas
foreword by Françoise Vergès
essays | translation | feminism | decolonial
What are the histories, constraints, and possibilities of language in relation to bodies, origins, land, colonialism, gender, war, displacement, desire, and migration?
Moving across genres, memories, belongings, and borders, these luminous texts by poets, writers, and translators invite us to consider translation as a form of ethical and political love – one that requires attentive regard of an other – and a making and unmaking of self.
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Your donations allow t r a c e to publish new manuscripts that illuminate the complex spaces, times, and languages we live in.
t r a c e prioritizes the voices of those who have, themselves, experienced war, conflict, displacement and migration. We value the voices of those historically marginalized within the inequitable publishing cultures of North America.
t r a c e is a not-for-profit press.
locations / displacements
We ask our writers, translators, artists, and readers to question borders and unsettle various forms of local and global colonialism and coloniality. We are grateful to do our work in Tkaronto in solidarity with diverse indigenous peoples from across Turtle Island who continue to gather upon the traditional lands of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat.
This territory was the subject of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibwe and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes.