Preface

The editors and staff at the University Press of Florida are excited to announce that Gabriele Belletti has agreed to serve as the Editor-in-Chief of Delos: A Journal of Translation and World Literature in 2024–25. Benjamin Hebblethwaite will continue as Co-Editor and Richard Gray will continue as Managing Editor. Gabriele will focus on organizing peer reviews for submissions from European languages whereas Hebblethwaite will focus on submissions from all other language families and Creole languages.

Gabriele works as assistant professor of Italian and French in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Florida. He earned a dual PhD degree in philosophy and Italian literature from Università di Firenze-Université de Nantes. He works in environmental humanities, twentieth- and twenty-first century poetics, migration studies, and the literary relations between Italy and France. He published the book, Objet et sujet dans les miroirs de la poésie (Object and Subject in the Mirrors of Poetry), at the Dijon, France–based publisher, Les presses du réel, in 2021.

Delos’ Book Review Editor, Rori Bloom, will step down from her role. We thank her for the significant contribution she made in selecting books and reviewers, and for her careful editorial work. The new Book Review Editor will be Pasquale Verdicchio. Pasquale is a professor emeritus of Italian and comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego. He has published translations of Caproni, Lamarque, Merini, Pasolini, Porta, Viviani, and Zanzotto, among others. His own writings of poetry, reviews, criticism, and photography have been published in journals and in book form by a variety of presses. His scholarly publications include Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild (Lexington 2016) and Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema, co-edited with Loredana Di Martino (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2017).

Delos is thrilled to announce that Sylvie Blum-Reid will serve as the Film Review Editor. Working as a professor in the University of Florida’s French department, Sylvie’s specializations include French and European cinema, travel narratives, twentieth- and twenty-first century French literature, and popular culture. She is the author of the books, East-West Encounters: Franco-Asian Cinema and Literature (Wallflower Press/Columbia University 2003) and Traveling in French Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan 2015).

Delos accepts literary texts from any language translated into English with analyses and commentary, as well as essays on world literature, translation, and the humanities. The new editorial team is asking translators and authors to prepare submissions that address new topics that will appear in thematic sections in the next issues:

Environmental literature: We seek essays and translations that shed light on environmental literature and ecopoetics. We want definitions of environmental literature and ecopoetics, essays on their leading practitioners, and information about their cultural, historical, psycho-social, thematic, and linguistic content. We would like to know about the relationship of environmental literature and ecopoetics to environmental justice and how they might transform the ways people think, talk, and act. We welcome translations of poetry, prose, and drama, as well as ecocriticism essays.

Literature and migration: We seek essays and translations that reveal the experiences of migrants. We encourage submissions about migration writing and its connection to ethnicity, language, politics, social integration, diaspora formation, multilingualism, and genres like poetry, drama, and prose such as novels, short stories, autobiography, travel writing, and literary criticism. We welcome submissions that are theme-oriented and ethnically focused. We are interested in what constitutes migration literature, including poetry, prose, plays, scripts, graphic novels, songs, interviews, Facebook posts, Twitter poems, and YouTube videos, etc.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Translation versus Human Translation: This is a call for papers that address artificial intelligence and machine translation in literature and serious writing, including legal, political, or medical documents. Some leaders suggest that artificial intelligence and machine translation technologies will render language instruction obsolete and that foreign language communicative needs will be solved with a pocket cellphone. Whereas in anno 2023 we can take care of many basic daily foreign language tasks with a cellphone, can tools like Google Translate or ChatGPT translate literary texts and serious writing at the same level as an experienced human translator? And can these technologies be used to generate multiple drafts to gain unique insights into the craft of translation? Moreover, how does artificial intelligence create original works in prose and poetry? How do they differ from works written by humans? Papers that examine technology assisted translation and AI creation in theory and practice are welcome.

Contemporary French, Haitian Creole, Italian and Spanish Poetry: We are interested in translations of contemporary poetry as well as critical studies from these languages.

Dialects in translation: As standard languages spoken by populations at national levels expand their grip over literature, art, culture, education, employment, and media, the dialects that historically developed alongside the selected standards—like Picard, Walloon, West Vlaams, Tuscan, or Northern Haitian Creole—are, at best, oral traditions, and, at worst, languages threatened by extinction. With the goal of preserving and better understanding these languages that thrive in the shadows of standard languages, we invite writers, translators, and theoreticians of dialects to submit dialect texts and English translations to Delos.

Ben Hebblethwaite, Gabriele Belletti, and Richard Gray