editor’s letter—

We are living in an age that defies distance. Kilometres vanish in a glimpse, borders are broken with a slight of hand, images and text flutter across hemispheres, leaving imprints— we hover in between farness and closeness. It is a gift, the ability to travel this way, albeit a hard-edged one, and it is by way of this gift that we are able to learn the true weight of distance, and the impossibility of certain spaces to be breached or diminished.

When, in our last issue, Spittoon made the decision to become a publication of literary translation, it was an effort to bridge the lapse between China and the English-speaking world. It is a herculean task regardless of method, and we are deeply grateful to the Chinese writers who have entrusted us with their brilliant work, and the translators who have set out upon this path with marvel, dedication, and grace. In the first story of this issue, Shen Danqi’s “A Reader of Translations (With Chinese Characteristics),” love begins and ends with translation.

The divide between the Chinese language and English is of an impossible distance, and in this issue we confront this impasse, amongst the many others that occur in incidences of travel. Through time and space and multiple forms, bodies and varying diction— the selection of literature within this issue speak of many passages, back and forth, eastward and westward, breaking bricks off of collapsed archways to forge new ones. The risk of conquering distance is the loss of curiosity; once we break restraints, once answers are available at a touch, our sense of wonder decays. It is my wish that you will turn these pages, and the worlds yet to be known will multiply. As Chen Xianfa says in his poem, “Clear images are enough / Immortal forms enough.” 

So, here is our itinerary: there’s a Lemon Hotel along the way, you can stay there for as long as you like, and don’t forget to take a lemon. 

If you fall asleep you may never see light again, but don’t worry, you’ll still dream, and you’ll still have your thoughts, or some of your memories, and you may even see glimpses of Destiny.

Marguerite Duras is due to make a devastating appearance.

You’ll send packages. “Blinder still: you once sent a stepladder / to the glittering night sky.” (Zang Di, “Mailing Snow”)

You will look so closely at your lover’s body.

The air will be thinner at the 7000 metre peak. 

It is exactly like the ever-startling sensation of closing your eyes in one country and waking up in another. A verse or a paragraph begins and ends and you have been taken apart and put back together along the way. Yet unlike the disassociation pervasive in modern procedures of transportation, the act of reading is committed to the full awareness of every moment, in equal exhilaration of here and elsewhere. On the page they congregate, mystifying shapes.

Writers of past and present have compared their artform to crafting a fine dish, to constructing a home to live in, to collecting bits of mist to make rain, to blowing candy wrappers across the floors. It is a interrogation and negotiation and a reckoning. Translation is of a different wildness; we must remember that two people who walk the same path do not take the same journey. Instead, they may meet at the end, talk to one another about the things that they’ve seen and the pearls of their experience, and finally, in the best of cases, each side rises, made new by the other’s different existence in the same world.

Impossible distance, yet we have arrived. Thrilling past all the stories that have ended, language veers fearlessly into the eternal. 

— XIAO YUE SHAN