In Other Words: the Journal of the British Centre for Literary Translation

In Other Words, the journal of the BCLT, is something of a strange beast: it looks like an a academic journal, but reads like a chaotic, passionate, thrilling and exasperating conversation between all your cleverest friends (if, of course, all your cleverest friends were translators). Poised somewhere between serious academic periodical, in-house trade magazine, and newsletter of the literary-translation world, it bursts with a wealth of discussion, debate and commentary, a kind of joyous multivocality, that makes it a far more entertaining read than anything else of the sort.

Issue 38 is no exception: there are reports on the Centre's outreach work, on in-school translation workshops, summer schools and mentoring schemes; there's a whole section dedicated to the special challenges of translating music and lyrics, with articles ranging from the entertainingly chatty to the ferociously academic; and there are the kind of reflections and celebrations of translation and translators that this journal does better than any other.

Amongst these, the late Stanley Mitchell's surprisingly raw and personal account of completing his monumental Penguin Classics translation of Eugene Onegin stands out a mile; and a short piece by Guatemalan-American novelist Eduardo Halfon, on the pleasures and terrors of seeing your work translated multiply between languages and back again, is touching, strange, and weirdly hilarious.

Daniel Hahn, IOW's editor, notes that in a publishing industry racked by constant pronunciations of doom, translated fiction seems in shockingly rude health. In its confidence and scope, in its way of cramming so much worth reading between two flimsy covers - and, let's face it, in the fact that your reviewer has just read through most of an academic journal and doesn't want to kill himself - In Other Words reflects a confident sense of possibility and purpose.