The following is part of an interview series:
PRINT LITERARY JOURNALS in conversation with BENNINGTON REVIEW

via email in Spring 2019

JESSE OSBORNE

What makes a submission jump out at you, and what is it about the submissions you accept that sets The Arkansas International apart from other literary journals?

GEOFFREY BROCK

I hope it’s something different with each submission. We want to be surprised, and part of the pleasure of reading submissions is coming across something you like that you didn’t know you were looking for; I hesitate to try to define what we’re looking for beyond that. Several things set us apart: our desire to put a diverse array of US voices in conversation with writing from around the world, rather than focusing exclusively on US writing or exclusively on international writing; the translation track in the University of Arkansas’s MFA program, which gives us a steady stream of excellent translation editors, which can be hard to find; and our interest in comics as a literary genre, which also has a strong international component, since comics culture is arguably stronger in some other parts of the world than it is here.

JESSE OSBORNE

I’m curious about the journal’s book reviews—how did that come about, and how does it contribute to The Arkansas International’s overall project/philosophy?

GEOFFREY BROCK

The book reviews appear only on our website, not in the print mag, and the website is entirely student run. The MFA students solicit and select books for review and they write, edit, and post the reviews. Naturally, the books chosen often reflect the magazine’s internationalist tendencies, and we often gravitate toward books from the many wonderful indie presses that share our interest in looking beyond our own borders. It’s a way for the students to deepen their engagement with and contribute to our contemporary literary culture.

JESSE OSBORNE

Speaking a bit about translation, as I know you’re a translator yourself, and translation is a big part of what the journal does—can you explain the choice to publish the translations on their own? What is your process for vetting a translation?

GEOFFREY BROCK

I’m assuming that by “on their own” you mean “without the original text,” and that you’re referring specifically to poetry and not to fiction (since nobody expects fiction to be published en face). We made that call largely for practical reasons: we have a limited budget, and running the original text for a poem takes twice the number of pages and thus either costs more or reduces the number of poems we can publish. It also complicates the permissions process, increasing costs in that way, and the proofreading and design processes. In general, I tend to be a fan of bilingual publication, and all the books of translated poetry that I’ve published (from my Pavese to my FSG anthology to a couple of books that are forthcoming) do include the original text. But I’m also leery of the way bilingual editions alter the reading process, often causing readers to play what I call translation tennis: bouncing back and forth from the translation to the original in order to gauge things like accuracy and fidelity—reading the translation in terms of the original. I often do this myself, of course, but when we are doing that, we’re not reading the translation as a poem in its own right, and one of the things I want as a magazine editor is for the poems we publish in translation to be read as poems. For better and for worse, that’s more likely to happen in the absence of the original text. Finally, I’d add that no one expects fiction to appear en face in journals or books, and increasingly that double-standard bugs me—it suggests both that translation of fiction is so straightforward that we don’t need to bother with the original, which is rarely true, and that so much is lost in the translation of poetry that we need to keep the original close at hand to make up for the translation’s failures, which is also not (necessarily) true.

As for our vetting process: our primary desire is to publish translations that excite us in English. Where one of us can read the original language, we do of course compare the translation to the original. If none of us can, we tend to rely on the translator’s experience and reputation and good faith, and in any case, as I said, we judge translations largely by how well they work in English. I really don’t think there’s any need for journal editors to do “extreme vetting” of translations; it’s not as if an inaccurate translation harms its readers or the original text—if anything, it might spur someone else to retranslate the original, bringing it even more attention.

JESSE OSBORNE

You’ve just published your sixth issue, Spring 2019; how has your journal grown since its first issue in 2016?

GEOFFREY BROCK

Our reputation has obviously grown—we’ve gone from an unknown quantity with a deliberately counterintuitive name to a place many writers actively want to publish. In the beginning we had to rely much more on solicitations, but now we get lots of great stuff over the transom.

JESSE OSBORNE

How do you foresee the future of The Arkansas International?

GEOFFREY BROCK

I think its future is bright. We’re riding a wave that I hope we’re helping to build of increased interest in putting diverse voices from here at home in conversation with voices from various other places. And because we believe that writers and translators should be well compensated for their labor, we particularly want to increase our budget in the future, so we can pay our contributors more. (We currently pay $20/page.)

JESSE OSBORNE received her BA in French and literature from Bennington College in 2019.

GEOFFREY BROCK is the editor-in-chief of The Arkansas International.