Dear readers,
We, Carine and Daria, are delighted to share with you the 2026 issue of our magazine, and we hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed working on it.
Our DoubleSpeak experiences have been some of the most transformative in our lives at Penn; from writing about the magazine in college application essays to attending the first meeting at the Kelly Writers House to listening to the DoubleSpeak playlist together, we have formed so many memories and learned of languages and cultures we had not even heard about.
This year’s issue is extremely rich in terms of geographies, languages, ideas, and new features. A number of translations accepted this year were completed this past summer in a literary translation seminar at La Sapienza University in Rome, taught by DoubleSpeak’s faculty editor, Taije Silverman, who was hosted at La Sapienza by Professor Iolanda Plescia. The variety in submissions by students from the seminar has significantly enriched the linguistic representation in our journal; we received translations in languages DoubleSpeak has never previously featured, such as the translation from Uzbek by Manzura Ravshanbekovna Abdirimova and translations from Kazakh by both Fariza Saidybek and Zarina Nurakhunova. We also expanded our range of forms by accepting our first set of riddles, translated from Crimean Tatar by Denis Ferhatović.
Some of these poems unfold through beautiful abstraction, such as Magzhan Zhumabayev’s “Turned Yellow,” translated by Fariza Saidybek. Others, such as Kunwar Narian’s “Shop that Sells Peace,” translated by Apollo Constantine, speak directly to the unrest the world is experiencing today.
Another highlight of the 2026 spring issue is its abundance of Persian translations: "To Have a Mother" by Fereydoon Moshiri, translated by Mahsa Nikomanesh; "The Aghavan Tree" by Amir Houshang Ebtehaj, translated by Elahe Eizadi; "Ghazal 317" by Hafez, translated by Elnaz Zandian, and "We Are All Okay" by Seyed Ali Salehi, translated by Sogand Shenavar. We hope that these fascinating translations allow our readers proximity to the poems’ authors and Iranian heritage, in place of the distance that the American government is attemptings to install.
Lastly, while this year’s issue contains a number of innovations and changes, we would like to think that we as DoubleSpeak staff were at all times guided by the mission that the translators have faced at all times and that was summarized so precisely by Walter Benjamin: to release in our own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in our re-creation of that work.
With this, we’d like to welcome you to the spring 2026 issue of DoubleSpeak and its many beautiful translations, as well as the stirring musing by Mariam El Naggar about the shifting linguistic nature of blessing, in Arabic and English.
Sincerely,
Daria Knurenko and Carine MedellusEditors-in-Chief
