Editors’ Note
Issue 25: Ghosts
FEBRUARY 4, 2025
Do you feel that? It’s like a lingering cold, or a pressing headache. A presence that shouldn’t be there. A force is bringing us back. But where exactly is it taking us? Twenty years back? A hundred? A thousand? To the eve of some seismic event? Or to a time before what we might call civilization?
The pieces in this months’ issues look at ghosts of various kinds. Sebastián López Brach travels to Miramar, a city destroyed by a flood in the 1970s. Mireille Juchau collects dreams from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In an essay on translation, Jhumpa Lahiri describes how translation is a process of retrospection, “tossing back words, fingering new ones.” Franziska Exeler writes from Bely Berag, inside the Chernobyl radioactive zone. And in poems from China, Tan Lin asks a friend, “The world happens, as illusive as dreams. / Will any of it seem true in the end?”
— The Editors
✺ Published in “Issue 25: Ghosts” of The Dial
