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Preface

Business as usual in the face of more than 257,000 fellow Americans dying 
from the coronavirus?— the business of editing Delos, a scholarly journal of 
literary translations, somewhat removed from the physical manifestations 
where our sisters and brothers, the first responders in the hospitals, nursing 
homes and schools, are employed. Together, our survival and livelihoods are 
at risk in the current pandemic.

There are many historical and literary precedents for what we are going 
through today, beginning with Boccaccio in the fourteenth century and cul-
minating with Albert Camus’s novel The Plague (La Peste, 1947), which he 
effectively employed as a symbol of Nazi ideology and occupation of France, 
and as a warning against mass hysteria for future generations, not merely for 
students of the political process and future epidemiologists, but for ordinary 
citizens like us.

We the editors are therefore putting a phrase from the essay by Laura Mar-
ris about her translation- in- progress of Albert Camus’s The Plague as a motto 
on our cover. Although her translation will not come out until 2021, we are 
quoting here the last paragraph because of its very relevance for today. In other 
words, it is too early to celebrate, letting our guards down, literally, as if we 
have turned the corner:

Indeed, as he heard the cries of delight rising from the city, Rieux 
remembered that this delight was always threatened. For he knew 
what this joyous crowd did not, and what you can read in books—  
that the germ of the plague never dies or disappears, that it can lie 
dormant for decades in furniture and linens, that it waits patiently 
in rooms, in basements, in trunks, among handkerchiefs and 
paperwork, and that perhaps the day would come when, for the 
sorrow and education of men, the plague would revive its rats and 
dispatch them to die in a happy city.1

1 Laura Marris, “Camus’s Inoculation Against Hate,” New York Times, August 9, 2020, 
Sunday Book Review.

Delos Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. v–vi. Copyright © 2020 University of Florida Press. 
doi: 10.5744/delos.2020.2001

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vi    Preface

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Michael Ayrton’s illustration of the pandemic, a.k.a. the plague, horrify-
ing in its graphic detail, shows a rat enveloping a dying young woman.2 This 
is arguably more effective than the rather harmless- looking COVID- 19 depic-
tion of a baseball- size sphere, decorated with reddish flower buds, which we 
see today ubiquitously in the media. We seem to be still in the early phase of 
understanding a horrible and dangerous “bazillus.”

To be sure, the stories and poems in this issue, regardless of the original 
language, are not business as usual to begin with. As the cultural historian 
Joan Didion famously said: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Of the 
authors translated, only one would have been old enough to read La Peste when 
it was published— Luigi Malerba, born in 1927. With the exception of the 
nineteenth- century Russian Leskov, the others were all born after 1935.

The issue begins with two authors wrestling with the process of translat-
ing poetry— Jim Kates, with the experience of decades of poetry from a vari-
ety of languages, and Andrea Pham, a Vietnamese- born poet trying to 
articulate her first experience of translating and being translated.3 Then five 
poets from Brazil, Romania, Russia, Mauritania, and Algeria raise their voices 
in as various responses, from minimalism to exuberance, from glimpsed 
secrets to ghosts to torn memories, visions and scents and always the sounds 
of words. Each of the four prose works, on the other hand, tries to capture the 
pain of loss in some scientific aspiration—geometry, music, taxonomy, alge-
bra. In particular, Luigi Malerba’s conceit seems to foreshadow the present, 
now when it seems all of nature and life is being scanned and photographed 
before it is gone, and as it disappears.

We are rich in reviews, as well. A particular pleasure is Timothy Sergay’s 
review of an inadequate “scholarly” translation of an important work for Bul-
gakov readers. It is a reminder (one that might be posted to publishers, too) 
that the love we scholars have for our subjects requires telling stories to live, 
too, and telling them just so.

Hal H. Rennert
Judy Shoaf

2 We describe Ayrton’s image on the cover of the 1960 Penguin paperback of The 
Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert.
3 See the Fall 2019 issue (34.2) of Delos for a group of poems translated from French, 
Italian, and Russian by J. Kates, and also for Andrea Pham’s exchange of translations 
with Lola Haskins.

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