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The editors and staff at the University Press of Florida are excited to announce 
that Gabriele Belletti has agreed to serve as the Editor- in- Chief of Delos: A 
Journal of Translation and World Literature in 2024– 25. Benjamin Heb-
blethwaite will continue as Co- Editor and Richard Gray will continue as 
Managing Editor. Gabriele will focus on organizing peer reviews for submis-
sions from European languages whereas Hebblethwaite will focus on sub-
missions from all other language families and Creole languages.

Gabriele works as assistant professor of Italian and French in the Depart-
ment of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Florida. He 
earned a dual PhD degree in philosophy and Italian literature from Univer-
sità di Firenze- Université de Nantes. He works in environmental humanities, 
twentieth-­­and­twenty-­first­century­poetics,­migration­studies,­and­the­liter-
ary relations between Italy and France. He published the book, Objet et sujet 
dans les miroirs de la poésie (Object and Subject in the Mirrors of Poetry), at 
the Dijon, France– based publisher, Les presses du réel, in 2021.

Delos’ Book Review Editor, Rori Bloom, will step down from her role. 
We­thank­her­for­ the­significant­contribution­she­made­ in­selecting­books­
and reviewers, and for her careful editorial work. The new Book Review 
Editor will be Pasquale Verdicchio. Pasquale is a professor emeritus of Ital-
ian and comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego. He 
has published translations of Caproni, Lamarque, Merini, Pasolini, Porta, 
Viviani, and Zanzotto, among others. His own writings of poetry, reviews, 
criticism, and photography have been published in journals and in book 
form by a variety of presses. His scholarly publications include Ecocritical 
Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild (Lexing-
ton 2016) and Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature 
and Cinema, co- edited with Loredana Di Martino (Cambridge Scholars 
Publishing 2017).

Delos is thrilled to announce that Sylvie Blum- Reid will serve as the Film 
Review Editor. Working as a professor in the University of Florida’s French 
department, Sylvie’s specializations include French and European cinema, 
travel­narratives,­ twentieth-­­and­ twenty-­first­century­French­ literature,­and­

Delos Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. v–viii. Copyright © 2023 University of Florida Press.  
doi: 10.5744/delos.2023.2000



vi    Preface

popular culture. She is the author of the books, East- West Encounters: 
Franco- Asian Cinema and Literature­ (Wallflower­ Press/Columbia­Univer-
sity 2003) and Traveling in French Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan 2015).

Delos accepts literary texts from any language translated into English 
with analyses and commentary, as well as essays on world literature, transla-
tion, and the humanities. The new editorial team is asking translators and 
authors to prepare submissions that address new topics that will appear in 
thematic sections in the next issues:

Environmental literature: We seek essays and translations that 
shed light on environmental literature and ecopoetics. We want 
definitions­of­environmental­literature­and­ecopoetics,­essays­on­
their leading practitioners, and information about their cultural, 
historical, psycho- social, thematic, and linguistic content. We 
would like to know about the relationship of environmental lit-
erature and ecopoetics to environmental justice and how they 
might transform the ways people think, talk, and act. We wel-
come translations of poetry, prose, and drama, as well as eco-
criticism essays.

Literature and migration: We seek essays and translations 
that reveal the experiences of migrants. We encourage submis-
sions about migration writing and its connection to ethnicity, 
language, politics, social integration, diaspora formation, mul-
tilingualism, and genres like poetry, drama, and prose such as 
novels, short stories, autobiography, travel writing, and literary 
criticism. We welcome submissions that are theme- oriented and 
ethnically focused. We are interested in what constitutes migra-
tion literature, including poetry, prose, plays, scripts, graphic 
novels, songs, interviews, Facebook posts, Twitter poems, and 
YouTube videos, etc.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Translation versus 
Human Translation:­This­is­a­call­for­papers­that­address­artifi-
cial intelligence and machine translation in literature and serious 
writing, including legal, political, or medical documents. Some 
leaders­ suggest­ that­ artificial­ intelligence­ and­machine­ transla-
tion technologies will render language instruction obsolete and 
that foreign language communicative needs will be solved with a 
pocket cellphone. Whereas in anno 2023 we can take care of 
many basic daily foreign language tasks with a cellphone, can 



Preface    vii

tools like Google Translate or ChatGPT translate literary texts 
and serious writing at the same level as an experienced human 
translator? And can these technologies be used to generate mul-
tiple drafts to gain unique insights into the craft of translation? 
Moreover,­how­does­artificial­intelligence­create­original­works­
in prose and poetry? How do they differ from works written by 
humans? Papers that examine technology assisted translation 
and AI creation in theory and practice are welcome.

Contemporary French, Haitian Creole, Italian and Spanish 
Poetry: We are interested in translations of contemporary poetry 
as well as critical studies from these languages.

Dialects in translation: As standard languages spoken by pop-
ulations at national levels expand their grip over literature, art, 
culture, education, employment, and media, the dialects that his-
torically developed alongside the selected standards— like Picard, 
Walloon, West Vlaams, Tuscan, or Northern Haitian Creole— are, 
at best, oral traditions, and, at worst, languages threatened by 
extinction. With the goal of preserving and better understanding 
these languages that thrive in the shadows of standard languages, 
we invite writers, translators, and theoreticians of dialects to sub-
mit dialect texts and English translations to Delos.

Ben Hebblethwaite, Gabriele Belletti, and Richard Gray






