Pulp, the literary magazine, is introducing a new feature to the publication this year—multilingual writing.
Senior Kimia Heydari, literature editor for Pulp, is at the head of this project. “It’s basically short punchy paragraphs about your culture or about something you like or even a free prompt because free prompts are what we promote and it’s basically English and your native language,” Heydari said. `In the magazine, readers would find writing in the original language as well as an English translation. The name being considered for the section is “Logophilia,” or “love of words.”
Heydari was inspired to start this section for a few reasons. “So at the beginning of the year, I noticed that literature and poetry has become very intimidating to the school in general. It seems surprising to me, in addition, that I saw people jot down their homework in their native language, [and] the ESOL department, I noticed, was very unengaged in the school. I, being friends with them, and having the ability to speak four languages, I decided, let’s add this section to the literary magazine,” Heydari said.
Junior Kristina Tsakos, one of Pulp‘s three editors-in-chief, predicts around four pages being dedicated to the multilingual section. Compared to the page count of last year’s edition, 123, this is a small amount. However, “it all depends on how much stuff we get,” Tsakos said.
Last year, a page in the Literary Magazine was dedicated to poetry written in Korean and translated to English, but this is the first time a whole section has been dedicated to multilingual literature in Pulp. Heydari notes that literature often needs to be in the original language to capture the full experience of reading. An example is reading The Stranger in English class and reading it in French at home in tandem. “The first syllable [of the main character’s name] is a cognate of death but if you transfer that to English you never get that same feeling, and when you think about the stranger, it does propel the theme of morbidity and not having hope; I thought, The Stranger is translated so many times but they have not been yet able to capture all of [this],” Heydari said.
Heydari has sought out multilingual submissions through talking to individuals as well as the ESOL department. “I realized that the ESOL department can really benefit from this because they can write and they can seek help with translation or they can try their best and express themselves this way the school we won’t generalize we won’t be so stereotypical and we’ll actually know more deeply and more personally about a culture rather than just reading it up on Wikipedia,” Heydari said.
Original visual art, music and literature in any language can be submitted for consideration to be published in Pulp to [email protected].
Mollika Singh
Staff Writer
