Working at Mantis was a wonderful introduction to the tribulations and rewards of the editorial process. The experience made me a more sophisticated reader capable of discerning and assessing moments of editorial intervention. It made clear to me not just the importance of editors in revising an individual poem for publication, but also their enormous power as gatekeepers who determine which voices get published. For that reason, the most rewarding aspect of working at Mantis for me was working with translators. As both translation editor from 2015-2016 and managing editor from 2016-2019, I made it a priority to include as wide a variety of voices and poetic traditions as possible in each issue.

While an editor at Mantis, the more I learned about the dearth of translation publishing in the US (an especially acute problem for poetry) and the miniscule (but growing) number of English-language poetry journals that publish translations, the more I was convinced that Mantis’s focus on poetry in translation made it an invaluable literary journal in the US. Among the many wonderful translations I got to publish, one that I won’t ever forget is G.J. Racz’s translation of SIX POEMS by the Pervuian poet Eduardo Chirinos. I had the pleasure of meeting Eduardo at the AWP conference a few months before he passed away in 2016. We dedicated our issue to him after learning of his passing as a way of keeping alive the memory of a poet that has yet to receive the recognition they deserve. As Chirinos reminds us in his poem “The Lover and Death,” which was published in Mantis 14, “death does its handiwork, / scrupulously taking the measure of every / corner, using the ruler as well as the plum / and filling in holes with a little shadow. Sand / papering over all imperfections, it lets drop / of astonishment fall into every crease.”

Luis’s Selection:

Eduardo Chirinos (translated by G.J. Racz) - Reloj de sol / The Lover and Death