Dear Readers,

Last year, we founded Circumference to bring poetry from around the world to American readers. We imagined that presenting a selection of powerful contemporary poems written in over thirty languages and new translations of poems of the past that resonate with the present would foster an international exchange of ideas and poetics and an appreciation for linguistic diversity. Now we are hoping that it will do more.

Last fall the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) declared that editing works written in nations under a U.S. trade embargo would constitute a breech of the embargo, in as much as it provided a service to those nations. This declaration stunned and scared us. One of the terrifying aspects of an embargo is that it is often difficult to know what we, as Americans, are actually doing to the individuals in these countries. While poetry has never been known for its efficacy in transmitting information, it is a powerful vehicle for knowledge and understanding. Poetry creates—at the very least—glances into other lives and ways of thinking about the world, glances that are lyrical, fragmented, culturally rich, and in some cases, truer than fact.

In response to OFAC’s decision, we announced our plan to dedicate a substan-tial portion of this issue to the poetry of these nations and their translations. What follows in the first section of this issue are the results of our effort: all different, gorgeous, surprising, and informative in their own way. You will notice that the only countries under embargo represented in this section are Cuba and Iran; it was much more difficult for us to reach poets in North Korea and Sudan, but we will continue to try—our search for poems is far from over. We are relieved by the partial overturning of the ruling, announced in the Treasury Department’s letter of April 2nd to the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers, but we remain cautious in our outlook. We, along with many other organizations in the literary community, notably the PEN American Center, remain steadfastly committed to the pursuit of free and open cultural exchange. As editors, we take full responsibility for the editing and publication of the work presented in this volume.

The rest of the journal contains poems from an amazing array of languages and countries, poems that blew us over by being beautiful, strange, thrilling, indescribable. We are delighted to be publishing each and every one of these pieces and hope that you will enjoy them.

Best wishes,
The Editors