Dear Readers,

When The New York Times recently reported that “more people speak Portuguese as their native language than French, German, Italian or Japanese” we were surprised. Soon after we read this we met a woman who had grown up in Macau—a small island off of China’s southern coast—speaking Portuguese. Recently, a friend who works for the Swiss told us that many people are suprised to learn that Italian is one of Switzerland’s national languages. Spurred on by these “findings,” we discovered that among the top 40 languages spoken by students in London are not only Bengali, Arabic, and Urdu, but also Akan, Tamil, Igbo, Tigrinya, and Pashto. That Africa boasts an estimated 1,800 languages, including several that are whistled. That approximately 138 languages are spoken in the 178 square miles that make up Queens, New York.

For many of us, the map of the world we carry in our minds (a map often startlingly like the one that hung in our third-grade classroom) is linguistic as well as geographical. “Discoveries” such those above—unexpected facts unearthed after our maps have been formed—disrupt the flat certainty we call up in conversations about the world. Speech bubbles and boundaries sprout and change until the terrain is so textured and variegated it can no longer be kept in the head as one image used for easy reference. This image is much more like our world.

Poems, new languages unto themselves, also make the world more beautifully complicated. Disruptions in this case allow for newly felt experience, for the re-shaping of thought, for little worlds that stand, three-dimensional, as though we had called them into being ourselves. These are more like our lives, our minds.

Reading the submissions we receive from translators and poets around the world, our imagined certainty about the shape and color of things is regularly called into question. We hope that reading Circumference inspires you, too, to re-draw your maps, to walk in new ways into territory newly imagined.

Best wishes,
The Editors