In this article, I want to examine briefly some connections between transnational networks, translation, and multilingualism in modernist magazines. [1] To start, let’s consider the following instances of translated work found in a more or less random selection of modernist magazines: Richard Wright’s Black Boy in Les Temps modernes (1947); F. T. Marinetti’s “Wireless Imagination and Words at Liberty” in Poetry and Drama (1913); Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in Sur (1935); poems by...

Chinese North American author Edith Eaton, writing as “Sui Sin Far,” is one of the most transnational of periodical writers publishing at the turn of the twentieth century (fig. 1). She contributed over 220 texts of diverse genres, themes, styles, and narrative voices, to over fifty Canadian, US, and Jamaican magazines and newspapers between the late 1880s and her death in 1914, although contemporary scholarship acknowledges only about fifty mostly Chinatown-themed stories published in her book...

When attention is paid to Japanese poetry in Anglo-American culture, it is overwhelmingly to what Hosea Hirata observes are considered “authentically ‘Japanese’ texts, such as haiku and waka.” [1] Modern Japanese poetry—and certainly modernist Japanese poetry—have long been relatively overlooked because of their perceived “inauthenticity” and the sense that Japanese responses to movements such as Imagism and surrealism were merely “a translation of Western texts” (Hirata, Poetics, 184)...

In Little Magazine, World Form, Eric Bulson issues this maxim: “When it comes to the little magazine, form is material, material is form, and the analysis of one necessarily involves factoring in the other.” [1] In this piece I explore the issue of raw material availability through a transnational framework. How might directing our attention to the paper and fuel shortages in the British Commonwealth in the 1940s enliven the debates over modernist aesthetics in little magazines? More broadly, I...

In a blurb published on its website, the Cape Town-based literary activist collective Chimurenga describes the motivation behind issue fifteen of its eponymous journal, titled “The Curriculum is Everything”: Presented in the form of a textbook, Chimurenga 15 simultaneously mimics the structure while gutting it. All entries are regrouped under subjects such as body parts, language, grace, worship and news (from the other side), numbers, parents, police and many more. Through a classification...

Le Moulin, an avant-garde magazine published in Taiwan in the 1930s, challenges the assumption that the transnational turn helps Western modernist periodical studies bring diverse and regional modernisms into conversation. Published by Taiwanese poets who had studied in Japan between the 1920s and 1930s, Japanese-language Le Moulin was an ephemeral modernist magazine emphasizing surrealist literature, hyperbolic imagery, and transnational modern life. It only had four issues and merely seventy-five copies per each issue were available between 1933 and 1934. The Moulin poets, through reading Japanese translations of the writing of the French Surrealists and studying Japanese Surrealist works, constructed a sense of synchronous effect in their poetic texts to reshape Taiwanese literature in the Japanese colonial period. In addition, they published their poems, short stories, and poetics in local and popular newspapers, advocating their aesthetic theory and innovative literary

Modernist studies’ broadening engagement with the transnational has led to greater attention to mobile forms such as the little magazine. Despite difficulties (as Kate Hartke reminds us in this cluster) such as paper shortages and problems with staffing, shipping, and supply, the periodical’s ability to travel between ports separated by oceans or within cafés divided by ideological walls enabled it to give rise to an array of modernist movements, driven by writers, editors, and readers committed...

In 1925 Henry Poulaille issued a questionnaire asking, “Do we have an international culture?” [1] In response René Guénon questioned the premise of the exercise, writing, “I do not know if whether by ‘international culture’ you mean only European culture or . . . if you take this expression in a broader sense.” [2] In his response Miguel de Unamuno goes even further, aligning the inquiry with a French “search for exoticism” and recommends using the term “universal” rather than “international.”...