It is our privilege to present the first issue of the fifteenth volume of TRANSIT, 15.1 “Words and Lives in Transit,” whose recursive title is a nod to Anna Seghers’ novel of the same name. Please find the issue on our website, as well as on our eScholarship page.
TRANSIT began in 2005, 21 years ago now, and we are lucky to feature a set of contributions that continue to center the journal’s commitment to serving as a forum for discussion of migration, and the cultural production that shapes and emerges from it. Contributions to our main issue consider the literary and artistic work of those in exile, the pleasures and travails of migration between languages, the politics of translation and memory and the shifting nature of memory itself in our accelerationist moment. We are also very excited to serve up an eclectic set of translations into English, of texts in Dutch, French and German, ranging in period from the mid-19th century to just last year. The forces of chance and curation have conspired so that Safae el Khannoussi, a rising star of Dutch letters, appears alongside the long-deceased Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt—a curious proximity very much in the spirit of this journal. The main issue is rounded out with a review of Kate Zambon’s latest monograph. In addition to these contributions, we are featuring a cluster of three pieces that emerged from the 33rd Annual Berkeley Conference in Interdisciplinary German Studies, “[Selbst]Versuch,” and that were guest-edited by the conference organizers, Sonja Thiel, Linus Mao, Andrew Blough and Anna Lynn Dolman.