Letter from the editors
Why Innocence?
As we cannot sense and think innocently, we sense and think about innocence, we search for ways of sensing and thinking of innocence, as an aesthetical and ethical concern of being human.
As we cannot return to our beginning-as-baby, some part in us seems to never cease reaching for that once upon a time pure state, Some part in us never ceases to pursue innocence, wish for it, desire it, and crave its recreation.
As we cannot avoid losing innocence, as we cannot avoid experiencing, we make the effort to hold on and carry it, we make the effort to experience innocence again and again. As we cannot avoid knowing, we make an effort to unlearn our knowledge. Time and again, we seek innocence in a universe of its very brokenness.
That pursuit, that effort to experience the re-re-re-freshening of states of the human soul and mind, that effort to sense each occurring moment, and in doing so, to re-re-re-experience innocence, we create for ourselves something to innocently carry and pursue, with sincere passion, in the depth of our hearts.
Critically innocent, a concentrated state of innocence, experience to the nth power, experienced innocence, a once-more innocent experience, a chance to not be framed inside our limited experience as a human being.
Is there any way for us to expose innocence without an interpretation or explanation of it? In the issue, you can meet [non]drawings of children, you can meet writings that demand re-re-re-freshening in the complexity of their reading, writing and translating. You can meet writings that seek, through language, a return to the undifferentiated experience of being pre-language, you can meet and re-meet works that seem to toy with the maturing pains of accumulated life. Here translations play with their originals, originals play with their origins, translations with translations. And somewhere in the gaps between originals and translations, between mother tongue and language of another one, inside the authors who write in adopted languages, and who translate themselves, we can think about translation as the innocent stumbling (sinfully) over pages, even over cultures.
The calling of poetry is in some way the calling of innocence, of a playing, of the child-soul-child-mind, of the person forever being scratched for the first time, eternally new in every pain, in every experience.
Hanoi Autumn, 2015 AJAR
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