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From the Editor The office of Natural Bridge is a crowded place, kind of like the masthead of the magazine itself. Crowded with submissions and bins to sort them, with mailboxes and the editorial assistants whose names appear on them, with desks, with an incredibly good computer and a less good one, with comfortable, more or less, furniture gathered from a university store, with a bit of the old musk the furniture carried with it mingled with fresh paint. The setting befits the venture of a new magazine. The indispensible parts, however, consist of the editorial staff comprised of MFA candidates, with less essential senior staffers waiting in the wings, and the material itself, the submissions, 700 of which came through the door. Without knowing what to expect writers submitted the work that ultimately shaped the magazine. Any vision the editors may have had was replaced by the writing we received. This goes for the devoted translators whose work appears in these pages. If writers who submit to magazines know in many cases the audience the magazine reaches, submitters and contributors to Natural Bridge had only their notion of what their best work might say to an unknown audience. From what came into our office we send forth a compilation of extremely strong writing; we hope it will bring you pleasure, as it brought us when we winnowed and sifted and selected these pieces. You’ll find work by recognized authors as well as by new writers. It is our hope you will not recognize the difference. We did not start entirely from scratch. Webster Review, which ceased publication in 1994 after twenty years, gave rise to our venture. Although we make a fresh start with Natural Bridge, we intend to carry on WR’s tradition of publishing literature in translation more generously than the average literary magazine. We hold up for your attention some remarkable examples of contemporary Hungarian poetry. In poetry from a struggling republic there is always a mixture of exuberance and exhaustion, fear and fearlessness, madness and cold reason. Similarities among the poems that appear here—whether dusk comes on like a ball mysteriously launched into a city park carrying a premonition of explosion or whether one makes strange the familiar bus route or coat hanger by imagining the world has already ended—are due in part to the revelations poetry in translation often carries for us readers of English. In honoring a debt to the former Webster Review whose exit as a journal made possible our entrance, we present what we hope are surprising translations unusual even among the fine work published in the country’s many journals. The staff of editorial assistants, from the MFA Program at UM-St. Louis, have proven to be the best readers of literature, and the arbiters of taste that defines, distinctively, we hope, this debut issue. They spaded into the hills that the submssions formed and turned up fine work. Their reward is this journal. We sincerlely hope that their reward is the reader’s pleasure. You will find Natural Bridge twice each year, in spring and fall. You will find special issues on a regular basis, along with guest-edited issues. In these ways, the magazine promises to remain fresh and unusual, deserving of the great appreciators of contemporary literature. To close, we dedicate this issue to one such man, Charles Larson, a Milton scholar, a favorite professor, and a lover of verse whose rich, timbrous reading voice affected you once and for all were you fortunate enough to hear him read. He spoke sentences in lengthy periods and his inflected conversational style seemed all the more remarkable given that Chuck came from the Nebraska prairies, the son of Swedish farmers. He taught everyone who knew him a thing or two about poetry. --Steven
Schreiner
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