This guest post was written by Kevin Kinsella, a writer and translator living in Brooklyn. His translation of Sasha Chernyi’s Poems from Children’s Island, from Russian, is forthcoming from Lightful Press.

For Natasha Wimmer, the best thing a translator can do is “disappear” behind a text, a strategy that earned her a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2009 for her translation of Robert Bolaño’s novel 2666. But the San Francisco-based Center for the Art of Translation is doing everything it can to put the translator front and center.

For the past 17 years, the center has published Two Lines: World Writing in Translation, one of just a handful of publications devoted exclusively to the translation of international literature into English, a sort of translators’ night out where each translator very nearly gets to step out from behind the curtain of the text. Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, this year’s edition — edited by Wimmer and acclaimed poet Jeffrey Yang — continues this worthy tradition by delivering works by poets and fiction writers working in more than a dozen languages. The translated pieces are accompanied by excerpts of prose and entire poems in the original language on facing pages.

According to Wimmer, each of the items included in the anthology, which takes its title from the translation of a line from Andrey Dmitriev’s story “Turn of the River,” relays a signal. “When we read in translation, those signals may come from far away, but they are strong and insistent,” Wimmer says. “Writers and translators — and readers — should remind themselves once again of the power of fiction in translation.”

And it would seem that no signal has further distance to travel to reach English readers than the anthology’s special selection of poetry from China’s Uyghur ethnic minority, edited by Yang, which gives readers the rare opportunity to experience the perspective of contemporary voices from a diverse culture that is thousands of years old — a culture increasingly under political pressures from the Chinese government.

Ironically, Wimmer’s own offering is a rendering into English of Bolaño’s “Translation is a Testing Ground,” an essay on the limits of translation. Probably written in the last year of his life, Bolaño’s piece is not especially kind to translation, but it does describe how great literature is able to survive even when poorly translated. In the essay, Bolaño describes how the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges saw a poorly translated production of Macbeth. Not only was the translation terrible, but so were the actors — even the seats were uncomfortable: “But when the lights went down, the spectators, Borges among them, are immersed once again in the fate of characters who traverse time, shivering once again at what we can call magic, for lack of a better word.”

Some Kind of Beautiful Signal’s broad array of international voices also includes an excerpt from Lydia Davis’s new translation of Madame Bovary, an excerpt from a never-before translated novel by Borges collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Susanna Fied’s latest translations from the Danish of poems by Inger Christensen.